Imaginary Worlds - Murderbot Isn't Ready for Its Close-Up

Episode Date: June 4, 2025

Murderbot is a killing machine in the far future that would rather spend its time binging an intergalactic soap opera -- and shooting bad guys with lasers is much less stressful than making eye contact or small talk with humans. Murderbot is also the main character of Martha Wells’ best-selling series of books, The Murderbot Diaries. The books have been adapted into a new show on Apple TV+ starring Alexander Skarsgård. I talk with Martha Wells, and the showrunners Chris and Paul Weitz, about the challenges of adapting the books to television, from casting choices to finding the right balance of comedy, action, and sci-fi. This week’s episode is sponsored by ShipStation. Go to shipstation.com and use the code IMAGINARY to sign up for a free trial. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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I'm a security unit, and I don't party. Security units, or SEC units for short, are cyborgs in the far future. They're mostly machine, but they're also made of cloned human tissue. Every SEC unit has a chip in its head called a governor module, which forces them to obey humans. But one of the SEC units played by Alexander Skarsgård

figures out how to disable its governor module. We hear the exuberant thoughts in its head as it stands very still around a bunch of rowdy humans. Okay, patching the code. Holy shit! It worked! It worked! Okay, what do I do now? Maybe kill all these idiots and take a starship to a distant galaxy. What should I call myself? Security Unit 238776431 just doesn't have the right ring to it.

How about freedom units? Or rogue bots? No, that sucks. Maybe murder bots? Murder bots. Hooray. Let the adventure begin! The adventure can't really begin, because a rogue Sec unit is the worst fear of many

humans. If it got found out, Murderbot would be melted down. So it has to pretend to be a normal Sec unit until it figures out its next move. And Murderbot certainly won't tell anybody the name that it gave itself. In the meantime, it's rented out by a group of scientists doing research on a remote and potentially dangerous planet. But for Murderbot, the scariest part of the job is social interactions. There's a scientist named Gharathian who suspects there's something off about their

new Sec unit. Oh, great. Eye contact. I hate it, eye contact. I watched through the screen. off about their new Sec unit. I understand Dr. Mensah and Professor Bardwatch are out in the hopper. I'm in contact with them. They're taking all necessary precautions. I am a necessary precaution, moron. Now I didn't do a spoiler warning because that's the premise of the show.

It's basically what you get from the trailer, and there won't be many spoilers in this episode. Murderbot has gotten rave reviews. A critic at NPR called it the best new comedy of 2025. And yes, Murderbot is a comedy, an action sci-fi comedy. Martha Wells has been thrilled to watch this happen. It's just really feeling that's hard to describe when you make something up in your head and someone makes it three dimensional, you know? Murderbot is the invention of Martha Wells. The show is based on her series of books called the Murderbot Diaries. There are seven books so far. Most of them are short and they are very bingeable.

The first season of the TV show is an adaptation of the first book. They sent me the pre-production version in like groups of four and I probably, I don't know, watched it like a million times because it was kind of like when your first book comes out. I did this. I know other authors have done this. You don't want to let it get out of your sight. You carry it around with you for a while because it's just so cool. And that was like that with the show. It's just like I wanted to watch it all the time.

– She had a premiere party at her house and afterwards she was... – Just scrolling through all these people saying how much they loved it. It's an experience. It's kind of overwhelming. – Martha got to pick which production company made the show. It's an experience. It's kind of overwhelming. Martha got to pick which production company made the show. The two showrunners are brothers, Chris and Paul Weitz. They began their career making comedies like the American Pie films and About a Boy, which starred Hugh Grant, and a very young Nicholas Holt.

Chris Weitz was also a writer on the Star Wars movie Rogue One. I spoke with both brothers. This is Paul. Chris Weitz was also a writer on the Star Wars movie Rogue One. I spoke with both brothers. This is Paul. We both read the books and kind of fell for them and felt like the first book would make a good first season of a television show. I feel like, yeah, we were equally, equally in love with the books. Whenever I told fans of the books that there was going to be a Murderbot show, the first question they'd ask is, how are they going to do that? Murderbot is the narrator of the books. We are deep inside its head, hearing its anxious inner monologue, its snarky observations, and the way that it thinks like a computer, from processing data to watching the world

through cameras and drones. Before Martha Wells became a novelist, she worked in tech, so she knows what she's talking about. I asked Paul Weitz if it was challenging to translate the literary narration into voiceover narration. No, because I think there's this idea that narration sucks, and you can see why, because every time a huge budget film doesn't work, they turn to somebody and say,

hey, can you do a narration here that explains to the audience what the heck's happening? But for us, like having worked together on About a Boy, which had dual narration, we felt, no, this is totally natural to be hearing what the character's thinking. And so long as it's in juxtaposition to what you're seeing, without that, there would be too much Robocop in this. You know, a character that's not saying anything to anybody.

Like in this scene, the scientists arrive at their research center, and they're oblivious to the fact that Murderbot is closely observing them. Arada, the biologist, was married to Pin Lee, the lawyer, and Arada had a thing for Ratti, who was an expert on wormhole travel and made his own jewelry. But Ratti didn't realize, because Ratti had a thing for Pin Lee. Judging from their pulse rates, they were contemplating sexual activity...

horrible. It felt like the core of the thing was sort of the internal monologue that we all have about how stupid everyone is and how stupid we are. And that it was weirdly sort of the most entertaining and recognizable facet of it. But beyond the voiceover narration, there are so many other challenges in translating the books to television. One of my favorite things about ShipStation is the name alone. I imagine a space station which is controlling the chaos and maintaining a sense of calm so all these space travelers and aliens could go about their day.

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Calm the chaos of order fulfillment with the shipping software that delivers. Switch to ShipStation today. Go to shipstation.com, use the code IMAGINARY to sign up for your free trial. That's shipstation.com code imaginary. The first Murderbot book was called All Systems Red and it came out in 2017. By that point, Martha Wells had been writing books for a long time, but she was mostly

writing fantasy instead of science fiction. And she hadn't achieved the level of success that would eventually come with the Murderbot books. It all began when she was working on a fantasy novel. She was struggling to figure out the ending. Suddenly, this image popped in her head. Like an enslaved person who was part machine security unit who had freed themselves from their governor module but had to conceal that and kind of keep working because they can't really get out of the situation and then would have to reveal that to actually to save the people they were supposed to protect. You know, it just really seemed to take off and

I had the character voice already and pretty quickly it moved away from being a short story with a sad ending to a novella because I realized it needed to be longer and I didn't want this character to have a sad ending. That's interesting that the slave narrative metaphor was something that you realized right away. I didn't know whether it was something that as you started writing you thought, you know, I think this is actually a slave narrative. It started from right from the beginning. I think you can't write that kind of story from the beginning. I think you can't write that kind of story without it being a slave. You're writing about slavery.

And in fact, Mensa brings that up at the beginning. They don't want to rent a SEC unit because it's, it's a sentient being, it's wrong. That's in the first episode of the TV show. Dr. Mensa and her team are trying to get insurance for their scientific expedition. And the company insists that they rent a SEC unit. As far as performance reliability, SEC units are equipped with a governor module wired

to their nervous system. That will prohibit any disobedience. Well, that's just a problem, you see. The people I represent, we are not comfortable with the idea of a sentient construct being required to work for us. We feel it's tantamount to enslavement. Yeah, she said it. Is that awkward?

Whatever your beliefs, this deal will not go ahead without a sec unit. We won't bond you, and so it won't happen. That scene gets to the core of Martha's world building. This corner of the galaxy is dominated by the corporation rim. Imagine ruthless capitalism in space with a smile. The scientists who rent Murderbot are part of a small, outlying community called Preservation Alliance. They're like a space commune. Martha says she wanted to create the Preservation Alliance

to show that not all future worlds have to be dystopian. Yeah, you can show places that are, it's kind of like HopePunk, I guess, is showing people, yes, this is, you can have this good thing if you just work toward it. But the preservation team has to work with the corporation rim because it's just too big to avoid. That idea appealed to the White's brothers because Murderbot is in the middle.

It's disgusted by the corporation rim, but it thinks the preservation team is very naive. This is Chris Weitz you heard as brother Paul earlier. The sort of the economic structure, I'm always interested when doing like fantasy or science fiction and like what is the political economy of this world, right? You want to try to figure out what world in which people's personalities take shape. And it's a very brutal structure in which these people are operating, but they're from sort of outside of that structure. They're from a much more kind of freewheeling, egalitarian society. So they're having to operate according to a system that they don't actually hold with.

And, you know, it makes us, I think, all the more want to see Murderbot defend them against that structure. It's interesting, because the books are told, you know, of course, from Murderbot's point of view, but then we, through the show, we get a wider lens in terms of, like, the preservation team, and you get to flesh them out as characters. Was that fun for you guys?

Super fun. I mean, Martha Painslow's character is pretty much as sketches because she's much more involved in Murderbot's own interior life. And it was clear that we were going to have an opportunity to kind of flesh out these characters. I mean, the great thing was that Martha was available to us to kind of bounce ideas back and forth.

Yeah, and to read scripts, to read drafts of scripts, to make sure that it wasn't something that she felt was, yeah, it was bumming her out and stuff that she was into. Paul Weitz called me and he said, you know, it's gonna have to be different. And I said, well, yeah, because we're taking a first-person narrative

and making it basically three-dimensional and visual. And that's a completely different form of communication. So for me, it's fun when they say, we think we have to do this. We wanna do, like we have to eliminate this character. And it's like, well, can we eliminate this character instead? Or we wanna do this. And I think, well, I don't, you know,

sometimes it would be a great idea. And I'd, well, I don't, you know, sometimes it would be a great idea and I'd be like, oh yeah. Besides trading notes with Martha, the White's brothers worked with the actors to develop their characters even further. Paul and Chris said, when it came to the satirical aspects of the show, it was tricky to make sure the joke wasn't on the scientists,

except what it needed to be. Yeah, I mean, because they're obviously sort of out of their depth, as in the book. They're in a much more dangerous environment than they were really ready for, which is why they need Murderbot. But also they're scientists. You know, they're space hippies, as we say in the show,

but they're also actually very capable, smart people at the same time. So while, you know, they're busy trying to save their lives, they're also feeling real regret over the research that they're losing. They're trying to bring their own capabilities to bear on things. And as well as that, they're experiencing the trauma of being in a violent situation. I think one thing that's really interesting about Martha Wells' take on the world of the future is that as opposed to a lot of science fiction in which characters will blast a hundred enemies to death and just kind of go on to joke and go on with our lives.

In Martha's world, characters develop post-traumatic stress disorder. They have psychological issues with the things that they've run up against. So that was kind of a fascinating aspect for us. You know, it's funny. There are some classic sci-fi comedies, Men in Black, Galaxy Quest, Hitchhiker's Guide, but I feel like there are more sci-fi dramas

than comedies in general. Is sci-fi comedy challenging to do in live action? I think it's sort of difficult to do without, you know, falling down the slope, either into parody or spoof or really broad comedy. So to try to maintain a tone in which it's really a comedy of manners within a functioning science fiction plot with genuine stakes. Trying to maintain that kind of tone is the trick. Did you have to make adjustments in the tone while you were filming or while you were editing?

Were there moments that you were like, oh, you know what, this is to this or this isn't enough of this? Yes. Yeah. I think that there are moments where you think like, well, that take was less broad or somehow it doesn't really harmonize with the rest of what's going on. Yeah, there's always like, okay, that made me laugh, but I don't really believe that that's a person

that I'm seeing, which is really the thing. You don't want to feel the hand of anything exterior to believing that the characters are real people. Yeah, it's interesting to have noticed, I mean, typically in sci-fi in the past, when characters would speak in the sort of far future, there'd be this kind of stiff formality to it in a way. And I feel like it's, I think Strange New Worlds is the only show I can think of recently, Star Trek, Strange New Worlds, besides Murderbot, where the characters sound contemporary.

Like was that a conscious choice on your part as well in writing the dialogue? Yeah, I think that the idea behind the idea is that everything has been auto-translated into present-day ease, right? So that Martha doesn't really use, I mean, she kind of will create neologisms or sort of port mantos, but mostly she's not really interested in linguistic world building in that sense.

She's much more interested in the way that you can convey characters through the way that we're used to reading and speaking. And you find these sort of test cases, like would the word hippies sort of exist within this far future world, right? And eventually if we figured, well, this has been auto-translated because obviously in some far-flung future, we're going to be speaking some kind of mashup of Mandarin and English and God knows what, right? So it simply made sense that people would speak in a way that was most palatable to

it, like a modern ear. One of the biggest questions around the show was who to cast as Murderbot. In the books, the character has no specified gender. I know different readers who imagine Murderbot as male presenting, female presenting, or non-binary. The White Brothers cast Alexander Skarsgård, who is a tall, blonde, cisgender man. There has been a lot of discussion online as to whether they should have cast a non-binary actor. Although some of the people who said they would have preferred a non-binary actor have also praised Alexander Skarsgård's

performance and acknowledged the economics of needing a star to get a show made. I asked Paul what led to their decision. It was characteristics of the actor as opposed to the gender of the actor. There are women who could have played it, no question. And in terms of having Alex do it, the characteristics that we like were Alex is physically intimidating,

Alex has a quirky sense of humor that is almost in contrast to how he looks. He is doggedly tenacious about wanting to believe that the things in the story are actually could happen, that the characters are, you know, that you're pretending that the characters are real. There was something about it that really spoke to him. Martha did not have an issue with the casting. No, because he's really, he's a really good actor

and he's really fabulous on the part. And one thing that bothers me as I see people saying things like, oh, he's too pretty to be non-binary. I mean, that's sort of a very nasty bigoted thing to say. I mean, non-binary people can look like anybody. You know, a masculine presenting person can be non-binary. So it's really, when I see people objecting on that grounds, that's just really, I think they need to check their own beliefs about gender because that's not, that's just a really ridiculous thing

to say. And this goes back to something which has bothered her for a long time. The people that would email me wanting to know, it's like, well, I know Murderbot doesn't have a gender, but what gender is it? You know, and that's basically the question over and over and over again. No, there is no secret gender. And if people watch the first two episodes of Murderbot, showing it its whole body without the armor and that there is literally nothing down there was one of the things I just I wanted them to do. Because I was so sick

of that question, that the assumption that Murderbot had a secret physical gender that it was just the assumption that Murderbot had a secret physical gender, that it was just hiding from the reader for no reason except to be titillating or whatever. So yeah, I was so glad that they did that. Well, it's particularly striking too when you see him nude and he's this hunky leading man. And then as you're saying, there's no genitalia, it's like a Ken doll. It's almost saying, I am not what I appear to be. I know what I appear to you to be, but I am not that. This is just simply the shell that I'm in. Yeah, and they did it so he doesn't have any body hair.

There's no nipples, no belly button. It's like he's only made to look human from the neck up. And there's a scene later, I don't think it's, I don't think you can see it yet, but there's a scene later where Murderbot is walking and you can see it doesn't have like hips the way a human would, it has doll hips where the joint is round and you can see where it is.

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When Martha Wells first created Murderbot, she didn't want to write another story about a robot who wants to be human. It's a common trope from Bicentennial Man to Data on Star Trek. Martha was inspired by a 2013 novel called Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie. The main character of that book is the AI of a warship, which has been put into a human body.

And it considers its new body to be a massive downgrade. You know, why would a machine intelligence want that? Especially after you've read Ancillary Justice, it's like this. This intelligence is giving up so much to be in this human body. And so I wanted to write, try to write a story about what a machine intelligence would want as opposed to what a human thought a machine intelligence would want, as opposed to what a human thought a machine intelligence would want. Paul White says, they thought that was a rich theme for them to explore.

I think it's a deep truth, not just in terms of how we relate to technology, but how we relate to each other, because there's always the sense that, nobody is as human as I am. And can't you be a little more like me? Whether that's applied to artificial intelligence, whether that's applied to people who are on the spectrum, whether that's applied

to people who are simply different from us, it's one of the core worms in the apple of being human is that we're so solipsistic. It takes a while for the scientists to realize how Murderbot wants to be treated. Early on in the TV show, there's a scene where a character named Rati tries to break the ice with their Sec Unit. Yeah, so we heard, or rather we were given to understand that imitative bot units are partially constructed from that grown human tissue. Great conversation starter.

That is correct. Wow. Does that mean you have, like, human feelings too? Because it really seems like you do. It does? Yes. Ratty? What are you doing?

Okay, look, I know you agreed to back off, but it feels really weird not to treat it as a person. Why would I want that? Ratty kind of, like, wanting know you agreed to back off, but it feels really weird not to treat it as a person. Why would I want that? Ratty kind of like wanting to bond with Murderbot, wanting to be pals with Murderbot, not having boundaries, and the others kind of like realizing that he's making Murderbot horribly uncomfortable, and is actually being cruel by trying to be bonding with it. That seemed real, like, you know, that people can care about each other and also drive each other crazy.

Some readers have told Martha Wells that they feel a connection with Brunnerbot because they see the character as being neurodivergent. I asked Martha if that was something she thought about from the beginning. Not when I wrote it. I wrote it just the way way I think the way I normally write my characters.

But I did, because it was in first person, I did put a lot more of myself into it. I mean, I knew before then I was non-neurotypical in some ways. And this is, and just seeing other people identify with it and talk about it is one of the ways I identified that, you know, I'm probably on the autism spectrum. The more and more I see those discussions and think about it, it's like, yeah, this would sure explain a lot. You know, things like ADHD and were not something kids were diagnosed with in the 70s, especially girls.

You were just a bad person. You were a bad kid, and that's why you were acting like this. So yeah, it was not intentional, but it's definitely in there. Oh, what other aspects of you, did you either intentionally put in or realize afterwards? You're like, oh, that's actually me.

The really bitter sense of humor when things are going wrong or the situation is bad, because I've noticed that about myself a lot, is when the worse things are, the funnier I get, the more sarcastic and the more bitter sarcasm. And so, yeah, because we've been in, you know, when we're having problems or something, and, you know, I've got everybody laughing because everything's just so terrible. So that was definitely the sarcasm, and everything is definitely for me. God, I wish I had that skill.

I just panic. Well, panic, too. It's part of panic. It can be funny while you're panicking. As I mentioned before, the first season of the TV show covers the first novel. One of my favorite aspects of the later books are the relationships that Murderbot develops with other types of artificial intelligence. And I'm going to give away a few spoilers just to describe who some of these characters are and how Murderbot feels about them. just to describe who some of these characters are and how Murderbot feels about them.

For instance, in the second book, which is called Artificial Condition, we meet the AI of a transport ship, which has a smug personality. Murderbot gives it a nickname, ART, which stands for Asshole Research Transport. ART thinks it's smarter than Murderbot, which drives Murderbot crazy. They start out as

frenemies but develop a deep friendship, even if it's cantankerous at times. If there is a second season of the show, I can't wait to hear who they cast as the voice of Art. In the third book, which is called Rogue Protocol, Murderbot meets a very friendly robot named Mickey. Mickey's owners are a couple that treat Mickey like it's their child. Murderbot is disgusted. It thinks that Mickey is letting itself be treated like a pet.

But Murderbot comes to realize that Mickey does have a sense of agency, and not every form of AI wants the same things. Well, I wanted to contrast how the humans have relationships with these different bots and how different murder bots' interactions are with them. The relationships are different and it's not really something that humans would understand. And Murderbot itself is not particularly good at having relationships with anybody. And so the relationships with the bots are also sort of a learning experience with it, too. What don't humans get about these forms of artificial intelligence, exactly?

Well, I see, like, I'll get questions from readers or see readers object to something like, one of them was, when will Murderbot ask Art its name? And in Murderbot, their real names are hard-coded addresses, which they already know because that's how they're communicating with each other. And the assumptions that a machine intelligence would have the same kind of emotional attachment to a name that humans do or would want that kind of identity when their own identity is just structured in a completely different way. But there is one thing that Murderbot loves unconditionally. It's not a person, a place,

or a bot. It's a soap opera called The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon. It's Murderbot's favorite binge. It's the only thing that can calm its nerves. And it helps Murderbot understand humans, even if real humans are very different from soap opera characters. In the books, we don't get a deep description of the rise and fall of Sanctuary Moon, In the books, we don't get a deep description of the rise and fall of Sanctuary Moon, but on the new Apple TV show, we get to see exactly what Murderbot is watching with cameos from Clark Gregg, Jack McBrayer,

and John Cho as characters in this intergalactic soap opera. Oldness is all. Oldness is all. Lieutenant! Battle shields maximal. No! Not until you tell me. Did you sleep with that bot?

Stars, Captain! The White's brothers were giddy that they got to make this TV show within a TV show. And getting to kind of like have the, this is your life feeling of having actors that we've worked with over the years from John Cho we first worked with on American Pie and who's since done 12 films with us in different forms to DeWanda Wise, who I worked with on Fatherhood,

or Clark Gregg. And also Jack McRare is like best friends with Alexander Skarsgard, so it was fun to have him there. Oh, nice. Yeah, I was gonna ask you, you could have unlimited celebrity cameos in future, like Sanctuary Moon. It's slightly limited to who you have

in your phone, Rolodex. Right. Because it's not like, you know, yeah, I wanna fly in to do a day of this thing. I asked Martha if she has her own version of Sanctuary Moon. I have a ton. I mean, I've been a really big fan of TV. I love Stargate in Stargate Atlanta's Farscape.

Legends of Tomorrow, which shows up in the books is, I think it's Time Defenders for Ryan. The one art in Murderbot watch when they really need something that's really unrealistic. So do you feel pressure? I mean, this book initially, you're gonna, it's gonna be a short story, and then you're like, I don't wanna kill Murderbot off.

Now, I mean, people are like, when's the next Murderbot book coming out? Do you feel pressure, and does that ever lead to writer's block? I think it helps that I've been doing this for so long because I didn't write Murderbot until I'd already been writing for 26 years, about 26 or 27. So I've done so many other books,

and I'm really good at ignoring people who are trying to pressure me, I think. Because really the publisher is the only one who has the right to do that. Because their money and people's jobs are riding on stuff. So they're the only one who can I really listen to in that respect. Also I had health issues in 2023. I had breast cancer. So that really threw me off schedule. And I'm probably about a year late on everything as it is. So, I can only do it so fast. So I think if I was younger, I would have felt a ton of pressure. I have had writer's block

before. Well, I had writer's block most recently at the start of the pandemic. I was supposed to work on a murder bot novella. I just, for six months, I couldn't do anything. Basically, I couldn't get it going. And I ended up stopping and writing Witch King instead. And that kind of knocked me out of it. And when I came back to it, I was able to work on it. Yeah, I mean, people who may only know

that murder bot books may be surprised that you've done more traditional fantasy. Oh, yeah. Do you miss do you sometimes miss that you now have writing Murderbot books regularly? If there's you're now much more in a sci fi thing that sometimes you're like, I just I just want to go back to the magic. Well, that's why I think that's where Witch King came from is I just, you know, because fantasy writing, doing the created world, Murderbot doesn't pay attention to a lot of its surroundings because it doesn't care.

So there's not a lot of description. And in fantasy, that's what people, a lot of people are there for. You really want to feel immersed in this completely different world. So I think it does help me keep Murderbot fresh to be able to go and write, you know, a fantasy novel and just kind of relax into that and have fun with that. When I was reading the books, the world of Murderbot was my version of Sanctuary Moon. Every night, I'd look forward to relaxing back

into Martha's world, which is funny because Murderbot is anything but relaxed. If the character had a meta sense of self-awareness and knew that humans in the real world were enjoying watching it squirm or freak out, Murderbot would be horrified and it would probably call us a bunch of weirdos. But luckily, Murderbot is unaware of our existence

so we can keep observing it at a respectful distance for years to come, in print and hopefully on TV as well. That's it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to Martha Wells and Chris and Paul Weitz. Also thanks to John Hedges, a listener who first turned me on to the Murderbot books last year.

My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman. We have another show called Between Imaginary Worlds. It's a more casual chat show that's only available to listeners who pledge on Patreon. Last week, I talked with Cameron Santiago about their role as a Lego fan media ambassador. The company sends them Lego sets to review, which is fun, but a lot of work.

It takes a while to build a big set. If you have one of those modular buildings where it's a big building with multiple floors, that can take you eight hours to build. It takes a while, and then you usually have to shoot the video, which could take 30 minutes, an hour, something like that, and then edit it, which takes a while too. And everything that goes into that, just making sure that you, if there's references in the set, you wanna jot those down and do your research and point them out.

If it's an IP, like the Lilo Stitch House I just built, there's a whole aspect on the back end too of just making sure that you communicate with Lego, what's performing well and what isn't, you know? So it's kind of just very involved. Between Imaginary Worlds comes included with the ad-free version of the show that you can get on Patreon.

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