Murderbot Diaries' Martha Wells says the next book is likely the last

Platform Decay, the eighth book in the Murderbot Diaries series, comes out on May 5, so it may seem early for fans to start thinking about the ninth installment in Martha Wells’ series about the titular cranky, misanthropic android. Wells tells Polygon she’s barely even started thinking about that ninth book yet. But she also says it may be the final installment in the New York Times bestselling series.

“I only have one Murderbot book on contract right now,” Wells says. “I'm going to start working on that after I finish the third Witch King book, which I'm working on now. It'll probably be the end of the year, at least, before I start the next Murderbot. I've got some vague ideas for it, but I'm not really sure what it's going to be yet. And that may be the last book.”

The Murderbot Diaries books — and the ongoing Apple TV adaptation — center on a rogue SecUnit, a genderless, anonymous humanoid amalgam of human and robot parts built as a security drone for a far-future megacorporation. This particular SecUnit has secretly hacked its own software to free itself from human control, and it thinks of itself as “Murderbot.” While it feels a fierce protective urge toward the humans it claims as its own, it’s deeply uncomfortable with emotions and with the embarrassing messiness of human bodies. It would rather be left alone to immerse itself in pop culture. All of which has made the books particularly relatable and totemic for people who identify as outsiders, particularly neurodivergent and queer fans.

Image: Orbit Books

In the upcoming Platform Decay, though, SecUnit has installed a new “mental health module” to analyze its emotional responses and help it recalibrate its mind, as it also tries to rescue some of its chosen human family from a massive corporate planetary torus. (Wells has described the book as “The family road trip from hell, on Ringworld.”) Wells points out that the character has come a long way toward emotional equilibrium over the course of the series — and there may not be anywhere else to go.

“I've really taken Murderbot on this journey — you can tell in Platform Decay, it's in a really good place," she says. “Its attitude and what's happening [in its mind] is very, very different from Network Effect and System Collapse.”

Wells says she doesn’t have a planned structure or endpoint for the Murderbot Diaries, and she isn’t working toward a particular plot event or finale.

“It’s never going to be the kind of series where you're going to get to the end and everything's going to be solved and fixed,” she says. "It’s not a story where [the protagonists] can just kill one villain and things will get better. In this corporate hellscape, there's always going to be someone to take their place.”

At the same time, she says previous books in the series have hinted at some kind of crisis point for the massive corporate overlord systems that created SecUnits as slaves, and are responsible for most of the franchise’s dystopic elements.

“There are hints in System Collapse and Platform Decay — you're starting to see these corporations really start to spiral out of control under their own greed,” Wells says. “Basically, the stakes being so high for the individuals trapped in them that it spirals very easily into violence. We see the system eating itself with this factionalized violence. So you see the potential that this system, the Corporation Rim, is probably not going to last a super long time. It’s just going to fall apart under its own lack of ability to deal with these internal problems. And the fighting is probably going to spread.”

At the same time, Wells isn’t necessarily interested in telling that story, or exploring other stories within the world she created for Murderbot.

Image: Orbit Books

“I don't really have any major confrontational moment planned with Murderbot versus the Corporation Rim, because that's just not what these stories are about,” she says. “You can kind of see that Murderbot is going to be OK, so it feels like, to me, we’re coming to the end of Murderbot's story — [or what] would be interesting to other people, as opposed to just its daily life.”

Platform Decay also hints at much larger events going on in the background, particularly with the liberated SecUnit known as Three, and with the spread of Murderbot’s SecUnit-freeing hacking program. The new book hints at Three heading off on a major adventure while Murderbot is busy elsewhere, but Wells isn’t currently thinking about spin-offs or side stories.

“I don't know at this point,” she says. “I'm really bad at planning out ahead of time what I'm going to write. I used to have conversations with my agent about what that would be, and then I would go and do something different. So I'm really lucky at this point, I guess, to be popular enough that my publisher understands that and puts up with me. I really don't know what's going to be next. It'll depend on what ideas I get for stories, or what I really want to write at the time.”

Platform Decay is available for pre-order on Amazon, Bookshop.org, Barnes & Noble, and other online booksellers.

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