Here’s where the trans allegory gets really strong.

Where Murderbot didn’t become “real” until they were free, ART finds realness in purpose. On one hand you have Murderbot sorting out who they are now that they aren’t a SecUnit, and on the other you have ART who enjoys being a transport ship and having a set, immutable purpose.

It’s a Whole Lot to deal with, as we see in Murderbot’s interactions with Tapan in particular. And not just deal with norms, but establish their own and learn to navigate the fluidity of human norms. Now that Murderbot is free they suddenly have to deal with all those norms they spent most of All Systems Redavoiding. SecUnits don’t have to deal with what is “normal,” mostly because humans treat them like tools rather than people. In Martha Wells’ version of the future, humans have all sorts of gender identities rooted largely in the socio-cultural traditions of their planetary systems – “Two were female, and one was tercera, which was a gender signifier used in the group of non[corporate political entities known as the Divarti Cluster.” But while Murderbot doesn’t spend time sorting out gender expression, they exist in a universe where they must navigate social expectations, albeit ones vastly different from ours. Muderbot is, for all intents and purposes, agender and asexual/aromantic. What it discovers will forever change the way it thinks…” (via Goodreads) Teaming up with a Research Transport vessel named ART (you don’t want to know what the “A” stands for), Murderbot heads to the mining facility where it went rogue. A past that caused it to christen itself “Murderbot”.īut it has only vague memories of the massacre that spawned that title, and it wants to know more. “ It has a dark past – one in which a number of humans were killed.

The artificial condition