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Kam and I have been watching the Murderbot TV series, and we’ve both been enjoying it quite a bit.

I’ve read several (but not yet all) of the books; Kam hasn’t read any of them.

I started out pretty dubious about the show; the first few minutes of the first episode didn’t inspire confidence in me. But over the course of the first episode, it won me over.

I enjoy the humor; I enjoy the characters; I enjoy SecUnit being an avid media consumer (and I enjoy the snippets of Sanctuary Moon); I really enjoy SecUnit’s loathing of having to interact with people and make eye contact and such. (All of which are things I also enjoy about the books.)

(There was one moment in the show that I especially liked in that eye-contact regard, though I’m not sure whether it was intentional or not: The camera is focused on SecUnit’s face from the front, and as SecUnit turns its head, its eyes jump from just-to-one-side of looking directly at the camera to just-to-the-other-side. That is, it seemed to me to be treating looking into the camera like making eye contact, and therefore avoiding it.)

I don’t find the casting of SecUnit jarring, but I know that a lot of people do, and I sympathize; I suspect I would have a much harder time enjoying the show if I had pictured someone browner and more androgynous-looking and shorter and less typically-male-voice-sounding. (Someone in the WisCon discussion of Murderbot just now suggested that Vico Ortiz (Jim from Our Flag Means Death) would’ve been a good choice; I suspect that they would have been a better physical match for a lot of readers’ mental image of the character.)

But for what it’s worth, the show does feel a lot like the books to me. Not an exact or perfect rendition, of course, but a pretty good adaptation.