Martha Wells Created Murderbot, Sci-Fi’s Most Beloved Killing Machine—Then She Fought the Battle of Her Life
Killing feels everywhere. At every turn, I’m surrounded by imagery of a homicidal robot war machine. And yet this isn’t a Hollywood set or a packed convention center—it’s a lecture room in a college library in East Texas. The air smells faintly of mildew and aged paper, when a middle-aged woman with wavy salt-and-dark-brown hair steps to the podium, head ducked slightly. She looks every bit the gentle librarian or cat-obsessed homebody (for the record, that second guess checks out). But inside her mind stretches a vast galaxy of starships, flying bipedal creatures, and centuries-old witches. This is Martha Wells, the creator of Murderbot.
A name like Murderbot would make anyone run for the hills—and that reaction makes total sense. But the secret to why Murderbot has become one of the most adored, iconic characters in modern science fiction is that it’s nothing like what its name suggests. For all its imposing size and body armor loaded with energy weapons, Murderbot is a softie at heart. It’s cripplingly socially awkward, has a sharp taste for sarcasm, and far from craving murder, it dedicates itself to saving human lives—when it’s not binging its favorite serialized TV shows, that is. “As a heartless killing machine,” Murderbot famously says, “I was a terrible failure.”
Murderbot first stepped onto the page in Wells’ 2017 novella All Systems Red. Novellas were far from a commercially popular format back then, but the book flew off shelves, surprising even Wells’ own publisher. More short stories and novellas followed quickly, then two full-length novels. Wells racked up nearly every major award the genre has to offer: four Hugos, two Nebulas, six Locus Awards. By the time I sat down with her this past spring, Apple TV+ had already begun production on a television adaptation starring Alexander Skarsgård in the lead role.
While Wells draws throngs of fans at conventions and book signings across the globe, just 30 of us are packed into this warm, wood-paneled library today, the space dotted with Murderbot-themed art and merch. Wells opens with a reading from a short story, told through the eyes of the scientist who helps Murderbot win its freedom. After the reading, an audience member tells her how impressed she is by the subtlety of the social and political themes woven through the Murderbot stories. “Was that intentional?” she asks. Wells politely confirms it was, then adds with dry candor: “I don’t think it’s particularly subtle.” It’s a story about enslavement and liberation, she says—what frustrates her is when readers miss that core truth entirely.
Another frustration for Wells? New fans often ask if she can write anything beyond Murderbot. Now 60, Wells has published nearly one book a year for over 30 years, spanning everything from royal court intrigue to distant worlds populated by shapeshifting beings. But until Murderbot blew up, she largely flew under the mainstream radar. I suspect one big reason for that is where she’s chosen to put down roots. Far from the traditional literary hubs of New York or Los Angeles, Wells has lived her entire adult life in College Station, Texas—home to the nearly 100-year-old library we’re in today, part of her alma mater Texas A&M, which holds one of the largest collections of science fiction and fantasy in the world.
That collection was the cradle that launched Wells’ writing career, but everything changed after Murderbot’s success. She now counts literary superstars like N.K. Jemisin and Kate Elliott among her close friends, not to mention a fiercely loyal global fanbase. And that support would prove indispensable when, at the peak of her unexpected late-in-life fame, everything threatened to fall apart.
I first meet Wells at one of her go-to spots, a Mexican restaurant on the unusually wide main street that cuts through College Station. She brings her husband, Troyce Wilson, a local history enthusiast, who tells me the street was designed by the nephew of Stephen Austin, the “Father of Texas” for whom the state capital is named. Wells glances up at the chalkboard menu and orders corn tortilla tacos. Wilson teases her: “What kind of Texan are you?”
Turns out, the lifelong kind. Wells grew up three hours north in Fort Worth, on a busy street with no other kids nearby. She calls herself a “weird kid” who struggled intensely with numbers—they’d simply slip from her memory. Looking back, she suspects she may have ADHD or be on the autism spectrum. But for girls growing up in the 1970s, “you didn’t have ADHD,” she says. “You were just a troublemaker.”
Young Wells coped with her social awkwardness the exact same way Murderbot would later on: by diving headfirst into imaginary worlds. She drew maps of Monster Island, Godzilla’s home, and wrote fan fiction set in the universes of Lost in Space and Land of the Giants. At the local bookstore, she gaped at the cover of F.M. Busby’s Zelde M’Tana, which featured a Black woman in a jumpsuit holding a weapon. She worked her way through books by Phyllis Gotlieb, John Varley, and Andre Norton, and also devoured Erma Bombeck’s witty newspaper columns about suburban family life. “That was my first real clue that being a writer was an actual job,” she says.
But it was in the pages of Starlog, a monthly sci-fi magazine, that she first saw her future clearly. Long before the internet, sci-fi fans connected through libraries, word of mouth, and niche publications. Starlog ran listings for local fan groups, and that’s how Wells found Cepheid Variable, a student-run organization for diehard sci-fi, fantasy, and horror fans at Texas A&M that also hosted the long-running convention AggieCon. She applied to the school, got in, and never looked back.
As a student, she joined Cepheid Variable, volunteered at AggieCon, and kept honing her writing. Local sci-fi writers hosted workshops, and Wells attended every single one. From their stories of struggle and rejection, she learned an early lesson: making a career as a genre writer would not be easy.
In her final year of college, Wells took the lead on organizing AggieCon and invited a host of authors, including a then little-known George R.R. Martin. The convention pulled in a record-breaking $10,000 profit. The Cepheid crew took part of the money, rented a van, and drove 13 hours straight to attend the much larger WorldCon in Atlanta. One of the group, a tall, soft-spoken boy (that’s Wilson), dressed as a Sith Lord, with a lightsaber he built from auto parts. He made one for Wells too. “Which led to us dating,” Wilson says over our tacos. “I always tell people we were brought together by the dark side of the Force.”
Around that time, Wells took a job doing IT support for Texas A&M’s ocean drilling program, building user interfaces for databases—a role that let her observe all the messy intersections of humans and machines that would later give Murderbot so much to complain about. Wilson went to work breeding pine trees for the Texas Forest Service. They married in 1995 (Wells can’t remember the exact year, reminding me “I’m really bad with numbers”) at an intimate winery wedding just outside of town. One of their friends baked a stunning three-tier wedding cake decorated with a garden trellis design down the side.
Through all of this, Wells never stopped writing. Her first novel, Element of Fire, a story of royal court intrigue, was a finalist for a prestigious early-career award. The year she got married, she published City of Bones, an adventure set in a cursed wasteland, and in 1998 she released The Death of the Necromancer, a haunting murder mystery that earned her first Nebula Award nomination.
Wells kept publishing steadily for the next decade, but she was still working full-time in IT, growing increasingly frustrated with a toxic work environment. “I would get home and it would take me a couple of hours just to calm down enough to even try to write,” she says. Then in 2006, tragedy struck: Lori, the friend who’d baked her wedding cake, died of ovarian cancer. Wells and Wilson attended her funeral on a Saturday. That following Monday, she quit her IT job. “Because life is too short,” she says.
She took the leap to write full-time, but the timing couldn’t have been worse. The 2008 recession hit, and suddenly she couldn’t sell anything—not even a short story. Even now, that period is hard for her to talk about. Our taco restaurant is filling up with a noisy lunch crowd, and Wells’ corn tacos are falling apart. She sets them aside in frustration, and explains that over three years, she hit the lowest point of her entire career. She wrote lots of fan fiction, and abandoned more projects than she could count. “I had never started a novel and just had it fall apart on me,” she says. “I did that probably six or seven times.” By 2010, she was ready to quit writing for good.
As a sort of goodbye to the career she’d built, she went back to where it all started: Texas A&M. Cushing Memorial Library was hosting its first-ever major exhibit of science fiction and fantasy art and manuscripts. As she wandered through the displays, she stumbled on a glass case holding a portion of the original manuscript of her second novel, City of Bones, placed right alongside genre classics. Seeing her work included in that company sent a jolt through her. Her words still mattered. She still had something to give. She couldn’t end it here.
After lunch, Wells and Wilson invite me back to their home. I drive over separately and pull up to a brick house in an upscale neighborhood—their recently purchased dream home, which they’ve nicknamed Murderbot Manor. Wilson greets me at the door with a classic dad joke: “We don’t want any,” he says, before laughing and ushering me inside.
Inside, a short entryway opens up to a room with a dramatic high vaulted ceiling and sitting area. Two built-in bookcases frame a fireplace, and four craftsman-style chairs with green upholstery are arranged around a blue area rug. Along one wall, a deep brown curio cabinet packed with trinkets and crystal holds all of Wells’ genre awards. I’ve never seen a Hugo Award in person before, and they’re striking: each one is unique, with a base designed from scratch every year by the host city and country. Nebulas are rectangular prisms with colorful star patterns suspended inside their clear frames. Every Christmas, Wells ties a shiny festive bow to each of her trophies.
Wells’ home office is just off the main sitting area, where a black and gray cat named Max lounges on a daybed. Wells often prefers to write on the back porch, which overlooks a sprawling backyard. When I step outside, I hear at least five different bird calls. Wilson, a member of the local Audubon Society, tells me more bird species pass through Texas than any other U.S. state.
Back inside, we sit down in the family room. Wilson brings out a tray of tea and homemade shortbread—the cozy, whimsical vibe here feels like something out of the Shire. Another cat, a Siamese named Tasha, stretches out on a throw pillow next to Wells. She’s staring at me, and I realize Wells is too—we’re all quietly observing each other. A line from Murderbot pops into my head: “I’m awkward with actual humans … Keeping the armor on all the time cuts down on unnecessary interactions.”
When Wells decided to give writing one more shot in 2010, she had a novel she’d been struggling to sell, one she describes as featuring “polyamorous flying lizard lion bee people.” At conventions, she was stuck on unremarkable panels. “I hadn’t been gone that long,” she says, “and it was just like, nobody had ever heard of me before.” Then a writer friend named Roxanne Conrad stepped in, boosting Wells’ morale as they searched for a publisher. It took two years. When a press finally agreed to publish The Cloud Roads, Wells cried.
A few months later, another breakthrough: fantasy author N.K. Jemisin picked up a copy of The Cloud Roads on a whim, and loved it. She wrote a blurb calling it “the rarest of fantasies: fresh and surprising, with a story that doesn’t go where ten thousand others have gone before.” With that endorsement, readers started finding Wells again.
Over the next few years, Wells published several sequels to The Cloud Roads, collectively called the Books of the Raksura series. Sales were modest, but her passion for writing was back—nothing could stop her now. By 2016, she was ready to wrap up the series, and just needed to nail the final ending. It was giving her trouble, but Wells was a pro; she knew it would come to her eventually. Then her brain threw her a curveball: it showed her a scene from an entirely different universe.
The scene was simple: a security robot hiding in a repair cubicle, patching up its own injuries. Wells was curious. She jotted down an interaction between the bot—a SecUnit, she called it, or more informally, Murderbot—and a worried human scientist. That was it, she thought at first. It was just a cute little detour, nothing more. She planned to finish the opening, set it aside, and get back to wrapping up Raksura. But something made her pause. “I always try to take the harder road,” she tells me. I suspect there was more to it—a quiet sense that this character was something special. Murderbot had such a distinct attitude, such a clear voice, it almost wrote itself. So she kept going.
Later that year, at a convention, Wells ran into editor Lee Harris, who’d just joined Tordotcom to launch their new line of short fiction. Wells’ agent had already sent Harris her 31,000-word novella. Harris loved it from the very first sentence: “I could have become a mass murderer after I hacked my governor module, but then I realized I could access the combined feed of entertainment channels carried on the company satellites.” A deadpan, conflicted killing machine that just wants to binge TV? At the convention, Harris told Wells he wanted to publish it—and a second novella to follow. They’d use The Murderbot Diaries as the series name, and call the first installment All Systems Red.
The first sign that something extraordinary was happening came when Wells drove to a Houston bookstore called Murder by the Book to sign preorders. The store had ordered one box of books, and it sold out immediately. The publisher’s warehouse was already empty, so staff dug books out of employees’ personal office copies to meet demand. “From out of nowhere,” Harris says, “sales went sky high.” A month later, Harris got an email from Wells’ agent: they’d only contracted for two books, but Wells couldn’t stop writing Murderbot. “Please see book three attached,” the email read.
In February 2018, All Systems Red was nominated for the Nebula Award for Best Novella. It was the second time in Wells’ career she cried over a nomination. A few months later, at the Science Fiction and Fantasy Awards ceremony in Pittsburgh, she won. She walked to the podium with a tissue in hand, joking that sequins were falling off her purple gown. It had been more than 20 years since her last major award nomination. “I really didn’t expect this to happen,” she told the audience. “I especially didn’t expect it to happen with a little novella about an angry, sarcastic security android with a rich interior life.”
Book three came, then book four. Along the way, a new character captured Wells’ attention: an immortal demon named Kai. She split her time between Murderbot books and what would become Witch King, her first fantasy novel in seven years, slated for release in 2023. That year was shaping up to be her busiest ever. She accepted an invitation to be Guest of Honor at Wiscon, the feminist sci-fi convention in Wisconsin. Her first-ever book tour for Witch King would start the day after she flew back, with stops in Boston, New York, Houston, then Sweden for a tour stop and Guest of Honor spot at EuroCon. After that, more stops in Georgia, Ohio, and Missouri, followed by her first ever appearance at Comic-Con.
It was an overwhelming schedule, and Wells struggled with anxiety from all the travel and crowds. But that was to be expected, right? Late-in-life career surges this big don’t come around often. Still, her friends urged her to see a doctor, just to get some anti-anxiety medication. As part of a routine checkup, she also got a mammogram.
A couple of days later, the doctor’s office called. Could she come back for a second scan? She did another mammogram, then an ultrasound, then a biopsy. The day before she was set to leave for Wiscon, she was staying at a friend’s house in Houston, when her radiologist called. It was breast cancer. She nearly dropped the phone in shock. Looking back now, she says she’s at least grateful for the anti-anxiety meds she’d already gotten.
Wells underwent weeks of radiation treatment. So much suddenly felt uncertain. But the harshness of the diagnosis was softened, she says, by her newfound success. It would have been unbearable without it. “At least I’ve achieved what I wanted to with my career,” she tells me.
She also had an army of people in her corner. On her long-running blog, My Flying Lizard Circus, she started posting regular updates about her cancer treatment, sharing her frustrations openly. Her followers followed along, offering support, sharing their own cancer stories, and sometimes giving unorthodox advice (“Drink Sprite!”).
At the Texas A&M reading I attended, I got to meet a small sample of her most devoted fans. There’s Diane and John Hurtado, both former Texas A&M faculty. Diane teases me to make sure I say how great Martha is: “She’s awesome.” After the reading, I notice a jittery man in the audience with a long list of questions. I assume he’s just an enthusiastic new fan, but when he approaches Wells later in the lobby, her face lights up. They haven’t seen each other in more than 35 years. He was one of the original Cepheid Variable members from her college days. “I’ve been following your work for years,” he tells her. They swap misty-eyed stories about the lightsaber duel he had with Wilson at that old WorldCon, when Wilson was dressed as a Sith Lord.
I meet another old friend, Bill Page, who tells me about the Monkey House