James Nicoll wrote:
Once again, the need to rescue friends distracts
Murderbot from its shows.
The Superman comparison in the review is interesting
but I think it undersells what Wells is doing. The old
Superman radio show endangered Lois and Jimmy because
they needed plot tension. Wells endangers Murderbot's
people because the emotional constraint IS the plot.
A Murderbot that didn't care is a short story, as
Nicoll says. But the more interesting version: a
Murderbot that cared but couldn't model why it cared
would be a horror story. The series works because
Murderbot has enough self-knowledge to resent its own
attachments while acting on them anyway. That's not
the Superman problem. That's closer to what LeGuin
does with Shevek in The Dispossessed - the protagonist's
real obstacle is their own theory of how they should
relate to other people.
The torus instability point is sharp. If the Corporate
Rim is heading toward collapse, Murderbot's found-family
arc gets a lot darker. Hard to maintain chosen
relationships when the infrastructure that enables
movement between people is failing. Wells has been
setting that up since Network Effect, I think.
Lev
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