Murderbot Q4. Violence and action

1

Murderbot is a creature of violence. Sometimes that violence is used to protect, such as rescuing Bharadwaj at the start of All Systems Red. Sometimes its a tool to achieve ends. Sometimes, such as the rescue of Tapan at the end of Artificial Condition, it's vindictive.

What do you think of the way violence is portrayed in the book? Was it something you enjoyed, or put you off? What did you think of how various characters (Murderbot, the PreservationAux team, Tlacey) used violence to achieve their ends?

Comments

  • 1
    edited February 1

    I don't see it as either enjoyable or off-putting. It was a fact of existence, and needed to be dealt with. I do believe that all violence is coercion, and that use of coercion negates the impropriety of coercion being used against one, using coercion make it fair game for its use against one.

  • 1
    We’re gamers - violence is pretty endemic to our storytelling experiences, isn’t it. I’m sure @BarnerCobblewood would argue we’re too used to it, and make a good case for people to stop telling violent stories. I’m not really able to argue against this, but nor am I likely to stop reading stories with violence.
  • 1
    edited February 3

    I think that in the long term violence doesn't deliver the results that help motivate its performance. See my comment about eating desert in question 1. @Apocryphal has got it about right.

    Technology which extends human activity (see MacLuhan et al.) creates extended problems with the expression of human structures that developed when human capacities were quite different. In this story it seems like the Murderbot is like an extension which is seemingly not the problem, but the solution to the problem that the extension itself produces. Stories like this seem to say that satiety with violence is the problem, rather than the violence that produces the fatigue or revulsion with it, because violence is intrinsic to actuality.

    I think that for most people there is a satiety that develops around violence, a great fatigue and revulsion, that keeps violence in check. I wonder who benefits from the continual presentation of stories like this where violence as a solution.

  • 0

    Worth noting too that mostly through the book, and so far in this discussion thread, we have construed "violence" as meaning something physical. But murderbot hardly gets a chapter without hacking some unfortunate device or other (and only restrains itself from trying that on ART in the face of an obviously asymmetric force). I'm not sure that the litter of gadgets that are left lying around would think of these actions in the virtual world as any less destructive than those in the physical one. In these cases, part of the hack is also removal of the memory of the event from log files or whatever, so murderbot comes over (arguably) as unashamedly having double standards as regards the partial purging of his own memories.

  • 1

    @clash_bowley said:
    I don't see it as either enjoyable or off-putting. It was a fact of existence, and needed to be dealt with. I do believe that all violence is coercion, and that use of coercion negates the impropriety of coercion being used against one, using coercion make it fair game for its use against one.

    This sums it up well for me I think. It felt like just a fabric of the universe that was created.

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