Murderbot Q3. Characters and Neurodiversity
Murderbot is the central character and is pretty clearly meant to be autistic (and, if you watch the interview with Wells, she was surprised that it revealed how neuro-divergent she is). Do you think the portrayal of Murderbot was believeable? Did these books give you any different insight into the inner life of autistic-spectrum people?
Murderbot is also asexual and aromantic. Did this affect how you enjoyed the character? Was the absence of romance in the story something you missed, or even noticed?
What about Murderbot's affection for trashy soap-opera dramas?
What about other characters? Murderbot mentions that many of its previous clients were unpleasant people, especially towards the SecUnits. Do the humans we saw fit that description? Were there any characters you especially liked or disliked?
Comments
I did not link the Murderbot's behavior with autism, although I think you are right. I certainly noticed the asexual/aromantic aspects - they were very up front. Yes they affected the story, but not for the worse. Most of the humans depicted in the Murderbot stories deserved to die in a fire. It is an unmitigated good thing that I am not the judge of such behavior, in the book or in real life.
I bought Muderbot’s relation to humans, curiosity and disdain and loyalty to them.
I didn’t buy the organic parts and not really her acerbic wit, either, which often just seemed like Wells trying to be witty/clever.
I did very much like the Murderbot/ART dynamic, which reminded me a lot of the main character/Slate dynamic in Far From the Spaceports, so that was fun.
This kids who were trying to reclaim their research were fairly convincing, but the villain not that much.
With my other half working as a psychotherapist I end up spending a decent amount of time talking around the whole autistic spectrum topic, so it wasn't so much off an introduction to the area as a revisitation!
The preoccupation with trashy soap operas was a fun twist, especially as this allowed both the "do I really want to be like them as they both fascinate me and repel me" dimension and also the geeky collect-the-series dimension. And, come to think of it, the whole business that the much more capable ART had to be coaxed through some episodes and filtered away from others.
I didn't see much exploration of the idea that love is not just sex, so it would be perfectly feasible for the murderbot to feel love while also having no sex parts or (presumably) hormones. It does of course feel things in that general direction such as loyalty and self-sacrifice, and maybe we get to love later in the series? Again, there's the very common autistic spectrum feature of learning how to imitate emotional activity without actually feeling it, and it's kind of hard to know in some parts of the book which is going on.
Yes, the murderbot/ART dynamic weas IMHO the best in the series so far. I hadn't thought of drawing Mit and Slate into the equation but that's an interesting thought. I do like Slate, as no doubt became apparent from the book. And hopefully there will in due course be a third Slate book to round off that particular story arc, and some of the storyline is already drafted, but currently the Neolithic is calling more strongly