Murder is in the air. Everywhere I turn, I see images of a robot killing machine. Then I remind myself where I actually am: in a library lecture room on a college campus in East Texas. The air is a little musty with the smell of old books, and a middle-aged woman with wavy gray-brown hair bows her head as she takes the podium. She might appear a kindly librarian or a cat lady (confirmed), but her mind is a capacious galaxy of starships, flying bipeds, and ancient witches. She is Martha Wells, creator of Murderbot.

Hearing a name like that, you’d be forgiven for running for your life. But the thing about Murderbot—the thing that makes it one of the most beloved, iconic characters in modern-day science fiction—is just that: It’s not what it seems. For all its hugeness and energy-weaponized body armor, Murderbot is a softie. It’s socially awkward and appreciates sarcasm. Not only does it detest murdering, it wants to save human lives, and often does (at least when it’s not binge-watching its favorite TV shows). “As a heartless killing machine,” as Murderbot puts it, “I was a terrible failure.”

The character made its debut in Wells’ 2017 novella, All Systems Red. Yes, a novella: not exactly a popular form at the time, but it flew off the shelves, shocking even Wells’ publisher. In short order, more stories and novellas appeared, and then a couple of full-length novels. Wells scooped up every major award in the genre: four Hugos, two Nebulas, and six Locuses. By the time she and I started talking this past spring, Apple TV+ had begun filming a television adaptation starring Alexander Skarsgård.

At conventions and book signings around the world, Wells draws legions of fans, but here in Texas only about 30 people are nestled in the warm, wood-paneled library, which today is crammed with Murderbot art and paraphernalia. Wells begins by reading a short story, told from the perspective of a scientist who helps Murderbot gain its freedom. After the reading, a woman in the audience tells Wells how impressed she is by the subtlety of the social and political issues in the Murderbot stories. “Was that intentional?” the woman asks. Martha responds politely, affirming that it was, before saying: “I don’t think it’s particularly subtle.” It’s a slave narrative, she says. What’s annoying is when people don’t see that.

What’s also annoying is when people who’ve just discovered Murderbot wonder if she can write anything else. Wells, who is 60 years old, has averaged almost a book a year for more than three decades, ranging from palace intrigues to excursions into distant worlds populated by shapeshifters. But until Murderbot, Wells tended to fly just under the radar. One reason for that, I suspect, is location. Far from the usual literary enclaves of New York or Los Angeles, Wells has lived for all this time in College Station—which is where the nearly 100-year-old library we’re at today resides. Housed on the campus of Texas A&M, her alma mater, the library contains one of the largest collections of science fiction and fantasy in the world.

It’s from this cradle that Wells’ career sprang forth. But post-Murderbot, things have changed. Wells now counts among her friends literary superstars like N. K. Jemisin and Kate Elliott, to say nothing of her fiercely loyal fandom. And it turns out that she’d need all of it—the support, the community, even Murderbot—when, at the pinnacle of her newfound, later-in-life fame, everything threatened to come to an end.

I meet Wells for the first time at one of her favorite spots, a Mexican restaurant on the unusually wide main street that cuts through College Station. She brings along her husband, Troyce Wilson, who’s something of a local history buff. He tells me the street was designed by the nephew of Stephen Austin, the “father of Texas” and namesake of the state’s capital. Wells glances up at the blackboard menu and orders some tacos with corn tortillas. Wilson chides, “What kind of a Texan are you?”

The lifelong kind, apparently. Wells grew up about three hours north of here, in Fort Worth, on a busy street without any other children nearby. She was a weird kid, she says, who had particular problems with numbers—they’d just slip out of her mind. Looking back, she thinks she might have had ADHD or been on the autism spectrum. But if you were a girl in the 1970s, “you didn’t have ADHD,” Wells says. “You were just a troublemaker.”

The young Wells dealt with her awkwardness the same way Murderbot eventually would: by immersing herself in far-off realms. She sketched maps of Monster Island, the home of Godzilla, and wrote fan fiction set in the worlds of Lost In Space and Land of the Giants. At the nearby bookstore, she gazed in wonder at the covers of books like F. M. Busby’s Zelde M’Tana, featuring a Black woman in a jumpsuit raising a gun. She picked her way through Phyllis Gotlieb, John Varley, Andre Norton. There was also Erma Bombeck, the witty writer whose local newspaper column on suburban family life, “At Wit’s End,” hit a vein with ’70s housewives. “That was my first real indication that being a writer was a real job,” Wells says.

But it was in the pages of Starlog, a monthly sci-fi magazine, where Wells first caught a glimpse of her future. Long before the internet, nerds and geeks found ways to come together through libraries, word of mouth, or the pages of their own niche publications. Starlog featured listings of these local groups, and it was here that Wells found out about Cepheid Variable, a student-run organization of sci-fi/fantasy/horror diehards at Texas A&M that also ran the convention known as AggieCon. She applied to the school and got in.

As a student there, Wells joined Cepheid Variable, volunteered at the convention, and tried her hand at writing. Local science fiction writers hosted workshops, and Wells went to every one she could. From their own trials and setbacks she learned earlier than most: A career in this stuff wouldn’t be easy.

In her last year of college, Wells took the lead on organizing AggieCon and invited various authors to attend, including a then lesser-known George R. R. Martin. The con made a record-breaking $10,000 in profit. The Cepheids took some of that money, rented a van, and drove 13 hours nonstop to attend a much larger convention, WorldCon, in Atlanta. One of the Cepheids, a rather tall, sweet boy, had dressed up as a Sith lord, with a lightsaber made of parts he bought at an auto store. He made one for Wells too. “Which led to us actually starting to date,” Wilson says over tacos. “I always tell people we were brought together by the dark side of the Force.”

Around that time, Wells picked up a job doing computer support for Texas A&M’s ocean drilling program, building user interfaces for databases (and acquainting herself with the various human-machine follies that would one day give Murderbot a lot to complain about). Wilson found work breeding pine trees for the Texas Forest Service. Somewhere in there they were married. Wells doesn’t remember exactly how long it’s been. “I’m really bad with numbers,” she reminds me. OK, it was 1995. They tied the knot at a winery just outside of town, a small affair. One of their friends baked a gorgeous three-tier cake with a garden trellis down the side.

Through it all, Wells wrote. Her first book, Element of Fire, was a tale of court intrigue and a finalist for a notable early-career award. The year she got married, she published City of Bones, an adventure story set in a mysterious wasteland, and in 1998 there was The Death of the Necromancer, an unsettling murder mystery, which earned Wells her first Nebula nomination.

Wells continued publishing at a decent clip for the next decade. She was still working in IT but growing dissatisfied with the job and a toxic environment. “I would come home and it would take me a couple of hours to calm down enough to even try to write,” she says. Then, in 2006, a tragedy: Lori, her cake-baking friend from the wedding, died from ovarian cancer. She and Wilson attended Lori’s funeral on a Saturday. The following Monday, Wells quit the IT job, “because life is too short.”

She took the leap and started writing full-time. The moment couldn’t have been worse. In 2008 the economic recession hit. Suddenly she couldn’t sell a thing, not even a short story.

It seems hard, even now, for her to reflect on that time. The taco joint we’re in is beginning to draw a noisy crowd, and though we’ve been doing our best to eat and talk at the same time, Wells’ corn tortillas are starting to fall apart. She sets them aside in frustration. Over the next three years, she explains, she experienced the lowest lows of her career. She wrote a lot of fan fiction and frequently abandoned projects. “I had never started a novel and then had it just fall apart,” she says. “I did that probably six or seven times.” By 2010 she was ready to call it quits.

As a sort of memorial dirge, she went to the place where it all began—Texas A&M. The Cushing Memorial Library was putting on a first-of-its-kind exhibit of science fiction and fantasy work. As she wandered through the displays, she came across a glass case containing part of the original manuscript of her second novel, City of Bones. Near it were classics of the genre. Seeing her book included in such company sent flutters down her spine. Her words still existed. She still existed. It wouldn’t stop here.

After lunch, Wells and Wilson invite me over. I drive separately and pull up to a brick-front house in an upscale neighborhood—their recently purchased dream home, which they call Murderbot Manor. Wilson greets me at the door with a dad joke. “We don’t want any,” he says, before welcoming me in.

Inside, a short hall gives way to a dramatic high-vaulted ceiling and a sitting area. Two built-in bookcases flank a fireplace, and four craftsman chairs with green upholstery are arranged around a blue rug. Along one wall, a deep-brown curio cabinet full of tchotchkes and crystal is the resting place for Wells’ trove of speculative fiction awards. The Hugos—I’ve never seen one before—are remarkable. Each one is different, the bases conceived anew each year by the city and country that hosts the awards. The Nebulas are rectangular prisms with colorful star formations suspended within. Each Christmas, Wells places a shiny festive bow on each of her trophies.

Wells’ office is just off the main sitting area, where a black and gray cat named Max lounges on a daybed. Often, Wells prefers to write on the back porch, which overlooks an expansive backyard. I step outside and hear at least five different types of bird calls. Wilson, who is a member of the local Audubon Society, tells me that more species of bird cross into Texas than any other state in the nation.

Back inside, we take a seat in the family room. Wilson brings out a tray of tea and homemade shortbread—the Hobbiton vibe here is unreal. Another cat, a Siamese named Tasha, reclines on a throw pillow next to Wells. The cat is staring at me. So is Wells, I realize. We’re all observing each other. A line from Murderbot comes to mind: “I’m awkward with actual humans … Keeping the armor on all the time cuts down on unnecessary interactions.”

At the time Wells decided to recommit to writing, in 2010, she had a novel she was struggling to sell. It featured, as she puts it, “polyamorous flying lizard lion bee people.” At conventions, she was relegated to uninteresting panels. “I hadn’t been gone that long,” she says, “and it was just like, nobody had ever heard of me before.” Then a writer friend named Roxanne Conrad intervened, keeping Wells’ spirits up as they hunted for a publisher. It took two years. When someone finally agreed to publish the book, called The Cloud Roads, Wells cried.

A few months later, another breakthrough: The fantasy writer N. K. Jemisin picked up a copy of The Cloud Roads on a whim. It blew her away. In a blurb, she called it the “rarest of fantasies: fresh and surprising, with a story that doesn’t go where ten thousand others have gone before.” With the help of that endorsement, readers started finding Wells again.

Over the next few years, Wells published several sequels to The Cloud Roads, collectively called the Books of the Raksura. They sold modestly, but the fire was back; Wells couldn’t be stopped. By 2016, she was ready to conclude the series. All she had to do was nail an ending. It was giving her trouble, but Wells was a pro; she knew it’d eventually come to her. Then her brain did something funny. It showed her a scene from a different universe entirely.

The scene was simple: a security robot hunkered in a repair cubicle, mending its injuries. Wells was intrigued. So she sketched out an interaction between the bot—a SecUnit, she called it, or, more informally, a Murderbot—and a concerned scientist. And that was that. Cute. Nothing more. Wells planned to kill it off and get back to Raksura. But something stayed her literary sword. “I always try to take the harder road,” she tells me. I suspect it was a bit more than that—some sort of precognition, maybe, of possible greatness. Murderbot had an attitude, a voice, one that almost seemed to write itself into being. Wells kept going.

Then, at a convention later that year, Wells bumped into an editor named Lee Harris. He’d recently joined Tordotcom, working on its new line of short fiction. And Wells’ agent had just sent him something for the line: a 31,000-word novella she was calling The Murderbot Diaries. Harris liked it from the first sentence: “I could have become a mass murderer after I hacked my governor module, but then I realized I could access the combined feed of entertainment channels carried on the company satellites.” A deadpan, conflicted killing machine that just wants to watch TV? At the convention, Harris told Wells he wanted to publish it. And make it two novellas. They’d use Murderbot Diaries for the name of the series, and the first installment they’d call All Systems Red.

The first indication that something unusual—OK, insane—was happening came when Wells drove down to a Houston bookstore (called Murder by the Book) to sign preorders. The store had ordered a box of books. It wasn’t enough. The production warehouse was already empty, so they reached out to the publisher to see if they had any spare copies. At Tordotcom’s headquarters, the publicist ran around and took books out of people’s offices to satisfy the demand. “From out of nowhere,” Harris says, “the sales went sky high.” A month later, he received an email from Wells’ agent. They’d contracted for only two books, but Wells couldn’t stop writing the character. “Please see book three attached,” the email read.

In February 2018, All Systems Red was nominated for a Nebula award for best novella. For the second time in Wells’ career, she was moved to tears. And a few months later, at the Science Fiction & Fantasy Awards conference in Pittsburgh, she won the dang thing. Tissue in hand, she approached the podium, cracking a joke on the way up about the sequins falling off her purple gown. It had been more than 20 years since her last award nomination. “I really didn’t expect this to happen,” she told the audience. “I especially didn’t expect it to happen with a little novella about an angry, sarcastic security android with a rich interior life.”

So book three came. Then book four. Along the way, another character started to grab Wells’ attention, an immortal demon named Kai. So she split her time writing Murderbot books and what would eventually become Witch King, her first fantasy novel in seven years. It was set to be released in 2023, which was quickly shaping up to be her busiest ever. Wells accepted an invitation to be a guest of honor at Wiscon, a feminist science fiction convention held in Wisconsin. Her first-ever book tour, for Witch King, would start the day after she flew back, with stops in Boston, New York, Houston, and then on to Sweden for a book tour stop and a guest of honor spot at EuroCon. After that there were more stops in Georgia, Ohio, and Missouri, and later, her first ever Comic Con.

It was a lot, and Wells struggled with anxiety—the travel, the crowds. But that was to be expected, wasn’t it? It’s not typical for authors this late in their career to experience a surge so meteoric. Still, her friends persuaded her to go see the doctor, if only to get on some anti-anxiety medication. As part of a routine checkup, she also had a mammogram.

A couple of days later, the doctor’s office called. Could she come back for a do-over? So she had a second mammogram, and then an ultrasound, and then a biopsy. The day before she left for Wiscon, she was staying at a friend’s house in Houston. That’s when she got the call from her radiologist. It was breast cancer. She nearly hung up the phone in shock. Thinking back now, she tells me, she’s at least grateful for the anxiety meds.

Wells underwent weeks of radiation treatments. A lot was suddenly uncertain. The harshness of the diagnosis was tempered somewhat, she says, by her sudden success. It would have really sucked without that. “At least I’ve achieved what I wanted to with my career,” she tells me.

She also had people in her corner. On her longstanding blog, called My Flying Lizard Circus, she started posting updates, often frustrated, about her cancer. Her subscribers followed along, offering support and sometimes questionable advice (“Drink Sprite!”), and sharing their own experiences with the disease.

At the Texas A&M reading, I meet a small cross-section of her most devoted fans. There’s Diane and John Hurtado, both former faculty at Texas A&M. Diane playfully nags me to say nice things about Wells: “She’s awesome.” Then, after Wells reads, I notice a somewhat jittery man in the audience who has a number of questions. I take him for an enthusiastic fan, but later in the lobby, Wells lights up in recognition when he approaches her. They haven’t seen each other in more than 35 years. He’s a Cepheid Variable from her college days. “I’ve been following your stuff for a while,” he tells her. Glossy-eyed, they talk about the duel he and Wilson got into at the Worldcon where he dressed up as a Sith lord.

I meet another friend of Wells’ named Bill Page, who tells me about the Monkey House, a home off-campus where Cepheids lived and hosted parties for years. There’s also Hal Hall, who got Texas A&M’s sci-fi collection off the ground. He berates himself for forgetting to bring books for Wells to sign. Then I catch Wilson, making the rounds as Wells’ right-hand man. Now in his retirement years, he serves as her assistant. “She doesn’t pay very well, but she did buy me a house,” he quips.

I’m starting to see why Wells never took off for some illustrious literary haven, how she managed to navigate all her false starts and disappointments. It was all right here, in College Station, the thicker-than-blood friendships and whimsical camaraderie. Two surgeries and 10 lymph node removals later, Wells is now cancer free. I can tell how relieved she and Wilson are. At one point, they tell me they’re planning a big trip to Seattle for Worldcon, followed by a seven-day cruise in Alaska.

After the reading, Wells, Wilson, and I head out to one last meal at a farm-to-table restaurant in the slightly posher neighboring town of Bryan. Everyone’s tuckered out. I order something alcoholic. Wells gets a virgin mojito. “Hemingway would not approve,” Wilson says.

We talk about found families, the people who keep us going. Every year, Wilson says, a bunch of Cepheids meet about a week before Thanksgiving at the Monkey House for an annual “Monkeygiving.” He calls it their “last chance to be with our loved ones before we go home to our families.”

My mind goes to Murderbot. It claims to be a loner, to not need friends. Yet it forms a deep attachment to a sentient research vessel. Later, it even offers one of its human companions a hug. Of all her characters, Wells has said, Murderbot is the one she’s put the most of herself into. It’s a surprising claim, until it’s not. It’s obvious that Wells feels a distance from other humans, even as she’s spent a life trying to relate to them, to understand them.

After dinner, Wells and Wilson head home to play the fantasy game Pathfinder online with a group of friends across Texas and California. Wells, who plays as a human ranger, got an actual longbow for her birthday last year (though she’s still trying to get her arm back in shape post-surgery). When the cohort last signed off, a concerned sorcerer had teleported an outmatched cleric right into a giant crocodile’s mouth. They managed to pull the cleric out of danger right before teleporting into a hallway with a tentacle monster.

There’s always a tentacle monster, isn’t there? A scary illness. Career doldrums. The constant fight for recognition. To this day, most people—even in College Station—still don’t know who Martha Wells is. Local newspapers ignore press releases about her latest award. The Barnes and Noble down the street has never invited her to its Star Wars Day, even though she has written a Star Wars novel. She did a signing in town once where nobody showed up.

Whatever. Murderbot wouldn’t care, and besides, there are more books to write. Just after I leave Texas, Wells learns that both Witch King and System Collapse, her second Murderbot novel, have been nominated for Hugos. She declines the Murderbot nomination. This time, she wants someone else’s name to be called.

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