Will star Alexander Skaarsgard as the Muderbot.
Really enjoyed the books, hopefully this will be good as well.
Huh, I just finished reading Network Effect, the first full-length novel in the series (though I haven’t read the novellas). Good story, though unfortunately I don’t think I’ll be able to recommend it for our summer reading list (the proximal reason I was reading it).
I was actually thinking about how I’d cast Murderbot, and decided that it ought to be computer-generated, so as to avoid gender cues, because Murderbot, like most of the machine intelligences in the series, is definitely and consistently agendered. Though probably even if they did that, most viewers would default to assuming male.
They call it thought-provoking and then immediately gender Murderbot. Whoever wrote that should probably think some more thoughts about the series.
Facing the corner, with their helmet on.
Just read the first book in about 90 minutes - very short but I loved it. Looking forward to the series!
Heh.
It’s time for a TV show about a robot who just wants to watch his own TV shows.
Whereas I thought, while reading a few of the books, that “sure, the author has been careful to use neutral pronouns, but MurderBot is definitely a woman-bot”.
I’ve seen a lot of people upset about the Skaarsgard casting, that he doesn’t fit their specific mental image of murderbot. I think he’s got more inherent sex appeal than Murderbot ought to have, but he also has a weary put-upon mode that suits it just fine.
Early on in reading the books I got the mental image of “What if a Terminator had a terminal case of social anxiety?” and the idea of seeing Murderbot as a masculine-presenting slab of beef stuck. After all, SecUnits spend most of their time standing around looking vaguely intimidating, so a big male-presenting appearance made sense to me. Skaarsgard has this in spades. Also my wife is a big fan of him since his True Blood days, so this is my chance to finally get her into the series after years of failed attempts to cajole her into reading the books.
I’m fairly certain it self identifies as “it”.
Like I said, the author was careful to use agendered pronouns. Nevertheless, I got definite girl-bot vibes throughout. Perhaps that’s just a sexist association between soap operas and women on my part, though.
I don’t think any of the shows it likes were “soap operas”. Its favorites mostly seem to be historical dramas, plus some action-adventure stories.
Its favorite show was The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon, which I guess is just called a serial, but has all of the wacky elements of soap operas you’d expect like clones and double agents and weird interpersonal conflicts. Perhaps one could argue that Murderbot just really, really likes TV, and serials are just a part.
I got a female vibe but I attribute it to the author being a woman. If it had been “Martin Wells” I bet I would’ve thought Murderbot as masculine.
I don’t think it’s sexist. I think it’s a deeply ingrained implicit bias that makes us want to apply heteronormative binary gender roles on the world. It’s good to be able to consciously address things like that.
On thinking about it, though, it might be good for the Apple TV show to explicitly make its favorite shows be soap operas. There’s going to be an unavoidable impression of Murderbot as male, given that it’s played by a male, and soap operas might help to balance out that preconception.
Assuming, of course, that Apple is, in fact, planning on making Murderbot agendered, and the pronoun in that article is just the journalist’s mistake, not the producers’.
One day I’d like to do a blind test (though I’m not sure how). It sure seems like woman-authored sci-fi reads differently than male. Martha Wells, Becky Chambers, even Ursula K Le Guin–but I’ve never read them without knowing the author’s gender in advance. So I can’t really know.
There have been times (when the author goes by initials, or when they have an ambiguous first name) when I’ve been mistaken about the gender of an author. In at least some cases, on reading the book, I went “Wait, this was written by a woman? It doesn’t read like that.”, and looked it up and discovered my misconception.
Though when there is a tell that the author is a man, it’s usually that the male characters are more developed and three-dimensional than the female characters.
True, though I’ve seen the opposite as well. Or at least have men behaving in ways that are either caricatured or don’t ring true. Everyone has their blind spots.
Oh, and female SF authors (and maybe female authors in general, though I don’t have as much experience out of the genre) also seem to be much more likely to challenge the cishet default, or to otherwise seriously explore gender roles. If the Murderbot series were written by a man, it probably would be referred to as “he”.
This might just be a reflection of the fact that they’ve had to fight against gender stereotypes just to write in the genre in the first place.
My DIL sees Murderbot as female, because they’re protective and they’re constantly watching over their clients. She thinks that I only see them as somewhat male because I listened to the stories on audiobooks, and the voice actor is male.
I am not a Murderbot lore expert, but Murderbot is basically a Terminator at least in that it is encased in enough organic flesh so that it can more or less pass for human; however, the story explicitly mentions that it does not have any genitalia (and is not interested in that sort of thing). Moreover, I do not recall that it ever exhibits a “male” or “female” personality, except perhaps as a pretense. The only “vibe” I got is that it seems a little too human (not in a gendered way though), but we know that its brain incorporates a certain amount of cloned human tissue and, furthermore, it was programmed by humans in the first place.
Since I discovered the books, I’ve been telling friends: "Oh, by the way. One word… Murderbot."
But I keep thinking of casting decisions. It’s not a he or a she. It really needs to be played by an actor who’s transitioning. Or a feminine guy, or a butch woman.
Maybe it’s like the end of Bladerunner, where the question is “Is that replicant more human than the human who’s been chasing it?”
Any robot who retreats into bingeing a soap opera in times of stress is (delightfully) human…