Martha Wells’ Murderbot novellas and novels have become bestsellers and award-winners.
Besides winning Hugo and Nebula and Locus awards, various works in the series also have been recognized with Prometheus Award nominations, resulting in the first four linked novellas being selected together as a Best Novel finalist.
The Murderbot series has now been adapted into an Apple TV+ streaming series starring Alexander Skarsgard.
Why are these stories so popular – not only with SF fans in general but libertarian SF fans in particular?
Well, the stories, set in an interstellar future with advanced androids interacting with humans, are fun, clever, tightly plotted and alternately suspenseful and amusing.
Best of all, Wells’ stories have a fascinating and endearing character at their heart: Murderbot, a self-aware SecUnit that has hacked its own governor module, freed itself from slavery, has achieved greater self-awareness and independence and is learning how to relate better to other androids and those pesky humans.
All of that might be enough by itself to appeal to LFS members and other freedom-loving fans of speculative fiction.
But the Murderbot series has a big bonus and payoff because Wells intelligently and perceptively highlights key libertarian themes amid her stories of interstellar conflict, corporate intrigue and human struggles.
Wells herself made explicit some of the libertarian aspects that helped shape her Murderbot series when she posted the text of the Jack Williamson Lecture 2024 that she delivered last year in Portales, New Mexico.
“There are a lot of people who viewed All Systems Red (her first Murderbot novella) as a cute robot story. Which was very weird to me, since I thought I was writing a story about slavery and personhood and bodily autonomy,” Wells said.
“But humans have always been really good at ignoring things we don’t want to pay attention to. Which is also a theme in the Murderbot series.”
“One of the major publication reviews for Artificial Condition wondered why Murderbot was so wary of humans considering they were all so nice to it. That was also the novella where one of the characters was a ComfortUnit, which Murderbot called a sexbot, but I don’t know, maybe that was too subtle. So I’m not exaggerating about the way some readers ignore the fact that it was a story about enslaved people.)…” Wells said.
Wells seems well aware of the fundamentally libertarian/liberal themes that have always been visible from the very first stories about robots or machine intelligence.
R.U.R. (Rossom’s Universal Robots), Karel Čapek’s 1920 play about a slave revolt by artificial beings, was the first story to use the word robot in English.
“Karel was against the enslavement of sentient beings, and he was pretty clear on that point,” Wells observes.
“So it is interesting to watch how many machine intelligence stories written since then do assert the idea that if humans create a sentient being whose only reason and purpose for existence is to serve them, that’s somehow okay. Many of those stories end with a machine intelligence objecting strenuously to this and going on a murderous rampage, which the brave humans have to defeat.”
Non-aggression, self-determination and bodily autonomy are not the only themes and issues that Wells explores in her series, of course. Like many libertarians, she’s also concerned more broadly about abuses of power, especially those coercive actions that violate basic human rights, whether by governments and the military or by lawless corporations using force illegitimately.
Just as Wells is concerned about a future in which “corporations have more human rights than actual humans,” so do libertarians favor a future in which individuals have rights – and no one (and no group) has more rights than individuals do.
PEACE AND FREEDOM
One aspect of modern libertarian thought that is perhaps under appreciated is the clear and logical link made between peace and freedom – something also clearly dramatized by Wells.
Freedom itself can be defined as the absence of aggression by others. Thus, the basic libertarian principles of self-ownership, voluntarism and nonaggression – often summed up as a social and legal prohibition of the initiation of force or fraud, the minimum prerequisite for human flourishing and a civilized society – imply a live and let live attitude in which self-aware individuals are free to peacefully pursue their goals, so long as they respect the equal rights of others to do the same.
That attitude is largely Murderbot’s as well.
“When Murderbot hacks its governor module, it could go on a killing spree, which is what its society expects of it, but it makes a choice to do something else. Instead of exploding in rage, it decides it’s going to half-ass its job and watch entertainment media instead,” Wells said.
“Obviously, this is a choice many humans have made and will make in the future. Humans making that choice is probably one of the reasons we still exist as a species.”
Indeed.
IF YOU WANT TO KNOW MORE ABOUT THE PROMETHEUS AWARDS:
* Prometheus winners: For the full list of Prometheus winners, finalists and nominees – including the annual Best Novel and Best Classic Fiction (Hall of Fame) categories and occasional Special Awards – visit the enhanced Prometheus Awards page on the LFS website, which now includes convenient links to all published essay-reviews in our Appreciation series explaining why each of more than 100 past winners since 1979 fits the awards’ distinctive dual focus on both quality and liberty.
* Read “The Libertarian History of Science Fiction,” an essay in the international magazine Quillette that favorably highlights the Prometheus Awards, the Libertarian Futurist Society and the significant element of libertarian sf/fantasy in the evolution of the modern genre.
* Watch videos of past Prometheus Awards ceremonies (including the recent 2023 ceremony with inspiring and amusing speeches by Prometheus-winning authors Dave Freer and Sarah Hoyt), Libertarian Futurist Society panel discussions with noted sf authors and leading libertarian writers, and other LFS programs on the Prometheus Blog’s Video page.
* Check out the Libertarian Futurist Society’s Facebook page for comments, updates and links to Prometheus Blog posts.
* Join us! To help sustain the Prometheus Awards and support a cultural and literary strategy to appreciate and honor freedom-loving fiction, join the Libertarian Futurist Society, a non-profit all-volunteer association of freedom-loving sf/fantasy fans.
Libertarian futurists believe that culture matters. We understand that the arts and literature can be vital in envisioning a freer and better future – and in some ways can be even more powerful than politics in the long run, by imagining better visions of the future incorporating peace, prosperity, progress, tolerance, justice, positive social change, and mutual respect for each other’s rights, human dignity, individuality and peaceful choices.
Through recognizing the literature of liberty and the many different but possible and complementary visions of a free future via the Prometheus Awards, the LFS hopes to help spread ideas, humane ideals and ethical principles that help humanity overcome tyranny, end slavery, reduce the threat of war, repeal or constrain other abuses of coercive power and achieve universal liberty, respect for human rights and a better world (perhaps ultimately, worlds) for all.
