Hi all! I know this announcement is a couple of months late, but System Collapse spoiler tags were needed for the six months following this book's release, and this time window has expired. We should now feel free to add SC content and update everything to our heart's content!

Created the page for the newly announced adaptation. Hopefully the titling and structure of it is good.

Maybe I'll add the missing info when I've finished the series.

Hi. Couldn't find any Discord or some sort of social media page about murderbot so I write here.

I'm about to finish 4th book. There's no translation (in my language) of the rest of the books. That's why I'm gonna read them in English. But probably gonna face abbreviations a lot, like ART. It would be wonderful to have a list for me and people who's trying to remember some stuff.

Just to check in before I do any further remodeling: I'm trying to clean up a few pages that have little to no text on them, including pages that have a line from the book but not a lot else.

Does anyone have active plans to do anything with these soon? If not, I'm planning to clean them up and (if the information might be useful) integrate them into a more condensed form.

For example: The Systems category has at least seven pages, only one of which has any major information on it. Most of the rest are just pages that were created with the title and linked to the category.

In some of the articles, Perihelion is described like this: "a supposed teaching and research vessel, and occasional cargo hauler. These goals are actually a cover for his crew's anti-corporate activities, which are to gather information and strike out against corporations." (This is from the article on Seth.)

In Network Effect, ART/Perihelion says, "I am a teaching vessel, and a research vessel for deep space mapping, and I sometimes haul cargo. All that is true. My crew also gathers information and takes actions for anti-corporate organizations that operate as part of and are supported by the polity of Mihira and New Tideland, and administered by the Pansystem University of Mirhira and New Tideland."

I don't think it's quite true to say Perihelion is a "supposed" teaching and research vessel. Perihelion's public activities serve well as a cover for covert activities, but they are legitimate purposes as well. I suggest striking "supposedly" and replacing "actually a cover" with "also a cover".

With plentiful energy, nearly infinite energy storage (Murderbot's built-in batteries will keep it alive for hundreds of thousands of hours), recycler technology making food and other goods cheap, and low-level bots providing a lot of services, the universe of The Murderbot Diaries should be in a post-scarcity economy like what Preservation has, but the Corporation Rim isn't. There has to be something valuable and scarce to give corporations enough leverage to be able to force people into multi-generational indentured servitude. Why did Ayers and company sign their way into 20 year contracts on a mining world? Why does Eletra's family stay with Barish Estranza and try to get their children into the management track instead of hopping on a ship to a freehold planet? Sure, they'd need passage on a ship... but why is that expensive, when ships are probably built by bots and can be piloted by low-level bots? Why do corporations need employees enough to contract them for decades or generations, when there is so much automation?

I've speculated that wormhole technology and proprietary coordinates might be part of what gave rise to the Corporation Rim (the age of the CR and the shift from cold-sleep ships to wormhole ships seem similar). Whether that's the key technology or it's the recyclers or energy storage or terraforming, there has to be something unusual about the technology, or it would just be copied by anyone who escapes the CR and there would be a zillion free worlds muddling along without bond companies.

Perhaps it's something rare that has to be mined-- a classic SF trope. If so, it has to be something that isn't found on planets or asteroids like the ones in our solar system. The only mining operation we've seen in detail on RaviHyral involved strange synthetics (that's what Mero, Tappan and Rami were developing technology to identify). GrayCris is willing to kill to obtain alien remnants, despite the risks. Even the destruction of the database containing coordinates to the Lost Colony by Adamantium (despite the database being a valuable asset) may have been related to the alien remnants there.

My best guess is that wormhole travel (and/or some other critical technology, with terraforming as my second choice) requires something derived from strange synthetics, e.g. "exotic matter" (see my post about wormholes), and that for some reason strange synthetics can't be mined entirely using automation. (We know strange synthetics can have properties that interfere with scanners.) If the strange synthetics get used up, a constant supply would be needed. If the CR's forced labor is required for wormhole travel to be possible, no one else is going to be entirely free of their forced-labor economy, unless they want to be confined to single systems or travel in cold-sleep ships. Even Preservation doesn't do that. Terraforming is my second choice of a critical technology because we know Preservation is still engaged in terraforming the rest of the planet Dr. Mensah and the others live on, but I think if all terraforming was dependent on CR technology, Preservation Alliance wouldn't have been able to remain independent of the CR.

The "Underground Railroad" subplot in Fugitive Telemetry suggests that whatever economic leverage the CR has over its population, it isn't enough to prevent rebellion and subversion. Independent ships evidently have access to enough tech and coordinates to help populations leave CR polities. Perhaps the CR will dissolve over time, as people who had the misfortune to be born within its boundaries migrate out and found more pleasant places to live (even hollowed out asteroids could be an improvement). It could take a few generations, but it's hard to believe the gunships would be able to keep everyone contained forever. Within the CR, the propaganda seems to be that freehold worlds are populated by cannabalistic savages, which probably discourages people from leaving. But media percolates in from outside the CR-- Murderbot had seen some before it met the PreservationAux team.

The Preservation Alliance obviously has lots of resources and life is comfortable there, so I think it wouldn't even deal with the Corporation Rim if there were not some critical resource they need that the CR controls.

Obviously, they vary. Preservation Station looks like an antique ship with a transit ring built around it. There are some large-ish open areas inside (Dr. Mensah's office overlooks one), but probably mostly corridors and rooms. TranRollanHyfa has a huge main "mall" area with hotels and other buildings and gardens in it and an "upper torus" (where Doctor Mensah was being held by GrayCris). "Upper torus" implies that the rest of it might also be torus shaped. I've never been able to figure out if there's an artificial sky projected over the buildings in TRH, or big transparent panels showing stars/planets/etc., or an artistic looking ceiling or what.

I don't think the torus on TRH or the transit rings on other stations are rotating for gravity. It just happens to be shaped like a torus. I think the "transit ring" part of a station is probably a torus-shaped structure extending out from whatever else might be in the station, where ships dock with a bit of space between them. The embarkation area is definitely part of the transit ring. But there might be other structures inside that ring or another ring parallel to it that serves some other purpose.

In general, the visual style and tech level seems more like "Star Trek" than "2001: A Space Odyssey." ;)

Hi all! I wanted to refresh this question: what would people think of trying to merge the wikis?

This one has nearly twice as many articles, so from a sheer quantity of work perspective it would be smart to move content from murderbotdiaries to here during a merge process. Aside from this, I noticed that a lot of pages on both wikis tended to have extremely similar content, possibly from people copying content over or being confused about which to edit or where to go. (I've been moving some of my changes here , so unless you look in article histories it's probably going to look even moreso than usual.)

It's also worth noting that this wiki's name fits the overall series better these days. (I get the impression murderbotdiaries was released before Network Effect, which means this was before we knew TMBD would refer particularly to the novellas.)

I prefer murderbotdiaries's color scheme, personally, and I like the picture choices, as well as much of the content that's there.

Thoughts?

Hello,

Can someone tell me what does the title, All Systems Red, mean?