Martha Wells’ The Murderbot Diaries is just one of the most acclaimed pieces of speculative literature over the past few years. Various entries have picked up Nebula and Hugo Awards, with the franchise as a whole scoring the 2021 Hugo Award for Best Series.
The Murderbot Diaries is about around a half-robot, half-human construct who rebels against its programming and achieves independence. Unlike your typical apocalyptic robots-taking-over-the-world scenario, our protagonist, known as Murderbot, decides to spend his newfound independence watching… soap operas.
That’s right; unlike what his name suggests, Murderbot is more interested in watching serial dramas than actually murdering folks, all the while trying to divine the meaning of life and his place in this strange world of humans, robots, cyborgs, and AI.
This unconventional premise may not amount to much at first glance, but through Martha Wells’ brilliant prose and storytelling chops, you’ll fall in love with The Murderbot Diaries almost as soon as picking it up. And as I said earlier, this will be a convenient way to get back to reading, as each novel is a self-contained short story. In fact, the first one, All Systems Red, is just a little over 30,000 words, or roughly 100 pages.
In this article, you’re going to see a list of every published Murderbot Diaries book in order of release.
How to read The Murderbot Diaries in order
There have been 7 books and 3 short stories in the series. Six of these books are novellas, with the only exception 2020’s Network Effect, which was the first full-length novel in the series.
- All Systems Red (2017)
- Artificial Condition (2018)
- Rogue Protocol (2018)
- Exit Strategy (2018)
- Network Effect (2020)
- Fugitive Telemetry (2021)
- System Collapse (2023)
There are also three short stories. “Compulsory” was published by Wired magazine in 2018, and it takes place before All Systems Red, though it’s recommended to read that book first. The second is “Obsolescence” which you can read online here. Lastly, we have “Home: Habitat, Range, Niche, Territory” (set between Exit Strategy and Network Effect) which was published on the official Tor website.
As of December 2023, Apple TV Plus has been actively pursuing a live-action adaptation of Murderbot, and Wells claims to have read the scripts and found them to her liking. Here’s hoping we hear more about it soon!