ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses Martha Wells’ popular and prizewinning series, The Murderbot Diaries, in the context of recent changes and conflicts around autism. Drawing on reviews by marginalized readers, personal experience living as a queer autist, and disability studies, Reid explores Wells’ narrative about a Security Unit, Murderbot, who frees itself from its governing module and embarks on investigations of corporate crimes. Murderbot’s first-person narrative shows its difficulties with human expectations that it have a gender and navigate complicated social and emotional interactions with humans. The series narrative arc shows Murderbot attempting to discover what it wants to do as a free agent and subverts conventions of space opera by showing an AI who does not want to be, or to be like, humans, preferring interactions with other programmed beings or immersing itself in its favorite media. The chapter concludes with by noting the need to work with disability studies to consider all forms of neurodivergence in order to develop new tools and skills to read work by Wells and other science fiction authors in new and complex ways.
