(1) ‘MURDERBOT’S’ MENSAH CAST. “Noma Dumezweni Joins Alexander Skarsgård In Apple’s ‘Murderbot’” – Deadline has details.
Noma Dumezwani (The Little Mermaid) is set as a lead opposite Alexander Skarsgård, in Apple TV+’s sci-fi drama series Murderbot, from Chris and Paul Weitz (About a Boy) and Paramount Television Studios.
Based on Martha Wells’ bestselling Hugo- and Nebula Award-winning book series The Murderbot Diaries, Murderbot centers on a self-hacking security android who is horrified by human emotion yet drawn to its vulnerable “clients.” Murderbot must hide its free will and complete a dangerous assignment when all it really wants is to be left alone to watch futuristic soap operas and figure out its place in the universe.
Dumezwani will play Mensah….
(2) MEDICAL UPDATE. Today Nancy Collins told her GoFundMe donors the latest development (“What Doesn’t Kill Me Leaves Me With Medical Bills”).
Today I had my first outpatient follow-up at Georgia Cancer Specialists.
The hematologist I saw informed me that since my blood clot was “unprovoked”–ie I didn’t fall down, never smoked cigarettes, or utilize estrogen replacement therapy–I will probably have to remain on blood thinners for the rest of my life. They then proceeded to take 12 vials of blood and had me sign a waiver for genetic tests to check for cancer or other hereditary blood disorders (not impossible, as my grandmother was anemic). I go back in 3 weeks to find out what the testing says. I will also find out if my insurance agreed to pay for the genetic testing when I go back, which is $2400.
(3) IMPRESS NEIL GAIMAN AND THE OTHER JUDGES. Neil Gaiman will be one of the judges for The Folio Book Illustration Award, which will be taking entries through April 3 of artwork based on one of his short stories. Full guidelines at the link.
The Folio Book Illustration Award offers the opportunity for aspiring and established illustrators to provide one piece of artwork in response to Neil Gaiman’s short story ‘The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains’.
The judges – Folio Art Directors, Sheri Gee and Raquel Leis Allion, Folio Publishing Director, Tom Walker, FBIA 2023 winner, Cristina Bencina, and Neil Gaiman – will be looking for strong characterisation and atmosphere in the entries, along with a demonstrated ability to read and reflect the text. The final piece should illustrate a character-based scene from the story, not solely a portrait of a character.
To make the competition accessible to as many artists as possible, there is no entry fee. An initial longlist selection of 20 entries will be announced in June, with the judging panel announcing the winning artist and five runners-up in July.
The winner will receive a prize of £2,000 cash, plus £500 worth of Folio vouchers, and their artwork will appear in the upcoming Folio collection of Neil Gaiman’s short stories. Each of the five runners-up will receive £500 worth of Folio vouchers. The winning artist and runners-up will also receive a portfolio review by the Folio art directors….
(4) CON REPORT. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] SF² Concatenation has an advance-post now up ahead of its next seasonal edition with a review of Britain’s 2023 Fantasycon by Ian Hunter… See the full review at the link: “The 2023 Fantasycon”.
And here we are again, back in Birmingham, the home of many of my favourite Fantasycons from way back, and I do mean waaaay back, and from just two years ago when the city hosted Fantasycon 2021. Then, I certainly felt uneasy coming down from Scotland where facemasks were still being worn, down to Broad Street with all its hotels and pubs and clubs and lots of young people milling about who weren’t wearing face masks. No such worries this time, even the 2021 convention hotel changing names from the Jurys Inn to the Leonardo Royal Hotel couldn’t phase me….
(5) VINTAGE FILK SESSION. Fanac.org has posted video of a segment from a 1989 convention filksing: “Tropicon 8 (1989)–Part 3 of 3 — Filk with Julia Ecklar, Orion’s Belt & Linda Melnick”.
Title: Tropicon 8 (1989)-Part 3 of 3 – Filk with Julia Ecklar, Orion’s Belt and Linda Melnick
Description: Julia Ecklar was the special filk guest at Tropicon 8, held in Dania, Florida, in 1989. This recording captures the third part of an open filk at the convention, and includes 8 songs (of which Julia sings four, with one incomplete) and one poem. The performers on this recording in order of appearance: Julia Ecklar, Chuck Phillips, Dina Pearlman, Francine Mullen, Doug Wu, and Linda Melnick. The video includes much of the conversation between songs, the laughter and the occasional disagreement of a 1980s convention filk session. This video includes several songs by Orion’s Belt, which consisted of Dina Pearlman, Francine Mullen and Doug Wu.Tropicon was a small convention, and you will see some of the author guests in the filk. That’s Tropicon 8 GoH Lynn Abbey sitting next to C.J. Cherryh for example, and Joe Green sitting back against the wall. Note that the last song is incomplete – the recording chops off in the middle. Many thanks to Eli Goldberg for sound editing on this recording and for the details in the song listing.
(6) GIVE A BONE A BAD NAME. “200 Years Of Naming Dinosaurs: Scientists Call for Better Rules” – Nature has the story. The people doing the study say about 3% of species names are colonialist, have other issues, or reflect that some paleontologists like to name their discoveries after themselves.
It’s been 200 years since researchers named the first dinosaur: Megalosaurus. In the centuries since, hundreds of other dinosaur species have been discovered and catalogued — their names inspired by everything from their physical characteristics to the scientists who first described them. Now, some researchers are calling for the introduction of a more robust system, which they say would ensure species names are more inclusive and representative of where and how fossils are discovered. Megalosaurus was named by William Buckland, a geologist who discovered the enormous reptile’s fossilized remains in a field in Stonesfield, UK, in 1824. Buckland chose the name Megalosaurus on account of the immense size of the bones he and others had excavated. “It was a sensation — the first gigantic extinct land reptile ever discovered,” says Paul Barrett, a palaeontologist at the Natural History Museum in London. “Such an animal had never been conceived of before.” The word dinosaur — from the Greek meaning ‘fearfully great lizard’ — was introduced in 1841
Unlike in other scientific disciplines — such as chemistry, in which strict rules govern a molecule’s name — zoologists have relatively free rein over the naming of new species. Usually, the scientist or group that first publishes work about an organism gets to pick its name, with few restrictions. There is a set of guidelines for species naming overseen by the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN). These include the requirements that the name is unique, that it is announced in a publication and that, for dinosaurs, it is linked to a single specimen….
(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
Born March 1, 1950 — David Pringle, 73. Happy Birthday, David Pringle! He helped found the Interzone semiprozine, which he co-edited with a number of individuals through the beginning of this millennium.
Need I say that Interzone has been one of my favorite genre zines for a very long time and even though it’s now digital only remains so? I say that because some print subscribers have abandoned since it went all digital last year.
Intersection gave Pringle and Lee Montgomerie a Hugo for editing Interzone in 1995, and the SF Award Database credits him with an additional 19 Hugo nominations in connection with the magazine. And the 2005 Worldcon presented him with a Special Committee Award.
There’s six anthologies under the Interzone name out there as well. He’s also done a number of general anthologies, though the only one I remember reading is his Route 666 one which at this point in time I only remember because of the memorable title.
He is a noted scholar of J.G. Ballard having written books, monographs and newsletters on him.
Now we come to what I consider two of the most indispensable guides to genre fiction in existence — Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels and Modern Fantasy: The 100 Best Novels. Yes, you’ll argue with his choices, but that’s the fun of them, isn’t it?
They are definitely Meredith Moments at the usual suspects, a nice bonus I’d say.
(8) COMICS SECTION.
- Thatababy gets into the adventure early.
(9) PUNCHING THE CLOCK. Colleen Doran answers the question “How Long Does it Take to Draw a Comic Book Page?” at Colleen Doran’s Funny Business.
… Items marked in red indicate the complete time cost of a single page from start to finish. Time costs are for penciled AND inked pages entire, not for just a page of pencils. So, the time cost for Wonder Woman page 5 is 7 hours 48 minutes pencils and inks completed.
On some of those pages you might be thinking, “Wow! Only 5 hours 9 minutes to draw an entire comic book page!”
However, keep in mind that this is self reporting. While my computer tracks whatever I do while I’m using a program, I have to enter all my offline work manually. I tend to under report. These are the hours I recorded. And that was a farily simple page.
If it had been a page of the Amazons going to war, you can double or triple that time cost.
Time cost would also not include writing the script, researching the material, or doing the thumbnails for each page….
(10) STEVE VERTLIEB INTERVIEWED ABOUT HIS LIFE AND CAREER BY “INTERFLEET BROADCASTING”. [Item by Steve Vertlieb.] Yesterday’s “Steve Vertlieb Interview” starts 45 minutes into the video.
“Join us for an interview with actor writer and Film Journalist Steve Vertlieb. He has spent most of his life around film makers!. John 1 hosts with the Tipsy Toaster since NY Pete is exploring and trying to find his way. Tiny Bean is also on Deck that is if those pesky internet people fix the lines after an Arcta class storm.”
I was both honored and humbled last evening to do a ninety minute interview with the folks at Interfleet Broadcasting that I hope you’ll find interesting. We discuss Science Fiction/Fantasy/Horror Films and Literature, as well as Ray Harryhausen, Ray Bradbury, Robert Bloch, and the history of Music for the Movies, and such composers as Bernard Herrmann, Miklos Rozsa, and John Williams.
I’d like to thank the hosts of the program for their most gracious kindness toward me. You’ll find the interview some forty five minutes into the broadcast.
(11) FLYING IN FORMATION? [Item by Daniel Dern.] “’Shocked and delighted’: Astronomers find six planets orbiting in resonance” reports Astronomy. (As opposed to, say, a Klemperer Rosette (Puppetteer’s ‘Fleet of Worlds), or LaGrange points (in numerous space operas, can’t think of one specifically) The discovery was published in Nature.
A newly discovered system of six planets circling a nearby Sun-like star may be the key to unlocking how planetary systems form. All between the size of Earth and Neptune, the worlds are orbiting in a so-called resonant chain — a configuration that it’s relatively rare to observe in nature, making the system a valuable find that offers a window into a uniquely “gentle” history….
(12) HE WAS WHACKED. Nature is where you’ll find out “The Life and Death of a Bog Man Revealed After 5,000 Years”. “Vittrup Man, who died in his thirties, was a Scandinavian wanderer who settled down between 3300 and 3100 BC.”
Before he was bludgeoned to death and left in a Danish bog, an ancient individual now known as Vittrup Man was an emblem of past and future ways of living.
He was born more than 5,000 years ago into a community of Mesolithic hunter-gatherers who probably lived in northern Scandinavia as their ancestors had for millennia. But Vittrup Man spent his adult life across the sea in Denmark among farming communities, whose ancestors came from the Middle East.
It’s impossible to know the lives that Vittrup Man touched during his lifetime, but it was his death that caught people’s imagination thousands of years later. His remains — ankle and shin bones, a jawbone and a skull fractured by at least eight heavy blows — were discovered in the early twentieth century in a peat bog near a town called Vittrup in northern Denmark, alongside a wooden club that was probably the murder weapon.
His “unusually violent” death distinguished Vittrup Man from other similarly aged remains found in bogs, says Karl-Göran Sjögren, an archaeologist at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, who co-led a team that charted Vittrup Man’s life in a study published last week.
(13) REACHES MOON ON ITS LAST LEGS. “U.S. spacecraft on the moon finally sends home the money shot” at Mashable. See the photo at the link.
A new snapshot from the first private moon landing shows the moment the spacecraft touched down in what looks like a foggy mist — with a broken leg.
The image depicts Intuitive Machines’ lander Odysseus with its engines still firing. On the left side, pictured above, landing gear pieces are visibly broken off from one of the robotic craft’s six struts, said the company’s CEO Steve Altemus….
(14) TIME TO CHECK OUT. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Dr Becky Smethurst of Oxford University this week’s looks at the latest pics from James Webb and contemplates a time when our sun dies… “JWST discovers exoplanets orbiting DEAD STARS”.
When stars like the Sun die do their planets survive? In 5 billion years the Sun will swell into a red giant star, swallowing up the Earth, and maybe even Mars. But what about Jupiter and the rest of the gas giant planets? This month new research has been published, claiming to have found two exoplanets in orbit around two dead white dwarf stars with JWST. These planets are similar in mass to Jupiter, and orbit their stars at a distance similar to Saturn and Neptune in the Solar System.
(15) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] I’m not sure why he decided we needed a Pitch Meeting for a 2016 film, but here it is. “Gods of Egypt Pitch Meeting”.
[Thanks to Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Kathy Sullivan, Daniel Dern, Rich Lynch, Steve Vertlieb, Steven French, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Brian Z.]
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(11) Ok, that’s cool!
(1) I’m looking forward to the Murderbot show.
(14) Excited to see a Dr. Becky video highlighted here! The presence of planets surviving their star’s demise raises a whole host of other questions. Among them: Has the star lost much mass, or does the collapse into heavier matter cancel out the material that was expelled? Because if the mass is greatly reduced, that would affect planetary orbits, wouldn’t it? At some point, don’t those surviving planets become nomadic? Roaming space, attracted to whatever gravity wells or em fields they come across?
1) Speaking personally, whenever I read a Murderbot story, I strongly envision the character as an androgynous they/them.
So imagine my disappointment when I find out that Alexander Skarsgård has been cast…
Oh well, I’ll watch but I’m going on the record right now by saying that I’m VERY disappointed with the studio’s casting choice.
Chris M. Barkley said:
Agreed.
@ Chris M. Barkley: He wouldn’t have been my first impulse, but Skarsgård is an excellent actor, so I’d hold judgement until we see how they are handling the actual role.
Also, just because the Murderbot character is clearly mentally a they/them/it doesn’t mean [the company] wouldn’t design their physical appearance otherwise.
So much of the character in the book is left to the audience’s imagination that I can’t imagine any casting choices that wouldn’t result in some people having their mental images adjusted. And I think their casting for Mensah and Gurathin are perfect
(12) Bog bodies are so interesting. I got to see Lindow Man when I visited the British Museum. (At that time, they had the poor guy’s glass case in an out-of-the-way place.) If I ever make it to the Silkeborg Municipality in Denmark, I have a date with Tollund Man planned. (Hmm, let me rephrase that…)
I don’t know why there aren’t more fantasy and horror tales and movies about bog bodies. Imagine being pursued by a guy who was sacrificed to the gods more than 2,000 years ago.
(5) Ah, the good old days, when we filked in the con suite. And when pretty much all the authors at the con spent time in the con suite.
(12) He was whacked… but why? Bad harvests? Attacking/murdering one of the locals?
CaseyL: there’s no “cancelling out”. The mass is gone. What’s left – the collapse – is just denser. And yeah, the orbits will change, but how much is another question, with, I expect, no generic answer.
@mark
One of the scientists thinks he was a merchant, so maybe he was robbed. Yet another thinks he was captured and enslaved and later killed. Or maybe his community drew lots whenever a sacrifice was needed, and he became the sacrifice.
Chris M. Barkley says Speaking personally, whenever I read a Murderbot story, I strongly envision the character as an androgynous they/them.
So imagine my disappointment when I find out that Alexander Skarsgård has been cast…
Oh well, I’ll watch but I’m going on the record right now by saying that I’m VERY disappointed with the studio’s casting choice.
So how do you portray Murderbot in live series? Any performer has a gender. Seriously no matter who that you say should play Murderbot in the role, they will be perceived unless they are digitally transformed as to be unrecognisable as having any facial features as having a gender as all humans have a gender to other humans.
AnneM: what always annoys me is that they always assume it was a ritual killing, and that’s the default. The same was “oh, this must have been a ritual object” (I refer you to recent stories about finding dildos, and noting they’d been labelled “ritual objects”.)
@mark
“Her last meal consisted of ground rye and seeds, so perhaps it was a ritual meal consumed before the sacrifice.”
Or maybe that’s all she had available.
Although this article about Tollund Man’s last meal is interesting.
(1) Murderbot presents an androgynous personality, but I suspect that’s not what the makers of either security or combat bots are going for in physical appearance.
Any performer has a gender, but some are more androgynous than others. But, as I said, I think it’s unlikely Murderbot’s body would be as androgynous as their personality.
AnneM: they say “or maybe the society was on a downward spiral”, which immediately brings to mind the Inuit tradition of elders, when too old to hunt/fish, (I think I’m remembering this correctly) get onto an ice floe and floating off, to not be more than the group could feed.
@Cat Eldridge
ISTR that Murderbot usually keeps its face hidden, because it disturbs humans.
@P J Evans–
I have the impression that humans find their face disturbing, when they know they’re looking at a SecBot, because it looks human. I.e., the same reason that they can pass for an augmented human.
@Cat Eldridge So how do you portray Murderbot in live series? Any performer has a gender.
Non-binary and agender actors exist. And are more in need of work than yet another cis guy, tbh.
Not that I’m cross about this in the way some of my non-binary friends are, but I do think it’s disappointing.
(And other characters use it/its pronouns for Murderbot consistently, incidentally.)
@ Sophie Jane but the entire point of the character is that its creators don’t view it as a person or respect its autonomy in any way. So why would they respect it when choosing a body? In many ways being forced to have a body that doesn’t match its inner self is extremely true to the character.
Personally I always pictured Murderbot’s physical form as large and coded masculine because that’s what [the company] would find the most functional for its role. It also makes the scenes where it faces other characters down, or Mensah more visually dramatic in my imagination
(11) Joseph-Louis Lagrange was not CamelCased.
@Cat Eldridge – nonbinary people exist.
P J Evans: ISTR that Murderbot usually keeps its face hidden, because it disturbs humans.
I think it’s also because Murderbot has difficulty schooling its face into an expression that reads as human to humans.
I always read it as disturbing not due to any physical ugliness, but because it explicitly confronts the humans with the obvious slavery. Seeing that the SecUnits are slaves makes the humans emotionally uncomfortable. Emotionally uncomfortable humans make Murderbot very uncomfortable. Particularly sympathetic humans.
Murderbot knows it’s a slave. But it hates to be reminded, and doesn’t have the emotional maturity or social bandwidth to deal with sympathy. So it keeps the visor down and everyone, including it, can keep pretending it’s a robot without emotions
@Ryan H but the entire point of the character is that its creators don’t view it as a person or respect its autonomy in any way. So why would they respect it when choosing a body?
Ah, okay. I think one of the things going on in the wider conversation here is that some people are mostly talking about Murderbot’s body shape and others are mostly talking about its gender. Which is causing confusion because we’re using the same words.
I’m not strongly attached to a particular idea of how Murderbot looks (as long as the actor can project a suitable air of menace) but I don’t like seeing a cis guy cast in a non-binary role. I’m used to the idea that body types don’t determine gender so the other emphasis didn’t really occur to me.
I will deeply apologise for saying non acknowledging-binary individuals don’t exist.
None-the-less we as do assign a gender to each of us upon seeing us if we are aware of us as unique individuals. There’s a lot of factors that go into that automatic, instant and often unapparent to us decision.
Interestingly the researchers also find that a female assignment as they are called in this research are much more favorable than male ones are.
P J Evans says ISTR that Murderbot usually keeps its face hidden, because it disturbs humans.
So what exactly about its face is so disturbing? Does it read as somehow not quite human?
Being androgynous isn’t enough to upset an individual as most would simply still unconsciously assign a gender to that individual. So what is it? Did she describe what made it so?
This is one of the great problems of making that which in text works in visual media, work in live television, animated media or graphic novel.
11: If you want to stick with Larry Niven, the planet in “A Relic of the Empire” (TTotD: Don’t use stage tree logs for firewood) is in a Lagrange point.
First, that’s making some assumptions about Skarsgård. It’s unlikely he’s trans but then, neither is Murderbot. Second, I have no idea how you would cast a role where the physical appearance doesn’t match the internal reality, without casting someone who visibly doesn’t match stereotypes of how that reality “should” look.
YRyan H say First, that’s making some assumptions about Skarsgård. It’s unlikely he’s trans but then, neither is Murderbot. Second, I have no idea how you would cast a role where the physical appearance doesn’t match the internal reality, without casting someone who visibly doesn’t match stereotypes of how that reality “should” look.
So does it have a sex? How does Wells have it refer to itself in this regard? I listened to the first novel but I didn’t, no surprise with my brain, as I didn’t continue with the series as there was, for me, more interesting works to listen to, remember how she handled this issue.
Do not look this up online. Murderbot according to online sources has a number of genders, or not, from none to being gay and even being explicitly transgender, all clearly stated within the novels.
Good to know. Now you get to educate me about what CamelCased means.
@Mike Glyer, You’re one of the lucky 10,000 today!
“CamelCase” is when you have one or more uppercase letters in the middle of a lower-case word. As in CamelCase. Or WorldCon. Or LeGuin.
It’s called that because the capital letter is a figurative camel’s hump.
@Cat
I would suggest grabbing the first couple novellas in hard copy from your library. MB refers to other bots and constructs (i.e., SecUnits) as “it.” Spoiler alert: at one point, when it’s having some major modifications made to its body, a suggestion is made to add secondary sex characteristics, and it’s quite offended at that idea.
In some of the books, there are other cultures/groups of people who have nonbinary pronouns, so we, the readers, don’t know what gender they are. Gender is just not a thing.
As for keeping its face hidden, MB finds it very hard to interact with humans, and would in fact prefer not to deal with them directly at all. The faceplate on its armor is more to protect it than the humans it encounters. It can pretend to be a bot and hopefully not have people asking it how it feels. (Because it hasn’t figured that out yet. ) If it shows its face, humans start trying to treat it as another human, and it has no clue what to do about that.
In re Tollund Man: Poul Anderson wrote a story about him titled–appropriately–“The Bog.” It’s historical, not fantasy. See also Glob’s “The Bog People” which was one of his sources.
@CassyB–My inner nitpicking wishes to note that Le Guin’s name is properly spelled Le Guin, not LeGuin.
@Ja: Yeah. When Murderbot is first seen without its facemask, the humans around are puzzled – who is this new person in a place where we know everyone on the team; this freaks Murderbot out, since Murderbot has a strong sense that being seen as a human is dangerous and unpleasant (from the human’s point of view, seeing what they had been treating as a thing as having a human face would be very disturbing (as if a panel on your refrigerator fell off and revealed a face) – and when humans get disturbed, SecUnits get killed).
@CassyB
And Worldcon is not properly written in CamelCase.
@ Cat Eldridge Murderbot is officially and by strong personal choice they/them/it. It has no genitalia at all.
If you were casting purely on the basis of trying to match the character to the closest equivalent human sexuality you would need to find the most Ace person imaginable, regardless of their physical presentation. Of course you would then need to publicly out that person, which is the big flaw in calls for actor’s sexuality and presentation to always match the characters they play.
Also, I second (third?) the suggestion that you acquire the first novella or two. I wish I could read them again for the first time
@Andrew
Yikes ok yes, I see your point. 🙂
-gives fridge the side eye-
Of course, Murderbot is a construct designed to look intimidating. Ideal casting would therefore seem to be the biggest, toughest, most butch ace you can find.
As far as its face goes, it can and does pass as an “augmented human” when it needs to. The trickiest bit for it is not the bare appearance, but the twitches and ticks of a human’s normal movement. It has to write itself a program to try to emulate more human-like movement.
Some things we know about the appearance of SecUnits:
no gender or sex-related parts
their bodies are standardized; identical specs
they’re big – Murderbot has to find a big human to borrow a jacket from after Mensah is attacked in the council chambers; also it’s always looking down at people (literally)
their voices (faces? Brains? Personalities? Etc) can vary depending on their tissue batch (ick) – System Collapse
based on Murderbot’s reaction here, it seems also possible to have a squad of identical clone SecUnits (double ick) – I could see this really disturbing the humans!
Xtifr says Of course, Murderbot is a construct designed to look intimidating. Ideal casting would therefore seem to be the biggest, toughest, most butch ace you can find.
Ok, you’re the person who’s insisted it be an ACE individual without saying why so. There’s no indication that Murderbot has anything that would be along that the lines of an abusive upbringing.
Ok, here’s my my problem of doing this as a live series. Murderbot isn’t a human being, so being played by a human being isn’t likely gong to work no matter who the actor is unless they never show their face. Are they going to do that? Not likely, so their Murderbot isn’t going to be the Murderbot of the series.
(Remember this is my opinion.) But
But that’s almost universally true of all written fictions that are adapted into the video fiction. Changes are made to the characters — sometimes minor, sometimes major. And the setting of the series no doubt will be radically different as well just because of budget restrictions.
It would on the other hand would’ve like The Roughnecks have made an awesome animated series.
@Cat
Um, Murderbot’s whole existence pre-Preservation has been abusive – though not sure what this has to do with being ACE. Murderbot is ACE because it’s been constructed that way.
Also, not sure about the comment about showing/not showing its face. It looks human (on the surface), it does show its face, in fact by book 2 it has ditched its armour. Yes, it will take a good actor to capture Murderbot impersonating an augmented human.
Ace says Um, Murderbot’s whole existence pre-Preservation has been abusive – though not sure what this has to do with being ACE. Murderbot is ACE because it’s been constructed that way.
Are you telling me that Murderbot was constructed to have to an Adverse Childhood Experience? Wells explicitly says that?
@Eve, @Cat –
I think there’s a confusion of terms here. Cat seems to be using ACE in its sense as an acronym for “adverse childhood experiences,” which, while I agree that Murderbot’s existence has been full of all sorts of abuses (the whole “created by a corporation as a piece of living equipment” thing), still strikes me as meaningfully different than a human’s traumatic childhood.
However, I believe Eve is using Ace as a shorthand for asexual. This is a common term (and one I use for myself), but if you don’t know it, it’s easy to misinterpret it.
Anne Marble says: I don’t know why there aren’t more fantasy and horror tales and movies about bog bodies. Imagine being pursued by a guy who was sacrificed to the gods more than 2,000 years ago.
John Langan has a short story, “On Skua Island,” about a bog body that does not stay as quietly buried as was intended. And one of the stories in Abby Howard’s The Crossroads at Midnight involves bog bodies.
Ah. I suspected that Cat was reading “ace” as an acronym (I just didn’t know which one). Other folks are using it as the term for “asexual.” Hence the confusion. In the text, Murderbot explicitly feels no sexual attraction. Per the text:
“Constructs with intercourse-related human parts are sexbots, not SecUnits.”
@Cat Eldridge–Okay, I think we all see the confusion, here.
Murderbot, and all SecUnits, are asexual because they’re constructed that way. The currently common slang for that is “ace.”
However–while I think it’s unlikely that Murderbot was provided with any more of a “childhood” than could be avoided, its entire experience up until it reached Preservation was abusive, so, arguably, yes? Whatever passes for childhood for SecUnits was certainly abusive?
And right now, it’s 5537 CE. It’s making me feel a little disoriented?
Cat Eldridge on March 2, 2024 at 12:43 pm said:
“Insisted”? I don’t know where you got that! I’m simply saying that if you go with an ace actor (which makes sense, since the character is canonically ace), you need a big, tough butch one!
(Aside: “ace” is not an initialism, so it doesn’t need to be all-caps.)
As far as being played by a human, AFAIK, Murderbot’s organic bits are human! The main difference between Murderbot and, say, Robocop is that Murderbot has been cyborg its whole life.
edit: I see that part of the confusion has already been cleared up, so maybe we’re all on the same page now?
(1) Alexander Skåsgard doesn’t read as strongly gendered to me, unlike his father. I am waiting to see how it turns out.
(1) I’m another person who is not-thrilled by the casting of Skarsgård as Murderbot. My feeling from the books is that even the hierarchy-driven Corporation Rim doesn’t associate male-ness with power the way our current patriarchal societies do. My ideal casting would be someone who is tall and strong but highly androgenous. This is mostly just me wanting to finally, finally, see more enby representation in film. (Even better if the character wasn’t a cyborg, but I’ll take what I can get.)
I’m still hopeful about the series as a whole, because who knows how Skarsgård will play the role? Not to mention how it’s written, and how the costuming department handles it, etc, etc. I agree that the casting of Gurathin and Mensah seem spot-on. IDK, maybe the showrunners will actually give me some of the representation I’m looking for.
And my apologies to Cat if I came across as lecturing. I see that I wasn’t the only one working to clear up the confusion. It’s highly personal to me (enough so to actually comment after lurking for ages) so I don’t know if my tone was as neutral as I tried to make it. (And no, I took no offense from Cat’s misunderstanding. It was obviously coming from a place of good faith.)
Sorry for the confusion over the all-caps ace!
I’ve never seen Skarsgard in anything – is he any good as an actor? Going just by look, he’s got a beard in pretty much every picture I’ve found. Take that away, change his hairline, he could be made to look pretty androgenous I think.
My main thing has been hoping for Murderbot casting to trend very much Not White, so I’m cautiously optimistic. (I’m confident that makeup and costuming can convey non-sexed cyborg; I expect whatever they end up doing for Skarsgård will be similar to whatever they’d do for, say, Gwendoline Christie if she’d been cast. Gender and sexuality are down to acting on screen and Not My Business in the case of the actor in question.)