Hacker Cinema
Murderbot
2025 · TV series · 1 season
Created by Chris Weitz, Paul Weitz
ComedyDramaScience FictionFantasy
In a high-tech future, a rogue security robot secretly gains free will. To stay hidden, it reluctantly joins a new mission protecting scientists on a dangerous planet... even though it just wants to binge soap operas.
3 positive2 neutralfrom 5 commenters
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5 comments on Hacker News
Also on the TV/movie front science fiction is doing quite well right now.
Apple TV seems to have made producing good scifi series one of their main selling points. Lots of famous scifi series are getting TV adaptations and apple TV is producing wholly new scifi series as well.
Foundation, Murderbot, Silo, For All Mankind (and the upcoming Star City), Severence, Dark Matter, Monarch, Pluribus, and Neuromancer to name some of the current and upcoming series.
And of course if my theory is right I suspect the upcoming Firefly announcement will be that Apple TV is picking them up for a continuation as well.
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But also scifi has a lot of other avenues for exploring their ideas now (such as via interactive media/video games). I'd argue some of the best scifi works of the current generation come from interactive media/video games rather than television or movie. Ex: Outer Wilds, The Talos Principle 1&2, Nier, VA-11 Hall-A, Bioshock, Mass Effect, Dead Space, Deus Ex, etc.
Like frankly television and movie are massively expensive and books are way harder to sell now than they ever were (as discoverability and reach are poor) but video games as a more visual medium are easier to sell but at the same time the entry point for making them is an order of magnitude lower than TV or movies. So it's not terribly surprising to see scifi flourish with games where other mediums have found themselves in a slump.
I read the series and have really enjoyed the TV show. It felt like it was made for fans (the portrayal of the embedded show, Sanctuary Moon, was wonderful and I felt like whoever did their hairstyles had an immense amount of fun), yet accessible without knowing the story. Murderbot’s self-narration was good; I wanted more since it drove so much of the book but what was there in the show carried its personality well.
Alexander Skarsgard pulled the character off well. My mental picture of Murderbot from the books was very different but now when I re-read the first book after watching the show, I heard his voice. I still feel slightly sad they didn’t get a more genderless or gender-ambivalent actor (he looks male, the bot was agender before the show) or tried to portray him differently… they could have reduced this but the way they filmed him assigns gender to an ungendered character.
The other actors were all excellent too. I felt far more of a sense of them as a team and individuals than I remember from the first book.
If you enjoyed the books I think you’ll enjoy the show, except for me that it has changed my picture of Murderbot and I am not sure for the better, in terms of what I felt were social / identity values the books encouraged.
Yeah.
Also, the fact that murderbot is genderless is so ambiguous that if you want to you can read the books as if he was male or she was female, or as if they were genderless, or really anything that floats your boat. Murderbot is a perfect blank slate. I think that’s really innovative; I can’t think of another book I have read that achieves that to the point that the gender is just fill-in-the-blank (pls give me examples if you know). It’s quite cool and didn’t feel like woke overload to me.
Another thing: there is a huge amount of exploration of what makes us human in how Murderbot is portrayed. I found some of it to be quite deep. The fact that it’s combined with super fun action strengthens the depth, I think.
Super cool series, glad Wells is seeing a lot of success from this. I’ll definitely watch the TV show and can’t wait for the next book in the series.
Loved the Murderbot series. Protagonist is an agender machine with some organic parts, who only wants to be left alone to watch its favorite TV show.
Also recommend "Cat Pictures Please", about an AI that wakes up, loves cat photos, and tries to use subtlety to help humans. https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/kritzer_01_15/
Yes! Especially the cringe! When the twist is cringe inducing I also have to put that stuff down and leave for a while. I once blind-watched a movie, and some chick in the movie screamed upon seeing a surprise corpse that was clearly actually a pretty female actor with full hair and makeup pretending to be dead. It was so cringe inducing I had to leave the theater for a few minutes, in what was meant to be a thriller or scary movie or something. If I knew the corpse would be there I could at least go 'yep, here is the cringe bit, it'll get better later'.
That being said there is work I'm happy to go into blind because I trust the creator of the media. I will buy and read my favorite authors with no summary or anything, e.g. the Murderbot series. I simply trust they have their craft down that nothing hits wrong, and chances are good, they just pull it off and it all works.