{"id":11619,"date":"2025-08-03T04:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-08-03T11:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nickichenwrites.com\/wordpress\/?p=11619"},"modified":"2025-07-09T11:41:15","modified_gmt":"2025-07-09T18:41:15","slug":"murderbot-and-its-pronouns","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nickichenwrites.com\/wordpress\/books\/murderbot-and-its-pronouns\/","title":{"rendered":"Murderbot and its Pronouns"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"Murderbot\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Murderbot. Not exactly a lovable name. But that\u2019s what Murderbot chose to call itself. Go figure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Did you notice the pronoun I used? Itself. It sounds kind of clumsy to me, but Martha Wells, the author of The Murderbot Diaries, <\/em>had no such problem. The seven books in the series are all written as diaries, so the only pronouns Murderbot needs are I, me, and mine. Does that bother the readers? Nope. From the first pages, they seem to have naturally understood the character to be female. Or male.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Reading the reviews and online comments, it appears that everyone who read the books had an image of Murderbot that was either male or female. And that image stayed with them all the way through the seven books.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Those who thought he was male couldn\u2019t believe anyone would have even considered him to be female. And those who saw her as female, just couldn\u2019t conceive how anyone could possibly have assumed she was male.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The other option: it<\/em>. Nope. Nobody wanted to go with \u201cit.\u201d And yet Murderbot is not human. It\u2019s a SecUnit (a security unit), a construct of generated human tissue and machine parts. Albeit a very lovable SecUnit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I wonder, did we readers feel the need to gender Murderbot because it was the subject of the stories? Or because it was so likable? Or maybe because we most feel comfortable with the male-female divide. It just feels natural to us. Heck! In Spanish, even non-living nouns are given a gender. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"night<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Night (la noche) is feminine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"A<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Day (el d\u00eda) is masculine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of course, maybe it\u2019s just hard to call Murderbot \u201cit\u201d because it\u2019s not your average robot or cyborg. Murderbot, having secretly hacked its governor module, has agency. Although it protects the group of humans who rented it, sometimes it chooses for itself how to do so. And in its spare time it downloads its favorite space operas and watches them (inside its head, of course.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I got started on The<\/em> Murderbot Diaries <\/em>thanks to what we call our family book club. We only meet about once a year depending on travel plans. The Murderbot Diaries<\/em> was chosen to be of interest to the teenage and 20-something grandkids.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A few months ago, Apple TV came out with a Murderbot series. It\u2019s pretty good and lots of fun. Of course, the books are better. If you want to see if Murderbot is male or female for you<\/em>, read at least one book before you see what Apple thinks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cats and Dogs and Their Pronouns<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

There was a cat in my novel, When in Vanuatu.<\/em> It was a male cat, but my publisher insisted I call it \u201cit\u201d <\/em>not \u201che\/him.\u201d<\/em> She said it\u2019s policy to refer to all animals as \u201cit.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Oookay. But we all know where kittens come from.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Murderbot. Not exactly a lovable name. But that\u2019s what Murderbot chose to call itself. Go figure. Did you notice the pronoun I used? Itself. It sounds kind of clumsy to me, but Martha Wells, the author of The Murderbot Diaries, had no such problem. The seven books in the series are all written as diaries, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"off","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2371,743,2658],"tags":[2662,2659,2660,2661,2663],"class_list":["post-11619","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-beaches","category-books","category-science-fiction","tag-martha-wells","tag-murderbot","tag-pronouns","tag-science-fiction","tag-the-murderbot-diaries"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3Kn1e-31p","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":10084,"url":"https:\/\/nickichenwrites.com\/wordpress\/books\/novels-short-stories\/","url_meta":{"origin":11619,"position":0},"title":"Novels & Short Stories","author":"Nicki Chen","date":"January 29, 2023","format":false,"excerpt":"photo by Manuel Cacciatori from Branzak, Italia When I sit down with a cup of coffee and a book, normally the book is a novel. 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