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I really honestly thought that the Murderbot series was making fun of leftists and that the show was too. I guess it was kind of a reverse Poe's Law situation where I read sincere views that seemed ridiculous to me as a satire of those views.
This is just more and more hilarious as I think back on the murderbot novels I read (a total of 5 of them i think).
One of the aspects of the setting is that the leftist little utopia planet gets to exist mostly because a larger capitalist/corportist system allows it to exist, and indirectly supports its existence. It has the same vibes as a small town deciding to be a little communist commune inside America. The town can survive with a totally anemic economy, because the rest of America is producing food and consumer products at such dirt cheap prices. The town only needs to export and trade a little to keep afloat.
The leftist planet utopia in the novels is in a very similar situation. They can't do anything complex without help from the corporate system. They want to explore a planet for a possible colonization effort. But they can't produce the spaceships to get there. They can't produce the surveying and survival equipment they need on the planet. And they can't produce the security they need while on the planet (they are so naive they aren't even aware enough to realize they need security). They are helpless kids being given expensive toys.
They are left alone on their planet not because they are strong enough to deter aggression, but because they are so poor and backwards that they have nothing worth stealing.
You went over some of the relationship stuff that happens in the novel. It has what I feel is an accurate level of interpersonal drama among sexually fluid and diverse crew (aka a lot of drama). And the main narrator of the story, the murderbot, sees all this drama as pointless and stupid, especially in the face of life-or-death stakes.
To me its a story about some incompetent leftists that are overly focused on pointless and stupid interpersonal drama that get saved by a hyper-competent corporate slave (and then in later novels its an ex-slave). If this is what passes for leftist literature, then maybe I need to go back through some of the stuff I've dismissed. Or maybe the lesson is that as long as the author says the correct things in interviews they can absolutely trash leftists with impunity (are we sure the author isn't a closeted pro-capitalist?).
It is, but there's noticeable difference between people poking fun at themselves and outsiders mocking them. Murderbot is, IMO, very clearly the former; this is pretty noticeable if you compare how right-wing sci-fi would/has portrayed a similar group of characters.
I'd also note that it paints an extremely rosy picture of the Preservation Alliance society as being a functionally utopian society with complete abundance of core needs and functionally zero crime.
I think it's more that insiders don't realize how ridiculous they look to people who don't share their assumptions and blindspots.
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I agree that the books are surely making fun of progressives, though Murderbot also finds the crew members to be cute, and wants to protect their foolish existences. The overall worldview of the books reads to me as sympathetic towards progressives, while also recognising that the capitalists, while unpleasant, better understand the brute realities of the world.
This paradox is what makes the story interesting.
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