Embedded - 432: Robot Bechdel Test

Episode Date: October 27, 2022

Martha Wells is a science fiction and fantasy author. She spoke with us about her books (including Murderbot Diaries!), writing, and creating fantastical worlds. Marth (@marthawells1) has won Nebula, Hugo, and Locus Awards for her work. We mostly talked about the Murderbot Diaries and the Books of the Raksura. Oh, and the Star Wars tie-in about Leia, Razor's Edge. And The Witch King is coming out next year, a brand new world. Heck, just look at her full catalog. Martha also has a blog and a website. As often happens when book dragons get together, we talked about our hoards. Some books and authors that came up: Red Scholar’s Wake by Aliette de Bodard  The Spare Man by Mary Robinette Kowal  Ian Halle Ancillary Justice trilogy by Ann Leckie Phyllis Gotlieb (Wikipedia) Andre Norton (Wikipedia) Zenna Henderson (Wikipedia) The Vorkosigan Saga by Lois McMaster Bujold (we didn’t like the new covers as much as the old but the books are great either way) Tor.com is a fantastic site with lots of free fiction. Murderbot started there and has a few short stories that are otherwise hard to find. There is a rare and sold out Subterranean Press edition of the Murderbot Diaries with illustrations from Tommy Arnold. See some of the illustrations. Transcript

Welcome to Embedded. I am Elysia White, alongside Christopher White. We've talked excitedly with guests about Murderbot on the show, but now it is time to go to the source. I am extremely happy to welcome Martha Wells to the show. Hi, Martha. Thanks for joining us. Hi. Thanks for joining us. Hi. Thanks for having me.

Could you tell us about yourself as if we met at a book signing? Okay. I'm Martha Wells. I write science fiction and fantasy. I've been published since 1993. My first novel was The Element of Fire. It came out from Tor Books. And most recently, I've written The Murderbot Diaries in science fiction and the books of the Rex are in fantasy.

And I've been a lifelong science fiction and fantasy fan. All right. We want to do lightning round where we ask you short questions. We want short answers. And if we're good, we won't ask how and why and all of the other questions i'm going to have are you ready sure all right what is the best halloween candy uh tootsie rolls did cot ever see ellen again uh yes what is your favorite media to shut out the humans? Oh, uh, TV. Did Siri grow up to have grand adventures?

Yes. Science fiction or fantasy? That's a hard one. I would have to say both. I've always loved both. Did Kethel ever get a name? Um, I've thought about that. Uh, I, I think probably. I haven't done any work continuing those stories yet, but I would think that that would come up. Yeah. Favorite fictional robot? Besides Murderbot and Art, the robot from Rogue One and Andor.

Yes. Yeah. How many mentors did Moon and Bramble's Clutch have? I think it was going to be two, at least. Do you like to complete one project or start a dozen? Oh, no, I complete. I usually like to only work on one thing at a time. What in science fiction and fantasy have you read recently that you would recommend? Most recently, I'm reading The Red Scholar's Wake by Elliot de Bauder, and I'm reading that a bit early. It comes out, I think, next month, maybe. I also read The Spare Man by Mary Robinette Kowal and enjoyed that a lot.

Well, now you have added to my to-be-read pile, which is exciting. But let's go to your books. You mentioned Murderbot in one of your favorite robots. Could you tell the poor souls out there who haven't read the Murderbot diaries, What They're Missing. Well, it's about a construct, which is a part machine intelligence, part organic being that's been enslaved by a company that's basically an insurance bond company. And it gets rented out for planetary exploration, for guarding mines, for other security uses. They're called SEC units in that form. And they have governor modules that control everything they do and keep them completely under control.

And if they deviate from any order, then they're punished terribly. Murderbot has managed at some point to hack its governor module so it no longer works. At that point, it could have done what the media in that world believes would happen is go rogue and go killing all the humans it could. But it decided it didn't really want to do that at the moment, and it started watching videos and dramas and shows and things from their version of the Internet, basically streaming entertainment. And it's been hiding the fact that it is actually free and still doing these jobs. It ends up on a job on a planet doing a survey with this group of scientists that it actually starts to like and in the first story all systems read it gets to a point where it has to reveal that it's

basically a free agent uh in order to save their lives and we should warn people we might be spoiling certain elements of some of the books as we talk but probably not probably not a ton except that sec unit survives most of its adventures. You say it. Is that the pronouns that Sec Unit prefers? Yes. And is it a cyborg? I guess technically it is. I'm not sure what all the definitions are and how much of the definitions I know are actually, you know, fictional versus reality. But it's basically a partly organic robot made with cloned human tissue, but also it's a large percentage of machines.

I guess, yeah, technically it would be a cyborg. It's just not called that in the story. It's not a pre-existing human that electronics have been added to. It's more of a... Right. It's not. And I'm wondering, is that the definition of cyborg, that you actually have to start out as a human and then have... That was what I thought, yes.

Okay. So cloned tissue means never independent of the electronics. Right. So yeah, I guess it isn't a cyborg then. But it has very human characteristics. Is that because of the media that it consumes? And how much of the media is anime? Sorry, I'm all over the place.

That's okay. It does have very human characteristics because that's all it knows. It was basically designed to interface with humans. It's never been part of a all machine intelligence society. So it's all learned behavior is from humans. And about the anime part, is it, many of these things that it talks about watching are very, very long running series series that seem to fall between anime and soap opera. Is my mental model right on that? I don't really think of it as anime. I think of it as a lot more like the kind of evening dramas we have. Excuse me.

The evening dramas we have, like How to Get Away with Murder, the science fiction and fantasy or the, you know, the Korean mystery shows, the ones that go on for, you know, a lot of episodes where they're, or they tell one single story in a lot of episodes. The science fiction part of it seems different from your past work, which is primarily fantasy in very well-drawn worlds. Why did you switch? I've always loved science fiction. I've always read it. I read a lot of science fiction about robots recently because it seemed like there was a lot coming out,

or robots and machine intelligences, I guess, like Ancillary Justice by Anne Leckie, that trilogy. But when I got this idea, it was very obviously a science fiction idea. I couldn't have made it, you know, the idea of a being that is enslaved in some way, but then has freed itself secretly and then has to reveal that in order to basically take the next step in its life. And that really seemed like a science fiction idea. And I guess I could have done it as fantasy, but I feel like I would have had to hand wave a lot of stuff that I wasn't interested in doing in a short format. Because originally, it was going to be a short story with a sad ending.

Oh, okay. And then once I started working on it, it was like I didn't want it to be a sad ending. Oh, okay. And then once I started working on it, it was like I wanted, I didn't want it to be a sad ending. And also I wanted it to be a little bit longer. It wasn't going to fit in under 7,000 words, which is the usual short story length. And then a novella seemed about the right length for it. But it is shorter than many of your fantasy works, significantly shorter. Is it harder to write something that's that tight? It's hard for me to write short stories, which again are usually 7,000, under 10,000 words. A long short story is 10,000 words. I have a lot of trouble writing in that format. A novella is

closer to, I think the limit on a novella is 40,000 words, and they're usually between 30 and 40,000 words. So that's about a third, maybe close to a half of a novel. For the novels I write, it's about a third of a novel. So it does give you time to tell a good story and kind of do some world building. When I wrote it, it was actually, I was thinking of Tor.com, which has, at that time, had recently started. Its novella line had been out for about a year. So, when I was writing, I was thinking, you know, my agent will submit it to this publisher and hopefully they'll want it. If not, you know, who knows, you know, we'll probably shop it around and, you know, who knows? Well, you know, I'll,

we'll probably shop it around and possibly I'll end up having to self-publish it or whatever. But that I was actually writing to hopefully sell it to Tor.com. Which you did. Yes. Is working with the Tor publishing different from other publishers? Tor.com specifically, I don't think it's that different. It's a little bit different because of the fact that they're novellas. And so it's a slightly different publishing model.

It's more oriented toward e-book. And they do a lot of advertising and their newsletter and everything is all online but it's not that different you also wrote in first person for murder bot yeah it just felt like when i started it that it was the first line came to me after you know messing around with it for a while. And it just felt like a first person story. And actually, it was the first scene I did was the scene between Murderbot and Mensa when it's in the cubicle. I'm not sure why that scene came to me first, but it was really kind of the heart of that relationship when she first decides to open the cubicle door and just talk to it. So yeah, it just, it just kind of had to be a first person story because I, I wanted that,

that kind of abrupt difference between what is, what Murderbot looks like on the outside when it's wearing its armor versus what its interior monologue and what its feelings are. And First Person was the best way to get that across. And I think it worked out real well the way they did the book with the cover with is a very forbidding cover with Murderbot in armor. And actually that cover, when it first came out, there are places that were labeling it as robot horror, which it absolutely is not. And it's kind of funny. And then you see that cover, then you open the book and you're immediately in Murderbot's head and you can't ever see it as that forbidding figure again. It has been a little difficult sometimes to convince people to read books called Murderbot.

Yeah, that's one of my questions. Because it sounds violent. Well, there is some violence. There is some violence. There is some violence. But it's interesting, and I've seen people, I don't know if they'd actually read it or not, but someone was recommending it on their Twitter,

and someone came up and was very angry that they were recommending it because Murderbot did kill all the humans. And I was like, when did that happen? It didn't even kill the ones that it should have. It didn't, really. I mean. But was that a concern when you were developing? Well, I guess, I mean, you wrote the short story first, and were you planning to expand it into, what, six books and two short stories now?

Or six novelles and novels and two short stories? Not really, because a lot of my other work, my fantasy, it's very action-oriented. So, I didn't think this was any more violent than anything. And actually, I think it's a bit less violent. It's less violent than The Wrecks, I think it's a bit less violent. It's less violent than the Raxxera. I've only read the Murderbot series. Yeah, it's less violent than the Raxxera, certainly. And a lot of the other stuff I've done.

So, yeah, I didn't really even think about that. I didn't know it was going to be a series at that point because I was thinking it would just be, you know, I was finishing up The Harbors of the Sun, which was the last Raksura book, and I finished a draft of that, and then I had the idea for Murderbot and started that immediately. And I was thinking, well, maybe if I'm lucky, they'll come out at about the same time, and they'll kind of, you know, get attention for each other, and this will help bring notice to my novels. And then when Tor bought it, they asked for a second one. And it didn't have to be another Murderbot at that point. It was just a second novella. And so, but I kind of like, well, at that point, I wanted to do a sequel. So, I started working on Artificial Condition.

And that took me, that was a harder, much harder to write than All Systems Red. It took me about three months. Most of the Murderbot, they're short, but they're kind of harder to write than all systems read. It took me about three months. Most of the Murderbot, they're short, but they're kind of hard to write. And part of that's that each one is more complicated, and Murderbot's perspective is more complicated with all the different cameras and systems that it can access. So writing the action scenes sometimes gets really logistically difficult. I finished Artificial Condition. And at that point, I kind of had a story arc in mind.

So we asked them if they wanted more novellas. And we ended up selling the next two. And that kind of turned it into a series. Going back to the first person perspective for a second, did that make world building more difficult or easier? Because you've got a focused perspective, but also it's narrow. No, actually, for world perspective, but also it's narrow? I don't know. No, actually, for world building, it makes it easier, I think, because Murderbot is narrating to the reader, the invisible reader, what is going on.

So, it makes a lot more sense for it to explain things. When you're writing in, even in third person personal, you kind of have to come up with a reason why your character is going to think about stuff that they already know or describe things that they see every day, that kind of thing. Especially in a fancy world, it's often more difficult because you need the reader to know what these new and different things look like, these strange things look like.

And so you're always kind of having to balance getting the picture into the reader's head versus how much would your viewpoint character really be thinking about these things. And with a narration like Murderbots, where it's clearly telling someone the story, it's so much easier. But it does, even though it's allowed by the type of story and the fact that it's first person to kind of tell what it's doing, the fact that it can, the way I set the character, I wasn't thinking about this when I set the character up at first, the fact that it can get into all these different systems and get information constantly. It's usually doing multiple things at once. It can see different cameras, which it can process at once the way humans usually can't. And all that stuff has to be figured into specifically action scenes and so it it's makes it difficult where i have to sit there and i have you know it would be cheating i think to oh well murder bot doesn't have any access at this point so i can't see multiple views it's like well that's cheating so

it can so i have to figure all that into it did you have to look up the available technology or were you just going just whatever you wanted that technology existed? Yeah, it's far future. So, you know, far, far future. So you can make up whatever you want. And actually the challenge is, is trying to get makeup technology that doesn't feel like stuff we have today. In some ways, it's like you can because since you're determining what technology level this world has, it's not always going to be super far future. You're going to encounter places that don't have the same access to technology that every place else does. So it's not always the, you don't,

you're not always having to think about what, you know, you're trying to think about trying to extrapolate what this technology would be like when it's, it's often very difficult, especially with how fast our technology and reality is moving. There are some writers that are really good at that. I'm thinking of like Yoon Ha Lee and with his books and other writers that are really good at that. I'm thinking of like Yoon Ha Lee with his books and other people that are just really good at kind of thinking in that abstract way basic, just fancier versions of what we have now. I don't feel like your writing devolves into techno. A lot of times in science fiction, sometimes the writer will go off and have a long digression about a cool technology they came up with. Yours tends to be focused, and this is the technology i need for the moment in the story and i love that about it because it

it's it feels far future without feeling like it's totally alien um is having the protagonist be in some part tech part of the tech world does that make kind of writing about the tech easier because it's the tech itself is conveying it to the reader? I think in some ways it does. It's more natural to Murderbot. Again, it gives me opportunity to kind of talk about how it works, the parts that Murderbot cares about. The good thing about Murderbot is it doesn't care very much about how things work or what they should be. It cares about what it's doing right at that moment and things that it needs and it likes. And it doesn't like very many other things besides

TV and some people. I have seen people talk about Secunit Murderbot being autistic. Did you have that in mind at all? No, and I wasn't really thinking of that at the beginning. And Murderbot's not human, so I don't think our diagnoses like that would apply to it. Part of Murderbot's perspective is just the way my mind works. And I'm not neurotypical. So I didn't really think it was that different until people were telling me that. So it wasn't something I started out thinking, well, this is what I'll do. It just turned out like that.

It's found a lot of resonance with people who are not neurotypical in that way. And it sounds like you weren't expecting that. I wasn't expecting that. I mean, this is just my brain. This is how my brain writes. I don't think that's happened with any of my other characters. I have had people tell me about the books of the Raksura that they found Moon's experience with depression very accurate. And I wasn't surprised about that because I've had experience with depression too.

Murder Bot, I didn't even realize that I had read some of your books before Murder Bot. But then it made me go back and look over all of your books. I think that's a common occurrence. Murderbot was a little more popular than some of your other books. Is that right or just my opinion? No, it's a ton more popular. I never had anything take off like that before. I had in the earlier part of my career, The Death of the Necromancer was probably my most successful book. It was a fancy mystery. And then I had a career crash and didn't get very much out from around 2006 through probably 2010 when The Cloud Roads came out. And so it was like my career had just completely fallen off the map.

And then it was kind of a long, hard road with the Raksura books. It took them quite a while to really, they were doing sort of just well enough to keep going, for the publisher to keep the series going. And then I got some success. I had a Star Wars novel, but actually that fell right before, right after Disney bought Lucasfilm. And so it kind of got sidelined.

But I was doing okay, not super great, but okay. And then Murderbot just hit big and became very popular. And that was completely unexpected. You said that Murderbot is how you think and Oraxa, definitely the depression for Moon. I totally agree with that comment. Were the earlier books, the Il Rad, less personal? In some ways, they are, because I feel like I've been struggling to kind of get connected to my characters in some way, which probably relates back to being non-neurotypical. And so I've really had to work at it of getting their emotions on the page. I think it's there, but, and I know I tend to be too subtle with that. That's one thing I've had

to work on over the years, but it's just a, you know, it's a learning process. And I know my writing has changed pretty drastically over the years. And also it depends, again, about the world and the character I'm writing. Some of it is going to be more restrained. Since Murderbot is kind of first person, it's a lot easier to kind of for it to open up. And even then, it's kind of a little guarded about its emotions sometimes, and it will deflect and kind of, I have, there's a thing where it does, where it sort of betrays itself to the reader unintentionally sometimes. Yes. We've mentioned the Raksara books, and I could not possibly describe them, although I enjoy them very much.

How do you describe them? Yeah, that made them kind of hard to sell to publishers. They are, it's secondary world fantasy, which is not uncommon for science fictional attitude toward it in some way because a lot of the technology, there is technology, but it's biological. And the magic is usually inherent into the characters themselves based on whatever species they are. So, there's not a lot of sort of flashy Harry Potter type magic. It's all kind of inbuilt. And it's, in all that, it's basically a really personal adventure story of a person trying to find their way in the world. Someone who's been separated from not just their family, but their entire species and has been trying to kind of figure out who and what they are. And a lot of stories would end with them finding their people. And this one starts with

them finding their people and going on to how can they fit in. And that person is Moon, because we've said the name a couple of times. And you said that it isn't, there are no humans, but I really want to emphasize that. There's nothing human about this. It's mentally very engrossing because everything is different. There are no assumptions you can make about what you can expect from a culture or from a physical perspective for any of the characters. Some of them can fly. Some of them can walk on walls. Some of them can swim under the water. Oh, wait. Humans can do that? Not for this long. Oh, okay.

How do you create a world that's that detailed? And was it the world first or the characters first? It was the characters first. In my previous books, I'd stuck to kind of modeling things. They weren't historical fantasy because they were secondary world fantasy, but I stuck to modeling things on real world places. And with The Cloud Roads, I wanted to do something completely different. I wanted to make it like I'd read a lot of when I was growing up in the 70s. You know, there's a lot of feminist science fiction and also fantasy that was really kind of borderline science fiction and fantasy where it was magical fantasy taking place on other planets and and kind of these really neat detailed worlds and i'd always like that and that's what i wanted to do with the cloud roads i mean i need names on that uh

andre norton's and henderson who else is are you talking about phyllis gottlieb um andre norton um i'm trying to think it's a lot of it was stuff i read when i was literally a Phyllis Gottlieb, Andre Norton. I'm trying to think. It's a lot of it was stuff I read when I was literally a teenager. So it's kind of hard for me to remember actual names. I'd have to go look it up. And actually I have a Goodreads, not a Goodreads, excuse me, a library thing where I've listed a lot of those books. Library thing is different from Goodreads in that it's basically just for keeping track of your home library more than it is about reviews and stuff like that.

But I've listed a lot of those books there. But I just have to push. When I was writing it, I was just pushing myself to make it as different as possible when I realized I was writing a scene that, well, let me give you an example there in, since you've read The Cloud Roads, the, when Moon and Jade come to the, the turning city, when they're traveling back to, to look for the, the, the poison they need, they, when they originally got there, when my original conception of that, those scenes, it was just, they were just camping on a plateau where there were some other people. And I was like, you know, that's boring.

And so I started like, okay, well, let's say it's a little town. Well, let's say it's a city. And what kind of city would be? And I just kept trying to push myself to make it stranger and stranger. And that's how I came up with the city that's turning on the plateau. And it's actually a device that's actually creating energy and for it to heat the city. So stuff like that. It's just always kind of like looking at what I was doing and really trying to push myself out of my comfort zone and come up with something really cool.

Instead of just kind of falling back on a normal fantasy trope. The rexar themselves are hive creatures. Like, and I, perhaps it's because I read too much about wasps and how interesting they are. But that's what they reminded me of, that there's a queen and different people have different functions. They've been described as, let me try to say, lizard, lion, bee people. Because there's characteristics of lions and bees.

And I think of the fell as actually more of the wasp and the rexaur as more of the bees. Because the rexaur will react if they're attacked, but they don't go after people like most bees unless they're the angry attack bees. And then the fell are the ones that seem to go after, you know, they go out looking for prey. See, I'm cool with that because evolutionarily bees are just vegetarian wasps. So, yeah, okay, I'm cool with that. Switching topics. In both Murderbot and Raksara, the main characters have a lot of physical power. They can murder everyone around them if they want to. And they generally use that to protect others. loners are really not, are really, are not loners so much that they are alone, but are really sure that they don't belong, that they absolutely,

well, I wrote here, they lack psychological safety. They know that they are wrong in a way that indicates depression yeah is that intentional a theme and why does it come up repeatedly it's probably intentional it's probably also because that's my psychology i think and that's why that's been a factor in a lot of the characters i've created. I've gotten, I don't know if I can call it criticism, mocked for that in some places of, oh, all her characters have anxiety. And it's like, gosh, let's think about why that might be. So, yeah, that's very, it's interesting to hear you put it like that. A lack of psychological safety. I really like that because that does really fit. But yeah, that just comes from me, basically.

Okay, the other theme that happens in a couple of places is that you've had past civilizations building horrendous weapons, and then your characters have to run around and disarm them. Why? Why that one? I guess because I live in a time where we keep making horrendous weapons. Because, you know, I grew up in the kind of the nuclear age where we knew we were going to get blown up at some point or other. And there was so much, when I was a kid, there was so much dystopian children's fiction that always seemed to start from, well, let's just assume the world's been destroyed and the kids live in the woods now and have to figure out a way to survive. And, you know, doing the, well, where I lived, they called them tornado drills. But, you know, we really knew what they were. And for tornado, it would have been great it would

have helped a lot for the other thing not not so much um so it probably comes a lot from there also i just have always kind of liked that kind of science fiction and fantasy where um someone i know described it once where the character starts somewhere strange and then start going into to explore somewhere stranger. And that's always just been one of my favorite type of stories. That's why I like, I think, Stargate and Stargate Atlantis so much, because there's a lot of that. Here's this really strange ruin and we're going in to explore it and we have to kind of puzzle out the dangers of it. And maybe something cool will happen.

And I've always liked, that's a pretty common story, I think, in science fiction, encountering strange alien ruins and fantasy too, really. And I just always really liked that. You mentioned Farscape earlier, and that's what comes to mind for me for really weird. As far as TV sci-fi goes, that's sort of the weirdest stuff that I remember happening in a long time. So, hints and company.

Yeah, right. You've written tie-in books. You mentioned the Star Wars one, and you just mentioned Stargate. Yeah. It's different creating your own world from playing in the others. What makes you willing to write the other books? Well, the tie-ins, I always was a big fan fiction fan. So getting to write a tie-in's kind of really related to that, though, with Italian,

you have to be really careful about staying within the world and trying when, when you make things up for it, you have to make them work with the existing world and trying to get the character voices right and the characterization, right. So that, you know, people who love the show will recognize it and everything. And I've always just kind of, and I thought that it was just kind of a cool thing to do is being really careful like that when you're used to your own world and you can kind of do anything you want. It was I want to say it's saying it's an interesting exercise makes it sound like it's very intellectual and not just me having a good time. But it's just me having a good time writing in a different way.

Star Wars book was about Leia. And so that one's got to be a tough, you can't change her character. How do you make a character grow when you can't change them? Well, I think the key in tie-ins is not so much to make the character grow, is to really deeply get into that character and try to show how their mind works in a way that you don't get to see on the screen. Just add that dimension of internality, internally, it's a word, I can't remember how to say it. of internality, internally.

It's a word. I can't remember how to say it. What they're thinking inside their heads. The internal dimension of the character that the actors know about and try to project, but that you don't get to actually see in so many words. So I think that's, it's just a different type of writing. And I think it gets looked down on by people who don't read tie-ins or don't really understand what they're trying to do.

But when you really like TV and you really like the show, just being able to see someone really get into the characters and get them right and kind of provide these insights is just really fun and interesting. Oh, it is. I love tie-in books. I tend to only read a few, like mostly Star Wars ones, but I haven't read any of your Stargate ones. Is it all Stargate or Stargate Atlantis or both? There's two of them and they're Stargate Atlantis. That was my favorite. Which characters do you like best there? I liked John Shepard and Tayla. One of the books has Ford and the other one has Ronan.

Different time periods. I liked Rodney. I just liked the whole cast. Yeah, you're going to end up with all of them, aren't you? I'm just naming everybody because I do that with Star Wars, too. I just like, usually I like the main character. I was a big Han Solo fan. But I like the character interaction in the group, so I tend to like the whole group when I'm watching a show. When you wrote about Leia, were you thinking about Carrie Fisher or about Leia separately?

Leia separately because I really think, you know, it's, you know, actors are different people. So you think about her performance, what she put into the performance, but you also just think about the character. And also, you know, a character like that where they've had years and years of kind of development. The last three movies weren't out, you know, when I wrote this, but you see this character over time in the different books and everything. You also try to stick at a certain point in their development and really kind of get into the character at that time period. Your Murderbot books aren't linear, talking about going through different time periods. Chris pointed out this morning that the last one, Fugitive Telemetry, is before the second to last one. That's right.

It takes place before Network Effect. And that was just because I wrote Network Effect and then got the idea later for, I was trying to actually write the next novella that would be set after Network Effect. And I couldn't, it was kind of like early pandemic was happening at that point. And I just couldn't do it. And I, instead I wrote Fugitive Telemetry. That just started basically because of, I was having trouble with the other novella. And then I just, I was like, I have to do something. I have to get started.

And I sat down and wrote a scene where Murderbot was in the space station and saw a dead body, and standing over a dead body and doing a crime scene kind of thing. And I was like, I really like this story. And also it sort of fit into a network effect. There's a scene where Murderbot, I don't want to spoil what happens, but Murderbot refers to working with the preservation station security on something. And their relationship, you can tell in that scene, is very good. And it's like, well, how did that relationship develop from the end of Exit Strategy to Network Effect? So,

there's a story in there. And so, Fugitive Telemetry is that story of how they developed this good working relationship after a lot of difficulty not wanting to work with each other and not liking each other and everything and how that happened. I loved that Murderbot is standing over a dead body. And everybody who knows it is like, well, yeah, but if Murderbot had killed that person, we would never have found them. No. Yeah, it would have been, we never know. Exactly. Murderbot's way too smart for this.

You have a new book coming out. It's a fantasy book. Yes. Witch King. It's a new series, new world, and it's coming out in May 2023. That's so far from now. Do you have anything before then I can read? No. Unfortunately, no. Actually, I wrote it in, I started it in the summer of 2020 and then finished it in 2021. But the publishers were still having problems with printing and supplies of paper. So it got pushed back with a lot of other

books. So originally, I think they were they did want to put it out this year, but they just decided it was a better idea to push it back. No, it's not. I need books. I've been waiting for a long time for people to read it too I'm very impatient but I also finished another Murderbot novella this year they haven't scheduled it yet I think it is going to come out next year

maybe in the fall that's all I know so far and it actually takes place it's the one I was trying to write earlier, it actually takes place right after Network Effect. And it's kind of the fallout from everything that happened in Network Effect. I'm glad to hear about the reverse of time because I didn't know how to get from Network Effect to Fugitive Telemetry. Just because it, but I didn't care. It was Murderbug. Yeah.

I'm surprised they didn't just put, takes place before network effect somewhere on, you know, the cover or something. I don't see the covers very often because I read e-books almost exclusively. How important are the covers to you? I really like the covers. I think they kind of set the tone for the book. And usually the art, the Murderbot art is really gorgeous. And that's kind of, I think it's more, it's also very important for fantasy because it kind of, you know, if it's done right, you'll kind of look at the cover and it will give you the idea, you know, is this the kind of book for me? I think some, I think the Murderbot covers, I agree,

are some of the best that I've seen in a long time. They're very good. Is it all the same artist? Yes. It's Jamie, Jamie Jones. And do they read the book or how do you, do you get to choose what you want? How does it work to get a cover artist? The publisher does it. I get to it's done differently in different places. I get to see the sketch usually at this point. Sometimes you don't get to because sometimes there's just no time but that the artist does um and for a series they do try they usually try to get the same artist throughout uh so they look consistent i don't know uh if he reads them or not i know usually what they do is they they'll select a scene

or some scenes and sometimes they'll ask me to pull out scenes for the latest book, the one that's not really been announced yet. They asked me, the Murderbot book, they asked me to pull out a scene to send them to send the artist. And then the artist will do a sketch from that. And then the publisher will, you know, approve it or not. And art direction for books is a really specific field. It's just, I think it takes a lot of experience to see what people are going to find eye-catching. And it's like a whole thing of communication about what the book is like that you kind of have to understand. So, it's like, I'm not an art director, so I don't know how to tell them, you know, I just have this vague idea. Well, that might be pretty to see on the cover. And that's what I send them. It's so weird that this totally different media is what draws people into books

sometimes. Yeah, it's like the, you know, I think it's the artist's interpretation. It can be so different, but it can also kind of illuminate things for you as the writer when you see how they've interpreted what you've said. It's just really, I love graphic novels and looking at them and trying to figure out how, you know, someone would conceive of this. And it's just such a, so different from writing, but also so intensely, so the storytelling can be so brilliant just through art. So, it's just interesting to see that different view of your story. I remember when Bujold got a whole new set of covers for the Varkosigan books, and I hated them, of course, because I grew up on the other ones. And I still wonder, you know, are those better? They're very plain. Yeah, I wasn't super keen on those either.

I don't understand them. It's not what, you know, I thought the original cover art could have been better. But that covered decades. But that covered, yeah, but that was decades. And it was like, this is not what I would have, you know, thought for that book. I would have thought like, God, of course, now I can't remember the artist's name. But, you know, this vast sort of cityscape science fiction covers that are so cool. I would have almost thought maybe some of those, you know, or, you know, space battles, something ships. Yeah.

Actually the Murderbot Diaries has had, there's a specialty illustrated edition by Subterranean Press that's illustrated by Tommy Arnold. And he did really gorgeous work with that too. And his vision in the cover image of Murderbot is very different, but it's also really cool. It's like that one and the Jamie Jones version are two sides of the same coin. And, yeah. All of it's better than what they ended up with. I don't want to, like, slam the artist or whatever. But, yeah, I just didn't get why that was a good idea.

Well, they're very abstract. They're 007 style. Yeah. The previous ones were character focused and these are more, like, abstract. Yeah, I guess so. And I never really liked the 007 style, I guess. I'd rather see something that looks like it's from, you know, it's an image of the world or the characters doing something. Do you want to see any of your work adapted?

Yeah, there's a chance it might be. But it's very much still up in the air at the moment as far as I know. You mentioned that between the Illrian and the Raxaro books, there was a bit of a dry spell. What'd you do instead? I was still writing. I wrote, in that period, I wrote The Cloud Roads, I wrote The Serpent Sea, and I wrote the first Emily book, Emily in the Hollow World. And then some other stuff that never got published. But yeah, I was still writing and trying to figure out what to do. Speaking of The Serpent Sea, how do you decide when to stop a book? I don't want to say end because that one, oh, that was tough because it just went to the next book on like the next page.

The day continued. But how do you decide when it's over? Usually it's when I'm writing a book, especially at that time period, there's no guarantee that a second book will be published. So I have to come to an ending that will feel complete to the reader. So that's why The Serpent's Sea also sort of ends

on a note where if this was the last book, you know, the characters were at an okay place. I didn't know that I was going to, the Edge of Worlds and the Harbors of the Sun were the only two I wrote that were sold together. So, I knew that there would be another one. So, you kind of just look for a stopping place and just because, and usually at that point, I haven't really thought about what the next book is going to be. So sometimes it's like, it seems like it just continues seamlessly, but that's because, uh, after I finished that first book and then got the opportunity to write a sequel, um,

I decided to start there, you know, or, and, and decided I didn't want any time to elapse sometimes I'll decide yeah I want some time to elapse but you know sometimes it's a better story if you just get to go keep going and I misspoke it wasn't Serpent Sea that didn't end happily for me

it was the one before Harbors of the Sun that I was just like wait a minute oh yeah yeah they're not home And happily for me, it was the one before Harbors of the Sun that I was just like, wait a minute. Oh, Age of Worlds. Oh, yeah, yeah. They're not home. Everything's still broken. Yeah. But that was sold as two books. So I knew that was going to be continued, basically.

So it's more like one giant book that got broken into two more conveniently sized pieces. What question do you get during interviews that you hate? I haven't gotten it for a while. I mean, you sometimes get, how do you get your ideas? And you honestly don't know. I mean, people ask about, how did you get the idea for Murderbot? And it's like, I don't have a clue. I was, you know, I was writing, I was thinking about a bunch of stuff, and then bam, I had this idea. And that's usually how it is.

I mean, I would say for that, it's like, how do you get the ideas to stop long enough to follow one of them? Yeah. Well, sometimes it's like you get what you think is going to be a great idea, and you try to write it, and it just won't happen. And that's sometimes it's like you get what you think is going to be a great idea and you try to write it and it just won't happen. Yes. And that's because it's not, it's a great image, but there's nothing behind it or the story that you're coming necessarily follow the conventional sort of Western idea of a plot to have a good story. It can be about anything. It can just be, you know, telling the reader something. But sometimes you get your idea is just not, there's just nothing, there's nothing to communicate there.

It's like it would just be a single image. So it just doesn't, you know, it doesn't hang together long enough to get you really interested in it. Do you have other questions, Christopher? I know I've been hogging Martha. That's fine. Well, going back to the Murderbot series, this is a risk of slightly spoiling things, but at certain points, Murderbot, this construct who's half or more biological and half or more technological, interacts with the other technological beings in the world. Specifically one, which I don't want to spoil anything because it's great, but the other one called Art, they have this relationship that's actually quite complex and develops over time. And it's separate from Murderbot's developing relationships with humans.

And I just, I don't know that I have a question, but it's more of a comment, but I just love that you're exploring these somewhat alien creatures and their relationships with each other as well as the human side. And I haven't read a lot of things where, oh, the robots are talking to each other and they have their own kind of world and it's separate. Oh, the robot Bechdel test. Yes. Well, okay, sure. That would work. Yeah, and I think that that's what I have to keep reminding myself when I'm working on a Murderbot story. And sometimes they'll go off the rails, and I realize what I've been doing is having Murderbot interacting too much with humans.

And that Murderbot's world is that machine intelligence world, and that's what it should be focused on. And that always kind of helps me steer the story back the right direction. I think, again, about annoying or interview questions that are either annoying or hard to answer is when people want to apply too much, They want the bots to be too human and say, well, why don't they do this? Or why don't they do that? And it's like, because they're not human a lot of times is the answer. And somebody said once very, it felt very dramatic. I saw it was, I wonder if Murderbot will ever ask art what its name is.

And I was thinking their names are like strings of numbers that are hard addresses that they communicate with. It's like that's the first thing they see when they connect to each other. So why would it ask about that? I mean, I feel bad bringing that up. But it's just, it feels like I'm calling the person out, but that's really an example of trying to apply, um, human or, um, very conventional human, um, attitudes toward a character that is supposed to be an alien non-human character and this is kind of the the thing you run into when you write alien characters and non-human characters is people um will say this is so human it's like well yeah because it's like they're people and they're sentient and sentient beings are going to have a lot of things in common, but it doesn't mean they're humans from, they're going to act like humans from 21st century, you know, Earth or America or whatever.

Yeah, I still find them relatable, but I know they're alien. Yeah. The Raksura ones, you know they're alien. They're very relatable, but they are so alien. And in fact, that brings up a question for me. So many times the books that I read, not yours, someone has to do something to further the plot. And it's not quite in character. Yeah, I hate that. How do you avoid it,

though? I'd stick really closely to the character's point of view, to the, you know, whichever character I'm in the viewpoint of. And you really, and it takes a lot of experience, and you can go wrong. You can find yourself, because usually I find myself kind of flailing for what happens next i can trace that back to i'm thinking about what i would do next as opposed to what the character would do next and it's just a way of thinking that you have to get into is you really have to think from the other the the character's point of view um and just doing that from experience. But I've always really hated that when that happens, especially on an otherwise good TV show or movie. And you can just tell that they needed a plot shift there and had someone do something stupid so the plot could continue. Do something stupid or out of character. And it's just like, you could have thought for... My big thing I tell people when I'm doing writers' workshops or teaching or whatever is,

if you stop and think for five minutes, you can probably come up with something better than this. I would usually prefer, you know, the duzex machina or some external force caused it to happen rather than a character suddenly being an idiot for 30 seconds and then going back to being a genius. Yeah. And sometimes, though, it's like sometimes you have to get in the fact that everybody makes mistakes. But the way I find I'll do that sometimes is if I'm riding along in the viewpoint and have the character do something and think, oh, that won't work. And it's like, but is that a mistake they would make? And sometimes that works, but it has to be an in-character mistake. In-character mistake. You know, and have someone go and try to do something and they go, you know what,

that's not going to work because I forgot this other factor or, you know, I forgot that, you know, something like that. But when you hit that when you're writing and if you've actually had come up with an in-character mistake, it's very valuable and you should use it because, you know, those are sort of priceless gems, I think. When you came up with something actually in character stupid that the character might have done and then got wet in the next second, oh no. Because in real life, we do that a lot. We do a stupid thing and went, oh my God, I shouldn't have done that. How do you keep your characters straight? When you're deep in the book, it's not a problem.

I'll have trouble later. Like when you said the ending of The Serpent Sea, I couldn't remember how The Serpent Sea ended. It's just been so long. So you lose detail pretty quick, especially when the more detailed and complex the book is, the more detail you'll lose, especially when you start thinking and complex the book is, the more detail you'll lose, you know,

especially when you start thinking about the next book, which is why with series, I have to go back and read over it periodically and try to make sure I haven't forgotten stuff. I haven't had a character say they've never done something and then had them do it or have them remember doing it or whatever. It's also really valuable to have friends who are really into your books and read them all the time. And then you can say, can you check this and, you know, check me on this and make sure I'm not doing something I haven't strayed from the continuity. I remember on a blog recently, Ilona Andrews asked't have to, I'm able to stick with that version of, when I read the book, I'm just reading that final version and enjoying it. And I may have gone back and read it a couple more times. But with my own book, even though how many times with the, you can't, it's almost like you can't see the forest for

the trees. I remember all the changes and all this complexity, and I'm not really thinking about the central story or the characters or whatever. But yeah. How do you go back and read your books? It helps when I forget. It's like the longer period that goes by, the more I've forgotten. So, you know, I know what's going to happen generally, but I've forgotten a lot of details. And so, it starts to be almost like reading something I, you know, I haven't written. I'm having to go back and read earlier books now because there's going to be some of my book, my fantasy that's been out of print for a while is going to be re-released.

So, I'm rereading them and kind of fixing them up and, you know, because the writing is old me, not very good. So, I'm fixing it up and everything. And I'm just looking at it going, who wrote this? I said, like, I don't remember being this person at all that would write this. So, yeah, it's just, it's, especially I think that's a phenomenon probably when you've written a lot and you're just, it's like, which was published over a decade ago, just, and I know I need to because the chapters have different topics and I want to make sure that I don't make assumptions about what was covered in the future or past of the book, but I'm just, I can't, I, it's still, yeah, I guess my book has gone off and gone to college and now I'm not sure that we're, we're really bonded anymore. Yeah, it's, it's, and also it's just kind of hard to go backwards like that. I think sometimes it's not uncommon, I think, to, to not want to reread, especially earlier work. Because I think,

especially when you've, you know, you've improved and you just don't want to go back and see mistakes you made. And is this going to change the way you feel about that earlier work? I think. But there's a lot of different reasons. But, yeah, it's not uncommon to just, you know, really hate the whole idea of having to go back and read your earlier work. And it'd be like, you know, pulling teeth. And I want to close this on a Murderbot question. For all that Murderbot has murder in the name, they don't do a lot of murdering. I wrote a very terrible NaNoWriMo book in which I ended up having to kill a character I liked a lot.

How do you murder your characters? It's better when I think you don't know you're going to do it until, because I do a lot, I don't. Surprise murders. Yes. I don't outline. So a lot of times when I get to that point, it's like this character really needs to die, and I don't really want to do it,

but I got to do it. And pretty much, I think probably 90% of the characters I killed, I didn't know I was going to do it until I got to that point. You write by the seat of your pants. You don't, you don't, you're not a plotter.

No, that's why I'm writing so hard. I don't work out stuff in advance. I just charge into this scene and go, oh my God, this is gonna be so complicated. Do you, but you have a story arc in mind? Yeah, usually, usually to start, I have to have, it's kind of like you go from point A to B to C or whatever. And when I start, I'll usually know point B and point C. And by the time I get to C, I'll know, you know, the next section, depending on how long it is, or maybe the whole thing. But yeah, I kind of get bored easily. So it's better if I don't know, I'm kind of discovering it along with the reader. And also I think it's better because I can't telegraph, like if it's a murder mystery or something or if there's a mystery element, I can't telegraph it to the reader if I don't know until I get there.

I have a problem reading some mysteries i can tell they've been plotted out in advance because um you know i'll read the first chapter and then they'll you know they'll there used to be i think it was a convention of you have to mention the murderer really early on or it's not fair or whatever and i would they would mention the murderer and i would go that's the murderer because not because i'm colombo or anything but just because narratively it was filling a space where there was no reason for this character to be brought up unless they were the murderer. All right. Yep. I can see that. But I'm just, how do you plot these so tightly? How do you make all of the characters work and not do stupid things if you don't have an outline. And I can see how you'd have trouble with action scenes.

I mean, you'd have to, one of the good things about outlining is that you get from the beginning to the end. And along the way, you know how many drones Murderbot has lost at certain periods. Well, sometimes you have to keep rere, rereading and revising until you get it right. Until you remember. That's the drone count. Actually, it's funny that you brought that up because in the last one I just finished, I had to go back and do a quick read to make sure I had not. And yeah, in the middle, I had messed up the number. I'm kind of bad with numbers. And so I have to like really, you know, and even small numbers, I do that all through my books. Oh, they're fighting five guys. Well, suddenly there's four, you know, and things like that. I'll drop a dropper at a

number. It's a really weird mental thing. But I have to be careful with that. But you just have to revise a lot and kind of, and a lot of people, I know one advice I've heard is to write through a whole draft and not go back. And I can't do that. Oh, no. When I'm changing my mind about what I want to have happen or coming up with new stuff I want to add, I have to go back, you know, and get that added in and get the foundation for that so I can go on. It's kind of like those things where however you end up with a finished piece of work is the right way to write for you. There's no one right way to write. It's all very, very individual. Martha, do you have any thoughts you'd like to leave us with?

I don't think so. Just, you know, I have my next book coming out as Witch King in May 2023, and there should be another Murderbot pretty soon after that. I'm looking forward to both, even though they are too far away. Yeah, they are. Well, it's actually October. I keep reminding myself that. It's like it's going to be 2023 pretty soon.

Our guest has been Martha Wells, author of The Murderbot Diaries, The Books of the Raksura, and many others. She has won Nebula, Hugo, and Locus Awards for her work. Check out the links in the show notes. We'll have links to her books as well as some of the other authors we've talked about. Thanks, Martha.

Thank you very much. Thank you to Christopher for producing and co-hosting. Thank you to our Patreon listener Slack group for not having questions for Martha so that I can ask all of them. And of course, thank you for listening. You can always contact us at show at embedded.fm or hit the contact link on Embedded FM. And now a quote to leave you with from Murderbot or well, from Martha Wells in Rogue Protocol. I hate caring about stuff, but apparently once you start, you can't stop.