#machine intelligence

So, Murderbot. One of the questions I get asked a lot is what inspired the character. I think people want/expect there to be a crystal clear single moment where something tangible and identifiable sparked the idea. But there really wasn't; or if there was, I don't remember it. What I remember is a whole lot of things, all coming together at once. It started when I was working on the ending of The Harbors of the Sun, the last novel in the Books of the Raksura series. It was the conclusion of the series, and I was sweating over it. This was the series that, with great difficulty and many setbacks, dragged my career back from the dead, and I loved it and wanted to do the finale justice. I was having something like a creative surge, with ideas for new books, fanfiction, redecorating my house, digging up my backyard, all kinds of things. (My brain is what we call non-neurotypical and sometimes it goes very fast.) One day, somewhere in there, the plot idea popped up for an enslaved security person who had destroyed their governor module but would have to reveal that to save an innocent group of scientists. I had an image of a scene which turned into the moment in All Systems Red where Mensah knocks on the wall of Murderbot's cubicle, an act of transgression which sets off the story. It was going to be a short story with a sad ending. I decided to quickly type some notes on the idea so I wouldn't forget it. I ended up writing the cubicle scene and then forced myself to stop and go back to work on the novel. The day after The Harbors of the Sun draft was finished, I started on what ended up being All Systems Red, though at the time it was just called The Murderbot Diaries. All my books, except for my Star Wars and Stargate Atlantis media tie-ins, had been fantasy, but this was a science fiction idea. I'd been reading SF all my life, and some of my favorites were Bujold's Vorkosigan series, Tanith Lee, Janet Kagan, Phyllis Gotlieb, and recently Nalo Hopkinson's Midnight Robber, Karen Lord's The Best of All Possible Worlds, and Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice. It quickly developed into something too long for a short story, but I had been reading some of TorDotcom's new novella line, stories like The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps by Kai Ashante Wilson and Binti by Nnedi Okorafor. I checked the submission requirements and thought that around 33,000 words would be just about the right length for what I wanted to do. The sad ending got thrown out early on, though I didn't decide on the actual ending until I got close to that point in the story. Murderbot needed time to grow and change on its own; going home with Mensah would be like trading up to a better owner. It needed to leave. The draft took from May 26, 2016 through June 26, 2016 to complete. It would have been faster, but I fell and had a back injury in the middle of it, possibly not unrelated to the rheumatoid arthritis that I didn't know I had at the time. Then I had to go be on programming (with a cane and a back brace) at Comicpalooza in Houston. The day I got back home I started writing again. A lot of things were coming to a boiling point that year. I had a lifetime of anxiety, depression, and undiagnosed developmental disorders. I was sick of being told that if you're not completely open and spilling your feelings for the approval of everyone around you then you must not have any feelings. Books, but also TV and Star Wars had probably saved my life as a kid, but that wasn't the narrative people wanted to hear. (It's cool if literature saves your life; if literature got a major assist from Land of the Giants and the Saturday afternoon Godzilla movie, not so much.) I was still hanging on as a working writer in a field that expected women my age to quietly fade away. I'd been angry all my life, but the oncoming election of Trump was making me exhausted with rage. I was terrified of what would happen, to me, to my family, to our friends, to all the people I knew. I had to put it all somewhere, so I put it into Murderbot. There were other influences. The movie War Games where the sentient supercomputer decides for itself that playing games is better than waging war. The Lord of the Rings documentary about the program used to create the massive battle scenes and how they had to tweak it to stop it from making all the pixel people run away instead of fight. I wanted to write an AI that didn't want to be human, and I was thinking a lot about what an AI would actually want, as opposed to what a human might think an AI would want. Once the novella was finished I sent it to my agent, Jennifer Jackson, who submitted it to Lee Harris at Tordotcom. Then we waited, and I went back to work on The Harbors of the Sun. I went to the WorldCon in Kansas City with friends, and ran into Lee as he was about to go to the Hugo Awards, where he would accept Nnedi Okorafor's Hugo for Best Novella for Binti. He told me he was buying the novella and I was ecstatic while trying to be cool and professional. The next day I did a panel with Lee while Nnedi's Hugo sat in a box on the floor behind the table. I was trying not to see that as a good omen, because in my career (all twenty-three years of it up to that point) I'd long ago accepted that my time for awards was past. But it turned out I was wrong about that. Lee asked for a second novella and I decided to write what happened next, which turned into Artificial Condition. After that, I wanted to keep going and offered to do two more. Each subsequent novella has been harder to write than the previous one, each taking me about three to four months of writing, cutting, and rewriting to get to a first draft. The novel Network Effect took me almost twice as long to write as any of my other novels. It was published last week, in the middle of a world-spanning pandemic, and here we are. I'm incredibly grateful to everyone who has embraced Murderbot (figuratively, because we all know it would hate that in real life) and to everyone who sees themselves in Murderbot. It's a gift, to have readers love a character as much as you love writing it, to have readers identify with a character and to feel comforted by it. It's a gift to still be able to write Murderbot, with everything going on in the world. So thank you for that gift.