Martha Wells: System Rebuild
MARTHA SUSAN WELLS was born September 1, 1964 in Fort Worth TX. She attended Texas A&M University, graduating with a BA in anthropology. She lives in College Station TX with her husband.
Her debut fantasy novel The Element of Fire (1993) began the Ile-Rien series, which includes The Death of the Necromancer (1998) and the Fall of Ile-Rien trilogy The Wizard Hunters (2003), The Ships of Air (2004), and The Gate of Gods (2005), plus collection Between Worlds: The Collected Ile-Rien and Cineth Stories (2015).
The Books of the Raksura series began with The Cloud Roads (2011) and continued with The Serpent Sea (2012), The Siren Depths (2012), The Edge of Worlds (2016), and The Harbors of the Sun (2017), plus collections The Falling World & The Tale of Indigo and Cloud (2014) and The Dead City & The Dark Earth Below (2015); the series as a whole was a finalist for the Best Series Hugo Award.
Her standalone novels include City of Bones (1995) and Wheel of the Infinite (2000), plus YA novels Emilie and the Hollow World (2013) and Emilie and the Sky World (2014). She has also written Star Wars and Stargate Atlantis tie-ins, and was lead story writer for a Magic: The Gathering expansion.
While most of her work is fantasy, her most successful work to date is the Murderbot Diaries series. First novella All Systems Red (2017) won Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Awards, and was a Philip K. Dick Award finalist. Sequels include Hugo Award-winning novella Artificial Condition (2018), novellas Rogue Protocol (2018) and Exit Strategy (2018), Hugo Award-winning novel Network Effect (2020), novella Fugitive Telemetry (2021), novel System Collapse (2023), and assorted short fiction. The Murderbot Diaries won the Hugo Award for Best Series in 2021, and development of a TV adaptation is currently underway.
Her most recent fantasy novel is Witch King (2023), winner of the Dragon Award. A sequel is forthcoming. Tordotcom is also republishing many books from her backlist in author’s preferred editions.
Excerpt from the interview:
“Murderbot’s interior voice is very similar to my own. Instead of dancing around a lot of my issues with anxiety and depression, I finally used Murderbot to talk about them. I think that’s one of the reasons why it sounds like me, and it’s a very personal character to me in a way a lot of my other characters are not. I do enjoy writing it, still.
“There are always people who complain at you online. It goes back to that thing of not understanding that people online are still real people. Some readers want to use the author as a scapegoat and a way to exercise their frustration. It’s not fun to exercise your frustration on the publisher, because that’s a faceless corporation – it’s more fun to go after a person that you feel like you can reach, and hurt. I pretty much try to avoid that, but, sometimes, you can’t. I’ve gone off Twitter because of all the terrible stuff that happened with Twitter. I left probably a year ago – it’s been quite a while – and I’ve been on a couple other social media sites, and I’ve just recently given up on one because there’s too much of that negativity. There seems to be a thing lately with blaming the author for things like distribution problems or problems with retailers. It’s weird how these ideas get passed around sometimes, and people start saying, ‘Why did you do this?!’ And it’s like, ‘I didn’t do that….’
“I like to recommend books and say, ‘This is coming out; this looks really good; or, I read this, it was great.’ And I couldn’t do that on one site, because people would complain about what retailer it was at or whatever, and it’s like, ‘I’m just recommending a book. I’m not selling it – I can’t do customer service.’ It just got to the point where I can’t really recommend books online anymore, and that was one of my favorite things to do. I see a point in the future of my social media, especially with the TV show coming out, where I’m just not online.
“With every Murderbot book, I’ve started without knowing where it’s going to go. I like experiencing the story almost the way the reader is going to experience it – finding everything out as I go along. With all the Murderbot books, I was never sure how they were going to end up, what the core of the story was going to be. It’s a combination of finding the story that needs to be told – particularly with Murderbot, with that character’s evolution. There has to be something that changes or becomes more clear for the character in each one, and it may not be central to the plot, but the plot should serve that change, whatever it is.
“Sometimes it’s as simple as a character making a decision about what they are going to do about something – it doesn’t have to be really life-changing, just ‘Am I going to accept this?’ or ‘Am I going to deal with it?’ And dealing with it might not fix anything, but now you’re dealing with it as opposed to ignoring it.
“Murderbot was optioned for the TV show a while ago – I want to say it was before the pandemic. First, around 2019, it was optioned for a movie, and we got to the contract stage, but it fell apart because of financing. So it was available to be optioned again, and we did another round of talking to different people who were interested in it. We ended up making the deal with Depth of Field, Paul and Chris Weitz. I think the first email we exchanged was in 2021. That’s how long it’s been in the works.
“I think the TV show is going to be really good. It’s been cool for me to talk to them about it, and help come up with solutions to problems, and talk a lot about the worldbuilding, and see the production paintings. Chris and Paul Weitz are writing and producing and directing. It’s going to be on Apple TV+. They’re going to start filming in February. Right before Christmas, Paul was scouting locations. It will star Alexander Skarsgård.
“I really do trust the team. We’ve been talking about this for at least two years, and I think they really get the character, and the world. One of the first things we talked about was the fact that I understand it has to be different because you’re taking a very internal first-person narrative and having to make it three-dimensional and visual. There’s stuff that Murderbot can tell the reader in prose, that it can’t say out loud, but we’re going to have to show somehow instead. There will be things it refers to that have to be shown visually in a scene. Prose and TV are two completely different types of storytelling. There are a lot of things that are going to be difficult and a lot of things that are going to be really cool possibilities. I don’t think there’s been a decision yet on when it’s going to come out.
Interview design by Francesca Myman
Read the full interview in the February 2024 issue of Locus.
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