Apple's Murderbot series debuts on May 16th
Adapted from Martha Wells' outstanding series
Apple has announced that its upcoming adaptation of Martha Wells' Murderbot Diaries will debut on its streaming platform on May 16th, and unveiled a pair of images of Alexander Skarsgård as the titular character. The series will run for 10 episodes and was created by Chris and Paul Weitz. (thanks to Max C. in the Transfer Orbit slack channel for alerting me to this.)
The company announced that it was adapting the series in December 2023, and went into production last year. The show is based on Wells' novellas and novels ( All Systems Red, Artificial Condition, Rogue Protocol, Exit Strategy, Network Effect, Fugitive Telemetry, and System Collapse), which follow a security android that calls itself "Murderbot," after it hacked hacked its own programming and has gone rogue, but would rather sit around watching soap operas and avoiding people whenever possible. It's confused and sometimes annoyed by emotions, but begins developing feelings and connections with a handful of humans and ships that it ends up falling in with.
Wells has earned enormous acclaim, and revitalized her career. All Systems Red earned the 2018 Alex, Hugo, Locus, and Nebula awards (as well as a bunch of others), while Artificial Condition and Network Effect also won a whole host of awards. In 2021, the entire series earned the Hugo for Best Series.
The show should introduce an entirely new audience to the Murderbot stories, and it joins a growing number of science fiction shows that Apple has commissioned for its streaming service, such as Severance, For All Mankind, Monarch, Silo, Foundation, and a forthcoming adaptation of William Gibson's Neuromancer.
There's a wonderfully delightful meta premise that comes with the series: an android that likes television is now the subject of a television show. But there's also a lot that the series can draw from the books (and plenty of material). Murderbot, at its core, is a series about an individual trying to understand the people around them, and dealing with extremely complicated feelings and emotions that it just doesn't have the tools to deal with.
I spoke with Wells back in 2021, and in that interview, she made an interesting observation:
"The fact that it has anxiety and depression and everything that it goes through, the more specific you are, the more people find common ground with it. For a long time in media, there's been this idea that things have to be general and generic, so more people would be interested in them. But in practice, it's actually the opposite: the more specific something is, the more likely someone's going to feel kinship with something they feel or have done, and Murderbot is incredibly specific about its problems."
Andrew Liptak
I think that's a key reason for why these stories have resonated so well with readers: it's easy to relate to Murderbot and the way they interact with the world. It can be a frightening, distressing, and convoluted place, but it's a story that really emphasizes something that we're all struggling to find and maintain: human connection.