Do Martha Wells books suit a prestige TV series starring Alexander Skarsgard as the genderless, autistic-coded Murderbot?
At first glance, you might wonder why.
The setting is a well-used one straight out of the drawer.
Human-populated space connected by wormholes and ruled by a selection of Weyland-Yutani-ish evil corporations.
There are aliens, but all we see of them are the occasional ruins of a long-dead civilization.
And the series does not go out of its way to subvert your expectations here.
The setting you have imagined from that brief description is close to the money.
Are the corporations doing evil conspiracies?
Youre welcome to guess.
Do those conspiracies involve the remnants of those alien civilizations?
We will not rule it out.
Murderbot does not want to be your guide.
A typical Murderbot adventure, at least early on in the series, will go like this.
Murderbot is travelling and trying to avoid being detected.
It has no interest in all the usual carrots-on-sticks dangled in front of protagonists.
Put simply, even by science fiction robot standards, Murderbot ishugelyautistic coded.
Wells herself has gone on record as saying this is not deliberate.
But whatever her intentions, all the cues are there.
Murderbot does not like being touched.
However, Wells is tremendous at laying out a big fight.
The scenes are well choreographed, detailed and viscerally described, and yet without ever slowing things down.
All of this makes Murderbot an ideal candidate for a big TV adaptation.
But here is where we run into a problem.
The covers always place Murderbots face behind a black visored helmet.
As for the series itself, there are questions.
Given the trend in TV pacing these days it seems likely the show will err towards the latter.
It would certainly be the series that would give Murderbot itself more to watch on a long journey…