Meet Martha Wells, science fiction author extraordinaire and mother of Murderbot—a socially awkward softie with weaponized body armor. The Murderbot Diaries, a series that appeared in 2017 with a novella called All Systems Red, has attracted legions of fans worldwide, earning Wells plenty of Nebula and Hugo Award hardware since. For Wired, Meghan Herbst recounts Wells’ cat-strewn life, her start in writing, the lean years after the author made the leap into writing full time, and how much changed after author N.K. Jemisin blurbed a book from another Wells series, The Cloud Roads, declaring it the “rarest of fantasies: fresh and surprising, with a story that doesn’t go where ten thousand others have gone before.”
In her last year of college, Wells took the lead on organizing AggieCon and invited various authors to attend, including a then lesser-known George R. R. Martin. The con made a record-breaking $10,000 in profit. The Cepheids took some of that money, rented a van, and drove 13 hours nonstop to attend a much larger convention, WorldCon, in Atlanta. One of the Cepheids, a rather tall, sweet boy, had dressed up as a Sith lord, with a lightsaber made of partMy mind goes to Murderbot. It claims to be a loner, to not need friends. Yet it forms a deep attachment to a sentient research vessel. Later, it even offers one of its human companions a hug. Of all her characters, Wells has said, Murderbot is the one she’s put the most of herself into. It’s a surprising claim, until it’s not. It’s obvious that Wells feels a distance from other humans, even as she’s spent a life trying to relate to them, to understand them.s he bought at an auto store. He made one for Wells too. “Which led to us actually starting to date,” Wilson says over tacos. “I always tell people we were brought together by the dark side of the Force.”
My mind goes to Murderbot. It claims to be a loner, to not need friends. Yet it forms a deep attachment to a sentient research vessel. Later, it even offers one of its human companions a hug. Of all her characters, Wells has said, Murderbot is the one she’s put the most of herself into. It’s a surprising claim, until it’s not. It’s obvious that Wells feels a distance from other humans, even as she’s spent a life trying to relate to them, to understand them.
