Bestselling and award-winning author Martha Wells is taking everyone’s favorite robot back into the fire in her upcoming book “Platform Decay,” which comes out on May 5, 2026.
The book begins with a familiar spark, a rescue, but Wells wanted to push the setting into something stronger and tougher to move through, eventually coming up with another unique sci-fi setting that Murderbot and its friends can navigate while encountering friends, foes and more eye contact. But beneath the action, Wells is still writing to the heart of what makes Murderbot resonate: the desire to help, the limits of what to risk and the lingering weight of what the character has experienced. “Murderbot has been described as a comfort read,” Wells told Space.com, because you get to watch someone “be able to take action in situations where you would really like to.”
Q: When did the idea of ‘Platform Decay’ first appear to you?
MW: “I had been wanting to do a story of Murderbot rescuing someone from a corporate station. And I know we’ve done that before. And I was playing with the idea a lot. And then I also thought about doing something on a torus, a planetary torus because I always try to make the setting a little bit different. That led into the idea of: what if this torus is extremely difficult to navigate, given how large this thing is? It’s got to be more difficult to navigate than a planet.
And [that] also [got] into my own frustrations with not having a lot of mass transit in the U.S. and in especially where I live, and just how difficult it can be to navigate that kind of situation. I’d also wanted to have Murderbot interact more with Mensah’s family. So this was a good way to do that.”
Q: How are the stakes different this time, and what makes it feel fresh?
MW: “Well, one of the things that [Platform Decay] gets into is the conflict of who do you save? Because Murderbot’s mission is to rescue these specific people, but to do that, it has to decide how much to risk to rescue other people in the same situation.
I feel that’s becoming a much more personal dilemma for all of us just thinking about [the events happening in] Minnesota and how much can you risk, as you have to protect your own family and yourself. But you see people you want to help. Murderbot is always a great character to be able to do things that we can’t do to make that happen.”
Q: You’ve written children characters briefly before in previous ‘Murderbot’ books. How do you keep them from being plot devices?
MW: “I think all characters can fall into that same trap. So you have to think about things from that person’s perspective. That’s basically it. I don’t think specifically about them being children so much as just people in this situation, and especially people that are not completely helpless, but, there’s just not very much they can do to help.”
Q: Your books have such a sharp, funny voice. Does that come naturally?
MW: “It comes naturally for me and as my sense of humor is sort of bitter and sarcastic. The worse things are going, the more bitter and sarcastic my humor sometimes gets. So when I first started writing Murderbot in 2016, I needed to express my anger and I needed to express how horrible everything seemed to be going and, and continues to get. The bitter humor has been a part of that. And I think that’s how a lot of people deal with these things.
And I think especially with our popular culture, there’s almost an emphasis on that. I’ve been watching ‘The Pitt’ lately, and it’s almost like a comfort show, because you get to see people come in with horrible injuries and they’re just like ‘oh, we can fix this.’ You see people trying to help as much as they can, even when they don’t manage to, when they fail, it still feels encouraging and, and heartening in a lot of ways. That’s what I wanted to do with Murderbot.”
Q: Has the Apple TV show changed anything about how you write Murderbot’s voice on the page?
MW: “It has a little bit. I hear some of the character’s voices now in the actor’s voice. I think it does help me visualize things, and in some ways the books are different, but there’s so much continuity there. They did come up with so many things for the show that I thought were just fabulous, like the embroidery on the … costumes for the Preservation group. The costume designers thought that Arada would get bored on the wormhole trip and so she would embroider …That’s the kind of thing where you have a lot of people thinking about something. The synergy is so incredible.”
Q: Without any spoilers, describe ‘Platform Decay’ in three-ish words
MW: “It’s like the family road trip from hell …The longer version of that is the family road trip from hell on Ringworld”
Q: Is there something you wished interviewers asked more about?
MW: “One of the things that used to annoy me the most when the books first started to come out is people who were kind of ignoring the slavery aspect, because it is basically a science fiction slave narrative.”
Q: Did you ever think the series would get this big?
MW: “Oh no. When I did the first novella, it originally was just going to be a standalone, and then when it was bought by Tor.com, they asked for a second novella. I had absolutely no idea the novellas were going to take off like this.”
