★★★★☆ Now we see the violence inherent in the system!

Home: Habitat, Range, Niche, Territory

Martha Wells

Home: Habitat, Range, Niche, Territory is a short story in the Murderbot Diaries. It is available free from Tor, or if you want it on a kindle, you can buy it from Amazon.

The story takes place immediately after Exit Strategy. It is told from the point of view of Dr Mensah. Murderbot and the PreservationAuth team are now back at Preservation Authority, and Mensah (who is a PreservationAuth political leader) is working out how to deal with the aftermath of the events of Exit Strategy. Part of that aftermath, of course, is the presence at PreservationAuth of a SecBot, which is only dubiously legal and worries some citizens.

The most interesting thing about this is that we are inside Mensah's head, not Murderbot's. Murderbot is, in a sense, very self-centered. This is not to say that she is selfish -- on the contrary, she is if anything too given to self-sacrifice. However, she makes plans based on how she expects them to make her personally feel. She doesn't want humans under her care to die, because she feels sorrow when humans die, so she protects them. She is not a deep thinker. She has sympathy for humans, but not empathy. By that I mean she feels pain when humans hurt (and that extends even to abstract hurts, such as loss of freedom), but she cannot imagine herself into the mind of a human.

Mensah is quite different. She is an abstract thinker and political leader. She has not just sympathy for Murderbot, but empathy.

As I read Mensah's musings on Murderbot and the harm that had been done to her, I was reminded of the Constitutional Peasants scene in the movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail. (Transcript here.) Like Dennis, Mensah has long been aware in the abstract of "the violence inherent in the system", but Murderbot and recent events have made it starkly real to her. Dennis is pedantic and annoying, but he is not wrong. Mensah is something like what you get if you take Dennis seriously.

Will Murderbot become an unlikely revolutionary leader, like Katniss Everdeen in the Hunger Games, or Severian in the Book of the New Sun? Probably not, but it's fun to think about.

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