There’s always fan art, and bog knows I’ve seen enough of that around. (there are some animatics on youtube for the diligent querent.)
Yes. Murderbot made it crystal clear that it was gender=none in the second or third book. VERY much asexual-aromantic. “If you have genitals, you are a ComfortBot. I’m a SecUnit.”
I should probably track down a copy of the audiobooks and see how that treatment went. I mainlined the first five books when I first heard about the series, and pre-ordered the fifth and sixth ones the minute I saw they were available.
I am… cautiously optimistic on how AppleTV treats it. I do hope they take some visual cues from the artist that did the covers- those were fantastic.
I feel like Murderbot would actually adapt well. There’s less specific details that would hamstring them to a particular visual style or structure.
One of the few points is that Murderbot is androgynous. If they can’t get that right, I’m not sure they understand the interactions well enough to make it a good adaptation.
That feels like the least important bit, though. I was just reading one of the books (which actually did have a lot more detail than others in the series), which was substantially less interior than the other books, and it was still something like 75% of key plot points and events were taking place entirely withint SecUnit’s head. (As opposed to 90% in most of the books.) I would say a key characteristic of the series is that it’s about the inside of SecUnit’s head - what they’re feeling and thinking (and the difference between that and what they do and say), their analysis of what others are thinking/feeling/doing, and even when they get into the action, it’s mostly strategizing and hacking. Other adaptations with this kind of interiority feel the need to stick in secondary characters who can have everything discussed/explained to them, but the whole point here is that SecUnit does not talk about these things. If you try to fix the interiority problem, it simply stops being Murderbot and becomes… something else.
I am curious how they will pull it off. I think it could be neat to have an unreliable narrator of murderbot’s feed, and see what it decides to show.
While rarer, internal monologues aren’t totally absent from television. Shows like Dexter, Fleabag, House of Cards, and Dead Like Me come to mind offhand.
I’ve never seen anything that had remotely the same level of interiority, though. I’m also not sure an interior monologue alone would solve the problem, either - you also have the problem of depicting the complex hacking stuff on screen, etc.
tbf, it’s not really discussed in the book either. a reader know it’s complicated only because mb says humans couldn’t do it.
usually that sort of stuff is done through showing other people’s reactions to success, or by having someone else try and fail.
personally, i imagine it’s got to follow the stories of the characters around mb, and we see it through their eyes. for instance, they could talk about the governor being removed, and what that means… giving us the same info readers get from mb
that said, it is all a diary/letter: so we could also get everything from talking to the camera to stardate log overdubs. coolest would be skarsgård sitting in front of a crackling fire, smoking a pipe, reading the books out loud.
I kinda like the idea of a bit of a fake out for people not familiar with the books.
Like the first episode or two seems to have an Arrested Development-style narrator making asides. It’s clear to the audience these are snippets of somebody’s internal monologue but not whose. Then it’s revealed to be the “robot” that’s been unobtrusively lurking in the background the whole time - who is the actual main character.
Maybe there’s even a few seemingly random cut-aways to scenes from Sanctuary Moon that don’t have any clear connection to what is happening. Then when the audience finds out about Murderbot and its love of soaps, they realise those are moments Murderbot gets bored of what the humans are doing/saying and decides to catch up with its stories.
I think that a POV shot that gets minimized as a picture-in-picture while Sanctuary Moon plays on the main screen would be a good way of showing this. The trick is to not overdue it. But you could show it a couple of times just to get the feel of how Murderbot deals with boredom.
