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Ep 2.5-Shorts: Drabbles, novelettes, flash fics, anecdotes
14 Plays1 month ago
So, as it turns out, there are there are also some short stories in the Murderbot Universe! We get to dig into the minds of some side characters, learn more about the origins of constructs, and talk about queerplatonic relationships, coming out, and non-human personhood!
If our audio quality is a wee bit sharper on this one, it's because we had some issues with our primary recordings and were working from our backups, and Sam worked her wizardry as best she could. Bear with us.
Timestamps for potential/light Network Effect spoilers: 0:40:04-1:04:08
This can be listened to in any order with the Fugitive Telemetry episode that you will see right above this in your feed! Your fate is your own! Choose your own adventure! Although I recommend this one first.
Covers the following short stories/novelettes in the following timeline order, all of which are available for free online:
1. "Obsolescence", written for the anthology Take Us To A Better Place (2020)
2. "The Future of Work: Compulsory" written for Wired magazine (2018)
3. "Home: Habitat, Range, Niche, Territory" released in Reactor magazine (2021)
4. "Rapport: Friendship, Solidarity, Communion, Empathy" written for Reactor magazine (2025)
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Transcript
From Glasses to Contacts: A Journey of Frustration
00:00:00
Speaker
Completely unrelated BlackBerrys, have contacts for... kind of the first time ever. I tried them once in 2019, but my optometrist was not very helpful.
00:00:14
Speaker
And I didn't realize that I had been wearing them inside out for an entire week. And so I thought that they were just extremely painful. Turns out I was wrong and they just didn't do a good job teaching me.
00:00:25
Speaker
They also made me order like $400 of contacts up front. And then they refunded me when I came back and said, I hate these. But so I had a very brief bad experience with contacts couple of years ago, but my glasses just constantly get scratched and dirty and awful and I'm wiping them off, but then doing a bad job wiping them and then they get scratched and it's just no good. And so I decided that for the first time in 20 years, i would try contacts.
00:00:54
Speaker
And it's very weird. It's very weird to look at my own face because I'm used to having rather large glasses there. So my eyes feel very small. And I was telling Miles this morning, I was saying, you I feel like my face always looks small when I take my glasses off. I look weird.
00:01:11
Speaker
And then when she was putting the contacts in my eyes, my doctor was saying, you know, you have really small eyes. It's like, thanks. Thanks for that, doc. But The girl who was helping me, because they make you practice putting them in and taking them out of the office.
00:01:27
Speaker
The girl who was helping me after that told me I did a great job and I picked it up very quickly. So I got a good grade in contacts. Well, hopefully with these new vision augments that you have, ah you won't run into major problems.
00:01:43
Speaker
Yeah, hopefully i won't run into cars. That
Humor in Protests and Legal Oddities
00:01:46
Speaker
was the main thing. I should have had Miles come with me so they could drive me home because then I just left with the contacts in. And so I just walked around stores until I felt ready to drive.
00:01:58
Speaker
Well, cars are important, but also the piecework killer. e True.
00:02:24
Speaker
too that's the lowest energy
00:02:42
Speaker
it sound even sadder found even sadder like I need to you're like a little cat who I need to give soup or something sounds pitiful it's soup for my family that's I'm missing a reference soup for my family It's a, one of the president's speeches ages ago about during the, the BLM protests in 2020, when he was saying something about how like protesters were throwing soup cans at cops because, you know, instead of bricks, then they'd get caught with soup and they'd be like, Oh no, this is soup, soup for my family.
00:03:28
Speaker
oh
00:03:31
Speaker
which is just ridiculous which have you heard about the dude um who got arrested for throwing eggs at king charles yes and then now he has to he has to clarify if he ever gets arrested that they're eggs for his personal use and he's on his way home you gotta yeah and he has he has to have the receipt from the shop he just went to otherwise he can't carry eggs in public our bravest warrior hello everyone Welcome back to another episode of The Fandom Apprentice.
Welcome to The Fandom Apprentice: Murderbot Diaries Season
00:04:03
Speaker
My name is Rin. I'm one of your hosts. I am a lifelong nerd who has spent much of my life reading, watching, playing with various sci-fi fantasy stories.
00:04:16
Speaker
And i I spend a lot of my time, when I can, foisting those tales onto my friends so I have somebody to yell about them with.
00:04:28
Speaker
Hello, I'm Sam. I'm the other one. I'm the one who has things foisted on me. And I'm just along for the ride. And today, instead of one long ride, we have several short rides.
00:04:40
Speaker
Because we are doing sort of lightning round episode about four different stories. Yeah, so welcome to yet another episode of season two.
00:04:52
Speaker
If you've been following us for a little while, you know that this season we are discussing the Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells. We spent our first season, which was much longer, discussing Lord of the Rings in excruciating detail.
00:05:09
Speaker
And now we are going at a pretty, pretty granular level, but not quite as granular for these books. This episode, we are covering the extra little short stories that Martha Wells has written to supplement the general novella and novel series.
Analyzing 'Obsolescence': Themes of Personhood
00:05:29
Speaker
There's four different stories that take place in different spots in the timeline. All of them in the timeline technically take place before Fugitive Telemetry. And so my plan is to sort of talk about them as if we haven't read Fugitive Telemetry.
00:05:44
Speaker
But that said, the last one of these stories does contain some characters that we meet and learn a lot more about in Network Effect. And so if you...
00:05:56
Speaker
haven't read Network Effect or reading along with the podcast, we'll include timestamps for where that section is, and you can skip it and come back after we've done our Network Effect episodes. ah Same goes with our Fugitive Telemetry episode, although we may be releasing this at the same time as our Fugitive Telemetry episode. TBD.
00:06:15
Speaker
It depends on how fast I can edit. The first story takes place long, long before and may or may not actually be even in the same world.
00:06:27
Speaker
And the second story is a direct prequel to All Systems Red or a near direct prequel to All Systems Red. So I guess, do we want to just start off with obsolescence?
00:06:43
Speaker
Hell yeah, let's do it. So obsol obsolescence is the first ah short story that we're discussing. Short story, novelette, I forgot to look up the definitions of what's what. I've heard some people say novelette, some people have said a short story for these.
00:06:58
Speaker
It doesn't particularly matter. They are short little drabbles, slam fic, whatever you want to call it. Mm-hmm. Obsolescence is, you know, a dozen pages maybe. um And it is in the anthology Take Us to a Better Place.
00:07:17
Speaker
All four of these stories and the full anthology Take Us to a Better Place are available for free online. We will link in the show notes to all of these. They're all quick reads.
00:07:28
Speaker
So for summaries for these, because they are so very, very short, I just have kind of a one or two sentence vibe for each one. Because i don't think there's any point in going over the plot in granular detail.
00:07:41
Speaker
But obsolescence is... the longest of these stories. Our POV character is someone called Jixie, who is responsible for some kids who call her to check on someone named Greggy, who appears to have been exploded.
00:08:02
Speaker
They investigate that he has in fact been murdered, and we get a lot of very distant past history context about augmented humans and constructed intelligence, constructed beings in the Murderbot universe.
00:08:17
Speaker
It is, so this is a murder mystery, which Martha Wells has a couple of, i feel like, comfort zones. comfort zones she likes She likes her murder mystery. She likes her pseudo horror bits. we see like Because Fugitive Telemetry is a murder mystery.
00:08:35
Speaker
All Systems Red and Rogue Protocol have that sort of horror element to them. This kind of does at times. he Yeah. So whether or not this this story, like, I suppose you could technically read this story as taking place outside of the Murderbot universe. Yeah.
00:08:54
Speaker
So it never directly references any of anything that happens in Murderbot, partly because it takes place so far beforehand. But in Is It Exit Strategy, I think, Murderbot mentions seeing a documentary about augmented rovers.
00:09:14
Speaker
And this story sort of gives a history of these augmented rovers.
'Compulsory': Free Will vs. Corporate Exploitation
00:09:19
Speaker
You had told me before that that's what this story was about. And then I forgot.
00:09:24
Speaker
So my notes are just kind of summarizing the plot because it's so strange and different and kind of keep up with it. And then it just switches to all caps. Oh, no, he's one of the rovers from the shows. He's a rover from my shows.
00:09:39
Speaker
He's Blorbo from my shows. Blorbo got exploded. Yeah, so there's all of these stories have, I guess, just to focus on Obsolescence for now. This has a number of characters. We get a bunch of names. We get Jixie, who's the POV character, like Sam said, is some sort of like essentially space preschool teacher. Mm-hmm.
00:10:01
Speaker
kindre It's hard to tell how old these kids are. Slash Station Commander seems to be in charge, but is also the youngest adult. We have Greggie, who's the ex-rover and teaching assistant.
00:10:15
Speaker
Dubar is some sort of mechanic, has a prosthetic arm. Shenjin is a medic with heart augments. Tia Joy is the education admin.
00:10:26
Speaker
with kidney augments. Sully has knee augments. There's another adult named Aarti. artie And then there are at least half a dozen kids, only two of which are named. There's Lily and Arnie.
00:10:39
Speaker
And then there's the killer, who doesn't have a proper name. And so we can kind of start anywhere with analysis on this one. But some of the terminology just immediately gave me a sense of unease from this story. There's a reference to someone being sent to a place called Mommyland. And that's never good, especially not in a sci-fi story. i don't want to go to Mommyland. That does not sound good.
00:11:06
Speaker
And we eventually get it revealed that this story is taking place on kid land, which is basically where all the kids are to learn and be raised communally.
00:11:22
Speaker
And the adults working there are all older or have various disabilities and need lighter works. They're not doing heavy manual labor. They're just... chilling out taking care of the kids which as somebody who takes care of kids full-time you know there is definitely people of any ability level can do it successfully but i don't like it being written off as the place that's not all the easy jobs because it's not and like rin mentioned basically all of the adults in kid land except for maybe jixie have
00:11:55
Speaker
some sort of augment. And it's unclear to me because all we know about the status of augments in this part of the timeline is that they used to be prohibitively expensive, maybe are more accessible now.
00:12:10
Speaker
But is this society, is the mother world of mommy land just shunting all of their disabled people off to kid land? Is this some kind of weird social segregation.
00:12:23
Speaker
I don't fully understand why all of these people are here. I was seeing a couple of, had a couple of response thoughts, I guess, to that.
00:12:34
Speaker
Is one, mommy land and kid land to me read as slang. Oh, yeah, definitely. i don't think that they're actually formally called those things. No, that is absolutely what these preschool teachers refer to this space as.
00:12:52
Speaker
It also, i believe this seems to me like it's ah essentially a boarding school. Mm-hmm. where like because they live in a station environment, which clearly doesn't have like really intense artificial gravity, there's no like FTL information transfer. there is When they talk about disaster protocol, the Hull Integrity Life Support Communication Order,
00:13:21
Speaker
you know, would very put your own mask on before helping others type thing. um Ensure that you're going to be able to stay alive to send the communication before you send the communication. This sort of says to me, like, whatever jobs the parents are
Mensa and SecUnit: Trauma and Understanding
00:13:36
Speaker
doing are either, like, too focused or too long or there's not enough room on the station to also have these kids there all the time.
00:13:48
Speaker
Mm-hmm. And or it was easier to repurpose. And or because it it mentions to like, there's like parts of the station that are older. It seems like maybe this is total speculation. There's not really hints about this in the text.
00:14:02
Speaker
Maybe. when they built newer parts of the station where adults are working, they didn't build it for families. Like, it was built for, like, people to come and work.
00:14:15
Speaker
And families were, like, back on Mars or Luna or Earth. But now that families are here, this older section of the station has been repurposed for kids isn while the while the adults are still doing their work.
00:14:33
Speaker
elsewhere and i don't know it is it is still perhaps uncomfy with the idea that like yes you don't have yeah like yes you are disabled therefore you get shunted off to this space it also was sort of mentioned that like all of them chose to be there if they felt like they needed a lighter assignment Yeah.
00:14:56
Speaker
You know, and so and it also seems like caring for the children is only like one piece of the focus of this part of the station. And Jixie is both in charge of the children and also everything else happening in this part of the station.
00:15:12
Speaker
That makes sense. People have to wear a lot of hats because it's, you know, such a small contained area. Everyone has to be able to do a bunch jobs. Yeah, so that's that's that's how I was reading all of this.
00:15:26
Speaker
Yeah. But that um may or may not be true. i had to, when I was first reading this, had to read that first section like six times to understand what the fuck was happening with Greggy.
00:15:40
Speaker
Yeah. Greggy is... Difficult to visualize. Yeah. Because he's got like spidery legs and like partly metal torso.
00:15:55
Speaker
It becomes clear. Greggie was an an augmented rover. Which it's, and it sounds as if people who went into the rover program were given augments so they could survive in the pre-terraforming space on Mars and Luna during the and initial settlement and expeditions.
00:16:20
Speaker
And it sounds like, too, this only happened, though, for people who had, like, catastrophic injuries, right? Yeah. It was a, hey, basically, we can fix you, but we also need you to then go and use these medical augments to help establish our colonies on Mars and Luna.
00:16:43
Speaker
Yeah, and we don't know exactly what Greggie's circumstances were before he became a rover, but it's very clear that the choice was become a rover or die. So it's not really that much of choice.
00:16:56
Speaker
And it's not a, they weren't going to kill you, but it was a, hey, this is this is an option that we can, this is a medical intervention we can give you for your own survival.
00:17:07
Speaker
And we also... see some of the history of these rovers because they start out as this amazing technological innovation. These huge heroes who have given up their arms and legs and internal organs to go help the cause of humanity.
00:17:22
Speaker
And then they slowly become obsolete. We can reflect again on the title, which is one of those short stories where you go back and read the title at the end and then it punches you in the gut and then they just become sort of this strange curiosity there's not a lot of rovers left now he is just in basically his retirement or was in his retirement as a teacher on the station before getting violently exploded murdered he bye
00:17:53
Speaker
somebody called the Peacework Killer. The original Rogue Sec Unit. Yeah, so turns out it wasn't just the government who made rovers. Mm-hmm.
00:18:07
Speaker
It was also corporations and they did it in a kind of sneaky, underhanded, definitely illegal way. yeah hmm. When corporations were doing their own sort of exploration and they they explicitly refer to it as space exploitation.
00:18:23
Speaker
hmm. At one point. And Peacework, I guess to call them, has strong opinions about rovers and and the personhood of rovers.
00:18:37
Speaker
When they make you a rover, they murder the person. The Luna government didn't murder me. Vision Space Dynamics murdered me. They said the contract would be for 20 years. Do you know how long ago that was? Yeah.
00:18:49
Speaker
Vision Space Dynamics went bankrupt and their assets went to IO Explorations. And then they were bought by Ciderall. And then they went bankrupt. And then they sent the old equipment to recycling and told me to leave.
00:19:02
Speaker
It has been 76 years. Fucking damn. And now the only way that Peacework can survive is by killing other augmented beings, other rovers, and taking their parts. So they've taken...
00:19:18
Speaker
some of Greggie's interfaces. Yeah, because it sounds like like the the government rovers basically have access to the VA. a They have perpetual health care forevermore.
00:19:31
Speaker
The corporate rovers, of course, have jack-fucking-shit. And we have so many parallels in this story with the current situation with SAC Unit, because despite its ah horrible circumstances and what ultimately happens...
00:19:48
Speaker
At the end, PeaceWork wants to live. They want to survive. And they're going whatever it takes. And then we have this confrontation with this very sheltered kind of naive society that is horrified with PeaceWork's existence and wanting to help and wanting to save them.
00:20:08
Speaker
and not being able to comprehend what they've been through contrasting piecework and greggy thinking about sec unit and mickey or sec unit and art there's just so much juicy stuff to contextualize our current situations these kinds of dynamics have been playing out forever in this world he any other thoughts on obsolescence Just the last one that this story now tells us that at this point in the timeline, the secret about corporate rovers is officially out. I'm sure that other people knew at other times, but I think that it's implied that there's going to be, if not a search for more of these corporate rovers, an awareness of them, some kind of attempt to help them.
00:20:53
Speaker
Well, and i I guess, too, it's it's a, we we see the origins of constructs being treated as objects. Because, you know we know, we know corporations treat their their employees as objects.
00:21:10
Speaker
Mm-hmm. But if even the corporate rovers have this idea that they're not human, and they're the only ones left alive after all of the other government rovers are gone, then people start to see the corporate rovers as not fully human.
00:21:28
Speaker
And then we can see the corporations getting more power and bringing these corporate rovers into the world of leaked. where they're not so where they're very much treated as tools.
00:21:42
Speaker
And this is a theme across so much of sci-fi and also cyborg theory is very much a thing in disability scholarship and interrogating, you know, where in our body is our humanity located?
00:21:56
Speaker
How do people perceive us? How do we perceive ourselves when we make permanent technological changes to our bodies for various reasons? So we can't provide concise answers to that on a podcast, but it's definitely part of a much larger and very interesting conversation.
Philosophical Questions on Constructs' Rights
00:22:14
Speaker
And with that, I think we can move on to compulsory. The Future of Work Compulsory. What a bleak fucking title. Yeah. Particularly when you get that beginning bit.
00:22:25
Speaker
the Like, the future of work compulsory. Mm-hmm. So this one it takes place sort of directly before or at some point before All Systems Red, but after Murderbot has hacked its governor module.
00:22:42
Speaker
Mm-hmm. And it is, you know, guarding ah mining installation and one of the humans that it's watching falls down a some sort of mining shaft thing, an extractor or something.
00:23:02
Speaker
And Murderbot decides to save the human because otherwise the uh, safety responder 28 would have gotten there just in time to retrieve the smoldering lump formerly known as Sakai, which one thing that I noticed, even here, Murderbot knows the workers' names.
00:23:27
Speaker
Oh my god, that did not even occur to me while I was reading it. When Murderbot doesn't want to use names, it doesn't. It calls things hostile, target, client,
00:23:39
Speaker
It is using the workers' names. Oh my god. Tech unit.
00:23:46
Speaker
Yeah, I didn't have a ton to say on this one. It is very, very short. I think that it's a good, quick, bite-sized thing to get somebody hooked if you're trying to reel in a new Murderbot reader and ah novella is still too long for them. so you have this it's a couple of paragraphs just read it it's very charming it gets you on board right away but in terms of plot and larger context I don't feel like it really gives us anything that the books don't give us yeah just cor the corporations are fucked and it's extremely bleak murder bots still using its free will to save humans
00:24:24
Speaker
Apparently getting free will after having 93% of your behavior controlled for your entire existence will do weird things to your impulse control. Sakai and the others would be hit with fines for almost clogging the collectors with her burning body.
00:24:36
Speaker
But it was better than being dead. I guess. Of course they'll be fined. it it's It's exceedingly bleak. But then we're going to have a lot to say about the next two. So I guess moving on to... Yes!
00:24:50
Speaker
Home, habitat, range, niche, territory. um This was written for Reactor Magazine, or was published in Reactor Magazine in April of 2021.
00:25:03
Speaker
It takes place after right after exit strategy and before fugitive telemetry. And apparently it was sent to people who pre-ordered network effect initially. And it's a Mensa point of view.
00:25:15
Speaker
Yes, it is. And in this one, we learn so much. This is a juicy one. But just for the quick two-sentence overview, we are seeing the effects of her trauma from exit strategy, from her point of view.
00:25:32
Speaker
And this is framed in her having conversations about advocating for SecUnit and its place in preservation society, basically. Mm-hmm.
00:25:43
Speaker
I would love to read a little quote from the beginning of this story where she's who is it that she's talking to? i didn't even write down their name. ah Ephraim, who's another another planetary admin person on the council.
00:25:58
Speaker
Yeah, so Ephraim is warning her about this dangerous killing machine that she's brought onto the station. The killing machine in question had just sent her yet another message packet. They're piling up in her feed, and if she would stop encouraging SecUnit by opening them, it would probably stop.
00:26:13
Speaker
They're all formal requisition forms for preservation station security, requests for increasingly improbable armaments. She responds to the latest with, I don't even know what that is. So during this meeting, she's just getting nonstop stream of consciousness texts from Sec Unit asking for more and more ridiculous weapons.
00:26:34
Speaker
Which you know that Sec Unit se unit is doing this because it one, that's its sense of humor. And two, it knows that Mensa's in a difficult meeting.
00:26:45
Speaker
he And it knows that she's probably spiraling. Yeah. Very early, we get a full paragraph description in describing every detail of the room she's in, and then it makes her all uncomfortable. And then we get separated, single line.
00:27:00
Speaker
It's the exact same size as the room she was held prisoner in on Tran Rol in Haifa. Oh, that's the problem here. That's the real issue. And if it weren't for these messages from Sec Unit, she would be literally bolting running out of this room. This is the only thing that is helping her keep her head on.
00:27:20
Speaker
basically. And in a beautiful parallel that is not related to the plot, but just related to real life. Rin read this out loud to me while I was having a horrible day. i had been without power for almost 24 hours.
00:27:33
Speaker
And we had a really bad storm here. I was fucking losing it. It was awful. But hearing this story also helped me feel better and keep my head on. So this one, it's hard to pick a favorite, but it has a special place in my heart among the short stories.
00:27:48
Speaker
i i like I practically want to read every single quote. I i can't, because it's you know it's so short, you should just go read it. there's There's the whole section where, "'You've brought a corporate?' He hesitates. She wonders if he if he was going to say, "'Killing Machine.' "'A product of corporate surveillance capitalism and authoritarian enforcement to the seat of our government.
00:28:12
Speaker
I agree your reasons were good, but this is a situation that has to be addressed.' Then there's the paragraph that Sam read. and The situation is a person who saved my life multiple times and the lives of the rest of my team.
00:28:24
Speaker
SecUnit is also a person who is not supposed to have access to the requisition forms or to station security systems at all. She knows SecUnit is not so much taunting her with its abilities as refusing but to pretend to be anything other than it is.
00:28:37
Speaker
Which is such a gender moment. Yeah. It's such a, you know, I refuse to temper myself to make the cithets comfortable. Mm-hmm. yeah They can fucking deal with the fact that, you know, my appearance doesn't conform to what they expect.
00:28:56
Speaker
Hell yeah. The other piece that I noticed about this, the the way the writing is is given is very, very mid-panic attack.
00:29:08
Speaker
stream of consciousness yes this the language is choppy in a way that's mimicking mensa's thoughts it sort of floats from place to place with no transitions and you know as if she's not really fully present all of the time this this it reads like a panic attack feels i wonder what it's like to read this story and not have an anxiety disorder Because didn't feel too jarred by it. I was thinking, okay, yeah, this makes sense. This is well written. This obviously reflects our state of mind in a way that I understand.
00:29:46
Speaker
But if you're someone for whom that is not a problem, i wonder if it's almost more impactful because that way of thinking is less familiar. i would be fascinated. if there's If there's anyone out there who's not anxious all the time, let us know.
00:30:06
Speaker
If we have any neurotypical listeners. Unlikely, but maybe. First of all, good for you. i honestly, amazing. Wish that were me.
00:30:17
Speaker
yeah Maybe. oh and But bringing it back to Mensa specifically and her trauma and the things that she's dealing with, she's trying to use this debate about SecUnit and its presence on the station as a distraction from dealing with her own actual feelings.
00:30:38
Speaker
But then She also can't avoid comparing herself to it and thinking about how paranoid SecUnit is and how that kind of makes sense because it's had to do that to survive.
00:30:50
Speaker
Then there's a section where she's thinking, it's about being treated as a thing, isn't it? Whether that thing is a hostage of conditional value or a very expensively designed and equipped enslaved machine slash organic intelligence, you are a thing and there is no safety.
00:31:06
Speaker
And she tells herself, you're being very foolish, because you were a hostage for a period of days, and it was a minor inconvenience compared to what Murderbot, no, SecUnit, she's never been given permission to use that private name, what SecUnit went through.
00:31:19
Speaker
So she's doing the trauma thing of thinking, oh, maybe I have something in common with this person. Maybe I can relate to their experience. But what I've been through is nothing like what they went through.
00:31:30
Speaker
And I should punish myself for feeling bad about it and then feel bad about feeling bad. And then it spirals and spirals and spirals forever. And something that you'd said to me right after we read this together was that this story shows how deeply Mensa gets sec unit.
00:31:47
Speaker
And that's fully on display here. They're able to relate on a level that she can't relate because no one else in her life in her inner circle really has any real experience with the corporation rim. They're just kind of cartoon villains. They're an idea.
00:32:05
Speaker
and So in addition to the fact that just nobody else in her family was there when this event happened, they have no frame of reference for how serious the danger is.
00:32:17
Speaker
And so Secuna is kind of one of the only people that she can trust and know that they fully understand the lengths that the corporation is willing to go to.
00:32:28
Speaker
That was one piece that I was sort of, that I was referring to, but also just the way that Mensa understands how Sec Unit wants to interact.
00:32:39
Speaker
There's a couple of points. She looks up, keeping her eyes on its left shoulder, leaving it the option of meeting her gaze or not. he she She just gets how to interact with it.
00:32:51
Speaker
It offers to let her hug it after... There's a scene where she gets spooked by a random journalist that sends her into another panic spiral and SecUnit is there immediately responding to it, sending station security to go chase them off.
00:33:05
Speaker
And it says, you can hug me if you need to. No, no, that's all right. I know you don't care for it. She wipes her face. There are tears in her eyes because she's an idiot. But, you know, even in that moment where she knows that SecUnit is trying to be nice, she's saying, I know that you don't actually want me to hug you. It's okay.
00:33:23
Speaker
Whereas, but Murderbot's like, no, I think, like, you need this. It offered because it knows that Mensa's not okay. Yeah, Sekyuna and also the rest of Prezox, who are just there kind of chilling, and we get some very cute little moments of them just hanging out at home, doing work, not wearing shoes. They're all bullying Mensa, telling her that she needs to go to therapy.
00:33:50
Speaker
And... We also get the origin story of SecUnit's drones because towards the end she's asking it, you know, from all those ridiculous requests you sent me, is there anything that you actually want? And it says, i would like the drones, please.
00:34:04
Speaker
And the drones are kind of a bribe to not pressure her into getting the retrieved client protocol. Yeah, or yeah trauma trauma therapy in general.
00:34:15
Speaker
And yet also I feel like that's, it's a bribe while also again I think a continuing ah continuation of Sec Unit trying to take care of Mensa as best it can.
00:34:28
Speaker
So it's it's doing the, like, you are a leader and and somebody who takes care of other people and you don't know who you are if you're not doing that. Mm-hmm.
00:34:39
Speaker
So I'm going to allow you to do something for me. Yeah. Because that's going to keep you grounded in yourself for now. While I can keep working on you to actually go and talk with somebody who can actually do something about this.
00:34:53
Speaker
Yeah. There was one other line that really got in here, which was Bardwaj and Mensah talking about the rights of bots and constructs.
00:35:05
Speaker
and trying to argue for sec units to have full rights in Prezox. Bardwater's expression turns serious. We can't ignore the fact that sec units are capable of being very dangerous.
00:35:18
Speaker
Glossing over that is just going to make our argument look ridiculous. Her mouth twists. They're every bit as dangerous as humans. Mm-hmm. There is a reason why, when I run D&D campaigns, most of my villains tend to be humanoid or mortal in some respect.
00:35:36
Speaker
Because human greed will always... cause the most damage the human capacity for evil is very very deep and very concerning and i i feel like humans always have the capability to be worse monsters than something like a like a bay here yeah we've got free will Yeah, I won't always do that. you know i'll ill throw a
00:36:09
Speaker
I'll throw a vampire in there. But people are always capable of doing the greatest harm to others. And particularly in this too, Mensa points out, like, Sec Unit can you know shoot things with the energy weapons in its arms, whereas people have to manipulate or...
00:36:32
Speaker
exploit others into doing the damage for them which is in itself a form of damage a form of harm and so and also thereby allowing people to think of themselves as not actually being dangerous because if they can outsource the harm to something else then well that's not our fault i think this is an idea that we've talked about on the show before that you know everyone is capable of causing harm but especially I think because of the first short story I'm just thinking about work and one of the restorative justice principles that I very intentionally teach all of my kids is that there are no good people and there are no bad people there's no good guys and bad guys there are good choices and there are hurtful choices you can be mean on purpose you can hurt people on purpose and
00:37:27
Speaker
Some people make unfair rules on purpose. And that is a choice that anyone is capable of making. And we're also capable of making good choices and we're capable of helping people.
00:37:39
Speaker
But I try to be very specific instead of saying like, good guys, bad guys, good things, bad things. Like, are you hurting someone? Are you helping someone? We are all capable of doing all of these things.
00:37:51
Speaker
And sometimes situations can spiral into a point where they become institutions where they become structures and then that requires other ways of facing them. But I think that that's a very difficult and very important thing to confront, especially for people who consider themselves leftists, who consider themselves progressive, to remember that you are not immune to fucking up royally.
Art and SecUnit: Familial Dynamics and Queer Narratives
00:38:16
Speaker
Yeah, you know, you're not immune to propaganda. You're not immune to harming others. It takes conscious care to make sure that we continue to learn and grow and help others with all of our decisions.
00:38:37
Speaker
And if being a good person becomes your identity, if being rational, if feeling like you fully... embody all of your principles. If that becomes an identity, then it's so much harder to confront when you do make mistakes, when you do make bad choices, because then it feels like your entire sense of self is threatened, as opposed to you made a choice that either was intentionally hurtful or just didn't work out.
00:39:05
Speaker
But... Yeah, being able to outsource that harm. Saying, well, I didn't do that. I wasn't responsible for shooting those people. SecUnit did. i didn't make SecUnits. I just work at the company. I agree that the existence of SecUnits is abhorrent. but I just work in the accounting department for the company. I couldn't possibly do anything. You know, systems, systems of oppression.
00:39:28
Speaker
I think, you know, sec units are abhorrent, but we shouldn't let them be here. No. We shouldn't let them, you know, flee that abhorrent existence.
00:39:38
Speaker
I don't want them here. Yeah. That's the NIMBY equivalent of not on my station.
00:39:45
Speaker
Yep. We shouldn't allow the refugees here who have experienced terrible violence. Noms, not on my station. But you know who does want sec unit? You know who wants sec unit with them at all times?
00:40:01
Speaker
Let's talk about the last story. Holy shit. Oh my God. Yes. So this one, so guess this is the point where we are going to talk about characters that will be introduced and expanded on in Network Effect and System Collapse, which are the two novels in the series, which we have not yet recorded episodes.
00:40:26
Speaker
This, this one is brand fucking new. Yeah, this came out a couple days ago, which is really convenient for us. July 10th, 2025.
00:40:38
Speaker
ah One of the people in our D&D group sent this in our group chat and was like, hey, have you read this yet? And we went, no, but this is incredible timing. but Because we were planning on recording this episode.
00:40:51
Speaker
So we... This technically, technically, Sec Unit is not mentioned in here. So if we're if we're, you know, if you would like to meet these characters in Network Effect and then come back and listen to this, by all means. If you would like to meet these characters and think, huh, who are they?
00:41:13
Speaker
And then learn more later, come along. This is quite fun. Because we meet some... I'm going to call it a character because it is. We meet a starship named Perihelion.
00:41:26
Speaker
And it becomes really fucking clear really fucking quickly. Perihelion is art. Yes, it is. Like there's there's, you know, it talks.
00:41:38
Speaker
And within, you know, its first two lines, it's like, oh, that's art. Yeah. Like, even if you don't know who Perry is, like, it's it's gotta be art. Perihelion's being mean to some new scientist lady.
00:41:51
Speaker
The first thing that Iris always told new mission team members was, don't let it intimidate you, because it will try. She honestly didn't know whether it helped or if it just scared them and encouraged Perry to live up to its reputation.
00:42:03
Speaker
She used her personal channel, the one nobody else could hear, and said, Perry, stop it. You'll upset dad and dad. Because... Seth and Martin, two more scientists who we meet, are both big kids.
00:42:16
Speaker
Sorry, everyone. I am stabbling because I was fucking rock to my core that Art considers Seth and Martin to be its parents. We knew... From network effect, spoilers, that Art and Iris are effectively siblings.
00:42:30
Speaker
But that they're, it's dads. Perihelion has dads. I'm losing my mind. Well, and it literally later on, Perihelion is basically being more of an asshole than it usually is. Mm-hmm.
00:42:47
Speaker
And Iris, who is our POV character for this, is like, hey, dude, what the fuck? Yeah, are you being You're being a dick. and And they're doing some sort of crime, spy shit, something mission.
00:43:05
Speaker
um We don't actually ever learn the exact details They're sneaking onto a corporate station to a pre-corporation rim section of the station to do something.
00:43:19
Speaker
And it's, you know, Perry's dropping little, ah it's being snarky, it's being kind of an asshole, and it's dropping like, hey, I can do this thing now, which I was not initially able to do.
00:43:35
Speaker
Much like SecUnit requesting increasingly improbable armaments, Perry also is suggesting increasingly improbable armaments. It has somehow learned corporate military secrets.
00:43:49
Speaker
It has learned how to hack into station security. he It has a lot of skills that its family did not know was capable of. Well, and and so towards the end, when when Iris is like, hey, dude, what the fuck?
00:44:04
Speaker
Quite literally, they refer to our dads. but like That is a line. And there is a there is quite literally a line.
00:44:18
Speaker
She was just used to thinking of it as her precocious sibling. They're siblings. Her sibling is a starship, but it's it's still her sibling.
00:44:29
Speaker
want to sing the Brian David Gilbert sibling song. That's them. This is my brother. This is my starship. We are siblings and we care for each other.
00:44:40
Speaker
Let's see. um There's, again, just a lot of fucking characters that get introduced randomly. We have Iris as our POV character. We have Seth and Martin, who are Iris's dads. Although Martin is...
00:44:52
Speaker
the only one that's actually identified as dad in this short story. Seth is not identified in there, so thank you for remembering that. We also have Karime in medical, um Katie, Mateo, and Turi, who are in engineering, Dr. Ladson, Dr. Sunara, Dr. Marik, and Oster, who are all part of the mission team.
00:45:15
Speaker
And there's another fucking M name. There's a Dr. Mahari, who's the fake local contact. There are way too many M names. Mm-hmm. It's Martin Matteo Morique Mejari. I was like, this can we can we find another letter, please?
00:45:28
Speaker
and Maybe it's a subconscious bias from Martha, who just likes M names. It's gotta be. I definitely, when I'm naming characters in writing, like, I have used too many ah similar phonemes.
00:45:40
Speaker
i need to I need to change it up. So... There is lot going on in this story, but there's one part that I am just dying to talk about. Please.
00:45:52
Speaker
So like we said, Harry is being weird. It's being snarky. Its performance is clearly being affected in some way by some recent experience that it had without its crew.
00:46:04
Speaker
And Iris confronts it and basically says, hey, fuck is going on you're being weird and perry basically comes out as robot gay that's the best way can describe it it tells iris that it met someone and it can't tell her anything about them because it would be breaking confidence and it just can't do that.
00:46:29
Speaker
But it's clear that this is very serious. so then we have Iris talking. Perry, I'm sorry. She gave it a few seconds to get over its irritation. Is there anything you can tell me about them without breaking your word?
00:46:41
Speaker
The confidence I don't wish to violate is my own. Oh, oh, Perry. Iris found a seat on a rock. So you really like this person? I had never encountered another machine intelligence that I could experience this kind of rapport with before.
00:46:56
Speaker
That's wonderful, and it really was. She didn't want Perry to be lonely, and it refused to try to get along with the other machine intelligences in their department. Perry added, It has given me a better understanding of trauma.
00:47:07
Speaker
Yes, she admitted, and this is a quote from a little bit later, Yes, she admitted, i think you should tell our dads, just as a precaution. And really, if you're feeling anything about this, they can probably give better advice than I can.
00:47:20
Speaker
And if I don't, they will continue to annoy me about my operational state. So... ah holy shit, Martha, who taught Martha our culture? This is exactly, this is beat for beat what it's like, at least in my experience, to come out to a really supportive sibling.
00:47:39
Speaker
This is a queer coming out conversation and I am 1000% fucking serious. this is No, it is. This Iris realizing, oh, wait, we're actually not bantering. This is like something's really happened. Oh, you met someone?
00:47:53
Speaker
Oh, tell me about them. Oh, you really care about them? You've never been able to connect to anyone else like this before? Yeah, you should probably tell our parents. They're going to be supportive. But i I can't give you relationship advice. I'm Iris. I'm 16 or whatever. We should tell our dads. They're adults. They can help you.
00:48:10
Speaker
Holy shit, Martha. Who told you? I think Iris is a little bit older than that, but I... She's teen. don't know if she's like 19. She's, I mean, she's old enough to be trusted to go into definitely dangerous situation where there are guns involved.
Machine Relationships: Iris and Art's Sibling Bond
00:48:27
Speaker
This is my problem with getting my first perception of Iris from Murderbot, who canonically cannot guess human ages. So she could be seven or she could be 25.
00:48:39
Speaker
I don't fucking know. Yeah, it's there is a piece of she she mentions basically being a human adult and mentions something that happened when she was 14.
00:48:52
Speaker
And that's the only context we get for her age. So I would say and and she doesn't seem to be a student any longer. But she doesn't get like the doctor something title. um She's part of Perry's crew.
00:49:09
Speaker
Maybe she's like in her early twenty s Yeah, I would say she's probably somewhere between 19 and 24.
00:49:17
Speaker
She's great. I love Iris. um There will be a lot of reasons to love Iris later on.
00:49:27
Speaker
i i do love the little piece where they're talking about, you know, you met somebody. Perry, please, it's not a corporate transport, is it? You know, you didn't bring home a Republican, did you?
00:49:40
Speaker
Yeah! And then, i couldn it's a rogue sec unit. Oh shit, Iris sat bolt upright. She realized the rest of the group was frozen, staring at her at open concern. She told them, it's fine, it's fine.
00:49:56
Speaker
Is it fine? Perry sounded skeptical. I'm just surprised, she admitted. A lot surprised. Okay. Wow, that is not what i expected.
00:50:10
Speaker
my i have My immediate thought was, you know, art is like this kind of snarky, but like like very smart, kind of bookish lab nerd.
00:50:25
Speaker
And then met the bad motorcycle riding, chain smoking ex-military greaser, who it turns out has a heart of gold and falls madly fucking head over heels with with it.
00:50:39
Speaker
And now it's... It's like art snuck out and got a secret belly button piercing because now it's asking for corporate intel drones. It's trying to just keep this under wraps that SecUnit has been kind of a bad influence.
00:50:54
Speaker
And I know we've talked, ah basically every time we have talked about art and SecUnit, we've talked about how we see a lot of queer platonic-ness in their relationship. And there's a little bit of that in, but oh my God, what is the book The Artisan?
00:51:10
Speaker
Artificial condition. Yes, there's a little bit of that in and artificial condition. There's a lot more in the novels that will really substantiate that and we'll really get into later. But especially with the benefit of that hindsight, seeing this, seeing the seriousness with which their relationship is treated by the story and that, yeah, this does have all the beats of a romantic coming out of talking about a new partner talking about somebody really important in your life but obviously the relationship that art and sec unit have is not quite like that but seeing it given that same level of gravity just makes my heart explode makes my heart so happy i love seeing art talking about how important sec unit it is to it even if we don't get second his name
00:51:59
Speaker
Well, and and and also, mean, for Sec Unit is very determined to remain aloof at all times and pretend it doesn't care, even though it definitely fucking cares.
00:52:15
Speaker
he To which, you know, when art converses with SecUnit, like, it sort of mirrors that a little. So we don't quite get as much of of their, like, their love for each other.
00:52:31
Speaker
Whereas here, you know, art's talking with its sister. And Iris can really bring that out of art. And she does in the novels as well.
00:52:42
Speaker
And she can be sort of the voice for the feelings that neither one of them is willing to express in a way that's extremely sweet. It's sort of implied and it's it's mentioned a little bit that time is funky for machine intelligences, but that Iris iris is Perry's big sister.
00:53:04
Speaker
You know, and and so Iris is like, dude, come on, talk to me. Yeah. Like, I want you to be okay.
00:53:15
Speaker
And it trusts her. And... The two of them have such a profound relationship that art isn't doing the, I am an omnipotent spaceship god. Fuck you. I'm so smart. I can crush you like a bug. It's going, Iris, I'm having emotions. I don't know how to deal with it.
00:53:36
Speaker
It's being vulnerable. It's not trying to be superior or threatening. It's just being a person existing in a relationship with another person. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. and And we call this a queer platonic relationship because like that's you know that is the best term that we have for it. Mm-hmm.
00:53:56
Speaker
what is a queer platonic relationship is a whole other broad question that we could probably do a whole several episodes on and that people have done research papers and shit on. And all this to say, I tend to think about queer platonic love as, as love that is not romantic or sexual in nature and yet is also very deep and very intense and Yeah, i would I would describe it as having a level of intensity, a level of commitment and trust that is not necessarily present in your general friendships. The relationship smorgasbord is a great tool that people can look up if they're curious about the things that we take for granted as being components of different types of relationships.
00:54:49
Speaker
But I think that... I love the relationship smorgasbord. Huge fan. um But I also think that queer platonic relationships, at least in real life between human beings, is probably different for machine intelligences. Yes.
00:55:01
Speaker
But between humans can take elements that people typically associate with romantic or sexual relationships and yes collaborate and share certain things in their lives that, again, people don't typically share or do with their friends. It's complicated. It's complicated. I don't fucking, I can't.
00:55:22
Speaker
i I would say I'm not a scholar, but actually i do have a degree in gender studies, but I didn't study this specifically. So was like, oh shit, I actually am an expert.
00:55:36
Speaker
ah the hand Hand waving. But I see, like science fiction, like pornography, you know, when you see it. And I see it and I know it and it makes me happy. And I think that it brings me a lot of joy and it brings me a lot of validation to,
00:55:53
Speaker
see that in art and sec units relationship. I agree. And if people, if readers don't feel that vibe, or if the idea of a queer platonic relationship is hard to wrap your head around, because I know for a lot of people it is thinking, well, how is that different than a best friend?
00:56:10
Speaker
Don't, don't worry about it. Don't sweat it. But it's something that I see and it's true for me. And this is my podcast. So No, i i I very much agree. Like, this this is a love story. This is a coming out tale. And and it is easiest for us, for the two of us specifically, to read ah read Queer Platonic onto this.
00:56:37
Speaker
Since both Perry and Murderbot are sort of explicitly Aero A's. jo a Which is a very explicit from Martha Wells, like, hey, please don't read romance or sex onto my characters.
00:56:57
Speaker
Yeah. And so our our result is, well, you're correct with that. And also this is a very intense, very deep relationship.
00:57:08
Speaker
And that exists without romance or sex in the real world. Yeah. I still, I know that part of being a talented writer is writing about things you have not personally experienced. But has Martha had somebody come out to her like this before? Like how I want to know what she drew from when she was writing this scene, because it just I was not expecting it to just get me as a person who has come out to people before, who has had members of my family and friends come out to me.
00:57:39
Speaker
It's it just spoke to a deep truth of my experience in a way that I did not expect from a short story about a spaceship. No, no. Yeah. i I was reading this at work.
00:57:55
Speaker
Oh, bestie. Like in front of the robot I was running. Like...
00:58:02
Speaker
Well, don't know how to unpack that right now. Flip it around, show it to the robot. saying How do you feel about this? Honestly. The other thing that when we talk about this as a coming out scene makes me think of is I think it's in, it's either the first or the second X-Men movie where, is it Iceman? It's one of the younger mutants that mutants comes out to his family.
00:58:33
Speaker
And because those movies had Sir Ian McKellen, famed queer activist and and actor in the movies, he helped them structure it as a coming out conversation.
00:58:47
Speaker
oh But in that scenario, there's, you know, the parents are like less supportive. It's a like, there's very much like, well, why can't you be normal response?
00:58:58
Speaker
No, I'm just thinking about the heart stopper coming out scene, which is also, oh, the heart stopper coming out. Incredible. I do have another thing that is not related to the coming out scene. That's just a little button to put on the end of this. That's the broader plot implications that is not just about their relationship, which is the only thing that I care about, but is also very important.
00:59:19
Speaker
Which is that Murderbot represents, much like with the whole preservation security issue, corporate weapon, just Murderbot's existence, knowing about art's very, very, very secret purpose, which i i don't think is totally explicitly discussed.
00:59:41
Speaker
in this story so I'll yeah save that for the novels. Art's job is very secret and we know this from artificial condition that it has weapons, it has capabilities that are beyond what a research transport should have.
00:59:53
Speaker
Even the little bit that Murderbot knows at this point in the timeline is a very serious threat to that mission. If its cover is blown then a lot of people are going to be really fucked and we know that we can trust SecUnit because we love SecUnit and it would never hurt us.
01:00:09
Speaker
But I think it's understandable that Art's family has some concerns about someone previously affiliated with the corporation RIM knowing the things that it knows.
01:00:24
Speaker
And that is something that they're going to have to reckon with. Yeah, it's very, you know, you brought the son of a mafia Don home? Yeah. Huh.
01:00:36
Speaker
Fascinating. Yeah. Experimenting with your sexuality? Healthy. But does it have to be with the Prince of England? It's literally that. Oh my god, it is. Yeah, it's, this is great. We love you. We support you, Perry. I am so glad that you found companionship in another machine intelligence.
01:00:55
Speaker
Did it have to be a rogue sec unit, though?
01:01:00
Speaker
I mean, it's it's very funny because, like, I feel like Iris is grappling with the, is this better than Perry falling for a corporate transport?
01:01:12
Speaker
The rogue sec unit isn't a corporate transport. Yeah. Anymore. i can kind of see the wheels turning in her head of thinking about how she will help pitch this to Seth and Martin and kind of soften the blow. Oh, absolutely. Good. Okay, we're going to frame this in a certain way.
01:01:31
Speaker
Okay, dad and dad are going to be eventually going to be cool about this. But. So anything else for these stories, Bestie?
01:01:42
Speaker
I'm really, really glad that we're going to get more art and iris soon. Yeah, this is going to tide me over until the novel's. Yeah, i I do feel like sometimes I did feel a little bit like I got more about their relationship from this one story than I got from like Network Effect as a whole.
01:02:03
Speaker
You know, and it's it's been a minute since I've read Network Effect. I'm going to reread it before we start recording, obviously.
Future Episodes and Listener Engagement
01:02:11
Speaker
But I feel like this short story is really where we understand perry and iris as siblings because we're inside their minds yeah whereas being inside murderbot's mind is a little more difficult because murderbot admittedly has trouble understanding relationships Mm-hmm.
01:02:34
Speaker
Whether that's relationships between humans, between humans and machine intelligences, between and but between its relationship with art. It doesn't fully understand that, but it knows it's really important and that it it trusts art in ways it doesn't trust anybody else.
01:02:49
Speaker
Mm-hmm. So... We will learn a lot more about Perry and Iris, but I feel like this this story helped me get them yeah in ways that i I still had been kind of struggling with.
01:03:05
Speaker
And they're also just a good sibling relationship. I don't know if Martha Wells has siblings, but you can definitely tell when some authors don't have siblings and they're trying to write siblings and it just falls because we both have siblings and it just falls completely fat. Sometimes you can really, really tell.
01:03:21
Speaker
But their relationship is great. It's nuanced. It's funny. There was actually also one other piece. Perry uses crew private to reply at one point to some of the crew, which explicitly doesn't include Dr. Marie, even though she's the line before described as the team lead.
01:03:46
Speaker
Which means crew is like an exclusive term that clearly Perry is the one that decides who's on the crew. Yeah, I love that. You can be part of the team, but not part of the crew. Which which says to me that crew crew is family.
01:04:04
Speaker
Team is coworkers. Crew is the family group chat.
01:04:09
Speaker
Everyone should go read these stories. Like we said up top, they're free. They're really short. They're just absolutely delightful. I've read them all before, but I read them all. I reread them all this afternoon in ah about an hour and a half.
01:04:23
Speaker
It takes you no time at all. If you are joining us from the timestamp skip, welcome back. The other random thought that I had while I was reading these is that with the exception of compulsory, all of these are in the third person, which we don't get in the Murderbot novels. They're all from Murderbot's point of view. And so that's just also kind of fun to see Martha Wells flex flexing a different writing style.
01:04:49
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, very much. We recorded these a little out of order, so we may release this either before, after, or at the same time as our Fugitive Telemetry episode.
01:05:03
Speaker
So if you look in your feed... your podcast feed, and you can currently see a Fugitive Telemetry episode, that tells you where that one is. If you do not currently see a Fugitive Telemetry episode, you can expect it to follow within two weeks.
01:05:20
Speaker
Mm-hmm. If the Fugitive Telemetry episode has come before or it's come at the same time, one of the next things that you will hear from us after the Fugitive Telemetry episode, wherever that is, is our network effect episodes.
01:05:36
Speaker
We are going to break that up into more than one episode because that is a novel somewhere between two and three episodes, probably. i still have to do my listen through and be like, hi, what the fuck happens?
01:05:49
Speaker
I feel like I'm out of shape after doing all these novellas. And then I got so used to long format stuff with Tolkien. And then we just had these quick little snorries. And now I'm going, oh, we have a whole fucking novel that's so much. I remember reading Network Effect for the first time and being like, getting, you know, about four hours into it and being like, well, we're definitely getting close to the climax now, right?
01:06:11
Speaker
no No, baby, no. I have commentary on the structure of that novel, and we'll get to that because i think I think Martha Wells did a good job with it, but I think you can tell she's coming off of writing novellas when she writes that.
01:06:25
Speaker
Anyway, we'll talk about that when we talk about the novel. But that's coming up. We will be reading Network Effect, and then we will be directly following with System Collapse, which will follow a very similar format because it's also a novel.
01:06:38
Speaker
And in the timeline, it directly follows network effect, like same day type shit. After that, we'll probably do the Murderbot first season of ah the show, which just finished. We've now seen it all.
01:06:54
Speaker
And we'll talk about it on the podcast. I enjoyed it overall. Me too. I do have questions about why they did certain things, but we'll talk about that when we get there. So that's what is on the horizon for us.
01:07:07
Speaker
Thank you so much for listening and sticking with us. And yeah, just keep on listening. If you like what you're hearing, You can leave us a review, either a star review or a comment or a written review, depending on the podcast platform you are listening on. If you would like to leave us a review across multiple podcast platforms, you may feel free to do that. And actually we highly encourage it for our own selfish reasons. Hell yeah. ah
01:07:39
Speaker
If you would like to interact with us in ways that are not simply listening to our voices, You can do that through our social media, which is at FanAppPod on all of the various social media platforms that we are on.
01:07:54
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You can particularly find us most active on Tumblr and Instagram. And you can always send us an email at thefandomapprentice at gmail.com. Thanks for listening. We'll see you all next time.
01:08:05
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The Phantom Apprentice is produced and edited by Rin and Sam. Our music is composed and performed by James. You can find more of his work on Spotify and Bandcamp under Bayruz, B-A-E-R-U-Z.
01:08:18
Speaker
Our art is by Casey Turgeon. You can find more of her work at KCT Designs on Instagram. The content discussed is the property of the original copyright holders and is used here under fair use.
01:09:06
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Yeah, I just trail off there and it just goes, wahoo!