Funny Quotes from Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells
Murderbot Diaries written by Martha Wells is one of my favourite Science Fiction book series along with The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Ender's Game series. They are funny, action-packed and narrated by a Secunit who just wants everyone to leave him alone so that it can binge-watch its favourite shows.
So far five books have been released in Murderbot Diaries. All of them made me laugh several times. I had some photos of my favourite quotes from the series. So I decided to write them down in a single post to make things easier for me and anyone who loves this series as much as I do. Feel free to write your own favourite Murderbot moment in the comment section. I'm sure you're going to enjoy reading these lines as much as I did.
1. Yes, talk to Murderbot about its feelings. The idea was so painful my efficiency dropped to 97 per cent.
2. I liked the imaginary people on the entertainment feed more than way more than I liked the real ones, but you can't have one without the other.
3. You may have noticed that when I do manage to care, I'm a pessimist.
4. The sense of urgency just wasn't there. Also, you may have noticed, I don't care.
5. So, I'm awkward with actual humans. It's not paranoia about my hacked governor module, and it's not them, it's me. I know I'm a horrifying Murderbot, and they know it, and it makes both of us nervous, which makes me even more nervous.
6. I hate having emotions about reality; I'd much rather have them about Sanctuary Moon.
7. As a heartless killing machine, I was a complete failure.
8. I've got four perfectly good humans here and I didn't want them to get killed by whatever took out Deltfall. It's not like I cared about them personally, but it would look bad on my record, and my record was already pretty terrible.
9. I don't know what I want. I said that at some point, I think. But it isn't that, it's that I don't want anyone to tell me what I want, or to make decisions for me.
10. And in their corner all they had was Murderbot, who just wanted everyone to shut up and leave it alone so that it could watch entertainment feed all day.
1. I didn't care what humans were doing to each other as long as I didn't have to a) stop it or b) clean up after it.
2. I just wanted to sink into my media downloads for a while and pretend I didn't exist.
3. It was called Worldhoppers, and was about freelance explorers who extended the wormhole and ring networks into uninhabited star systems. It looked very unrealistic and inaccurate, which was exactly what I liked.
4. "That could be a good sign, right?" "Sure," I said. It was a terrible sign.
5. When constructs were first developed, they were originally supposed to have a pre-sentient level of intelligence, like the dumber variety of bot. But you can’t put something as dumb as a hauler bot in charge of security for anything without spending even more money for expensive company-employed human supervisors. So they made us smarter. The anxiety and depression were side effects.
1. There needs to be an error code that means “I received your request but decided to ignore you.
2. Miki was a bot who had never been abused or lied to or treated with anything but indulgent kindness. It really thought its humans were its friends because that’s how they treated it. I signalled Miki I would be withdrawing for one minute. I needed to have an emotion in private.
3. As a SecUnit, a large part of my function was helping the company record everything my clients did and said so the company could data-mine it and sell anything worthwhile. They say good security comes at a price and the company takes that literally.
4. I couldn’t hack a combat bot without making a direct physical connection, and trying for that would result in me being torn apart. (I’ve been torn apart before, and on my list of things to avoid, it was right up there at the top.)
1. Possibly I was overthinking this. I do that; it’s the anxiety that comes with being a part-organic murderbot. The upside was paranoid attention to detail. The downside was also paranoid attention to detail.
2. By tricky I meant I was getting an average of an 85 per cent chance of failure and death, and it was only that low because my last diagnostic said my risk assessment module was wonky. (I know, that explains a lot about me.
3 The one good thing about having emotions was that it accelerated the repair process for my memory storage. (The bad thing about having emotions is, you know, OH SHIT WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED TO ME.
4. I was having an emotion, and I hate that. I’d rather have nice safe emotions about shows on the entertainment media; having them about things real-life humans said and did just led to stupid decision.
1. “Just remember you’re not alone here.” I never know what to say to that. I am actually alone in my head, and that’s where 90 plus percent of my problems are.
2. If I got angry at myself for being angry I would be angry constantly and I wouldn’t have time to think about anything else.) (Wait, I think I am angry constantly. That might explain a lot.)
3. You know that thing humans do where they think they’re being completely logical and they absolutely are not being logical at all, and on some level, they know that, but can’t stop? Apparently, it can happen to SecUnits, too.
4. There is a lot about what is going on here that I don’t understand. But I am participating anyway.
5. After spending my entire existence having to gently suggest to humans that they not do things that would probably get them killed, it was nice to be able to tell them in so many words to not be so stupid. But I didn’t regret doing it.
6. There's a thing you can do with these small intel drones when the hostiles are dumb enough to get aggressive without adequate body armour. You can accelerate a drone and send it straight at the hostile's face. Even if you don't hit an eye or ear and go straight through to the brain, you can make a crater in the skull. Doing this would solve the problem and get me back to new episodes of Lineages of the Sun much more quickly.
7. I had a stab wound so large you could see the metal of my interior structure, but Senior Indah was too polite to mention it. The medical bot extended a delicate sensor limb toward me. On the feed, I told it anything that touched me would get torn off and thrown across the room. It pulled the limb back and used it to check Hostile Two instead.
8. Amena is on the survey because her education requires an internship in almost getting killed, I guess.
9. I could play it back to listen in on the whole conversation but I could also punch myself in the head with a sampling drill and I was not going to do that, either.
10. My organic parts had a reaction that reminded me how lucky I was not to have a digestive system.
11. The good thing about being a construct is that I can have a dramatic emotional breakdown while still running my background search to find the drone key commands.
These were some of my favourite moments from the books. The entire series is fun to read and full of such funny lines. Like I said, after Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy this was indeed a type of space science fiction I needed to read. I'm going to read more books like these for sure in the future. There are some books that I'm looking forward to which are very similar to this. You can try them out if you loved Murderbot Diaries.
1. The long way to a small angry planet by Becky Chambers - https://amzn.to/3n9Heon
2. A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers - https://amzn.to/3896Xt2
3. An Unnatural Life by Erin Wagner - https://amzn.to/3pKVZzL
If you know any more similar books, do let me know in the comments. I've also written my favourite quotes from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in this post.
Meanwhile, if you haven't read Murderbot Diaries yet, check out them below.
1. All Systems Red - https://amzn.to/2YYliml
2. Artificial Condition - https://amzn.to/2YYlPol
3. Rogue Protocol - https://amzn.to/2AUWmUG
4. Exit Strategy - https://amzn.to/3dmguMG
5. Network Effect - https://amzn.to/2BsBW58
6. Fugitive Telemetry - https://amzn.to/2RGHlOx
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