Live Green, Wear Black.: Cyborgs in SciFi and the Politics of Personhood, Citizenship & Passing

I don’t know what took me so long to get around to Old Man’s War. It sat on my TBR list for ages, and when I finally picked it up in late December 2025, I expected a clever genre satire — which is exactly what the first book was originally intended to be. As the series progresses, I noticed that the tone has shifted from wry commentary into something more structurally ambitious and ethically unsettling, especially around embodiment, memory, and the question of what makes someone a person.

Even though Scalzi started this series twenty years ago, it fits right into the mainstream conversations we’re having now about identity, autonomy, and the politics of engineered bodies (or gender affirming surgery).

So when I picked up Martha Wells’ Platform Decay, those same questions were already rattling around in my head. Wells and Scalzi are doing very different things stylistically, but they’re circling the same ethical terrain: who gets to be a person, who gets to belong, and what happens when a system decides your body is something it can overwrite or destroy.

And in Murderbot’s case, that threat isn’t abstract. It’s physical. It’s immediate. And it’s final.

One of the most striking things about Murderbot is that its greatest fear isn’t death. It’s being overwritten — or, increasingly, being destroyed outright.

By the time we reach Platform Decay, Murderbot isn’t just a rogue SecUnit. It’s an obsolete rogue SecUnit. The Corporation Rim doesn’t maintain older models; it recycles them. And “recycling” in this universe is not a gentle euphemism. Wells describes it in ways that are deliberately visceral: bodies stripped for parts, organic components dissolved, mechanical components melted down and repurposed.

The Apple+ adaptation makes this even more explicit. The corporation doesn’t want to “capture” Murderbot for reintegration. They want to liquidate it. The moment they realize it’s off‑module, they move straight to destruction. No hesitation. No attempt at repair. No interest in recovery.

Just disposal.

And the only reason Murderbot survives is because its Preservation Alliance friends intervene — loudly, publicly, and with enough political leverage to force the corporation to stop.

This is where the stakes of memory become clear. Losing your memories is one kind of erasure. Being melted down is another. Murderbot’s fear isn’t just about identity; it’s about the very real possibility that its body — the vessel of its autonomy — will be destroyed before anyone can argue otherwise.

And this is where chosen family becomes more than emotional support. They’re the ones who remember you when systems try to erase you. They’re the ones who insist you are real.

One of my favorite sci-fi authors and near neighbor in San Francisco, Charlie Jane Anders, wrote a blog on the trending topic in fiction of memory (see: https://reactormag.com/the-most-surprising-book-trend-right-now-memory-sharing/). This trend focuses on the idea of exchanging or experiencing memories collectively. But Murderbot and Scalzi are dealing with something different: memory backup.

In Old Man’s War, character Harry Wilson reveals that, in their downtime, the green soldiers discuss whether they’re actually the same people they were before the transfer, or whether they’re just copies with inherited memories. Harry Wilson eventually lands on a kind of pragmatic acceptance: he likes being alive, and he wants to keep going. But there’s an unspoken implication that if the original humans had understood what the Colonial Union was really doing, they might not have agreed to it.

That gap — between the original and the copy — is where the uncanny valley opens up. A perfect replica of you is not you, even if it talks like you and remembers your childhood. The closer the copy gets, the more unsettling the difference becomes. Scalzi’s soldiers feel that difference in their bones, even if they can’t fully articulate it. They know they’re continuations, not the same consciousness that lived in the old human body.

Murderbot’s fear of being overwritten sits in that same space. But for Murderbot, the stakes are even sharper: the corporation doesn’t need a compliant copy — it can simply melt down the original and build something new. The uncanny valley becomes a tool of control. If the system sees you as interchangeable, then your continuity doesn’t matter. Your survival doesn’t matter.

But to the people who love you, it does.

And that’s the key: identity isn’t just memory — it’s continuity, embodiment, and relationship. A replica can’t fake that.

There’s another layer here that feels important to name. Murderbot’s need to “pass” as human — to mimic the right gait, the right tone, the right social cues — isn’t just about fitting in. It’s about avoiding unnecessary violence that jeopardizes his friends but acting appropriately to protect them. It’s about not being clocked.

This is where Murderbot’s experience echoes the experiences of with trans people who often have to perform gender “correctly” to avoid political, social, financial, or physical harm. Passing isn’t about aesthetics. It’s about safety. It’s about navigating systems that punish deviation.

Murderbot is illegible by design — not human, not machine, not allowed to define itself. Trans people often face the same institutional illegibility. Bureaucracies don’t know what to do with them. Systems misgender them, misclassify them, or erase them entirely.

And when Murderbot fears being overwritten, that maps disturbingly well onto the real‑world experience of being deadnamed, misgendered, or legislated out of existence. It’s a form of ontological violence — a threat to the right to exist as oneself.

Murderbot’s self‑creation — hacking its governor module, naming itself, choosing its relationships — is a liberation arc. And like many trans narratives, it’s a story of building the self in defiance of systems that insist you are something else.

This is where the Preservation Alliance becomes so important. Murderbot’s relationships with these humans aren’t incidental. They’re political. They’re the only reason it’s still alive.

The Corporation Rim treats SecUnits as property — and older SecUnits as scrap. Preservation treats Murderbot as a person. That difference is everything.

Chosen family is how marginalized people build safety nets outside oppressive systems. It’s how they survive. Murderbot risks itself for its friends not because it’s programmed to, but because it chooses to. And they show up for Murderbot in return — legally, socially, emotionally, and in the most literal sense: they prevent its body from being destroyed.

Chosen family is also what preserves identity when memory is fragile. Even if Murderbot were overwritten, its chosen family would know something was wrong. They would insist on the real version. They would fight for it.

And in a world where older models get melted down, that insistence is not symbolic. It’s life‑saving.

Two of my favorite authors, Charlie Jane Anders and Annalee Newitz, have been writing and thinking about these issues for years. Anders often talks about transness as a technology of survival — a set of strategies for navigating hostile systems. Murderbot does exactly that. It builds survival algorithms. It masks. It performs safety while constructing identity internally.

Newitz’s work focuses on who owns bodies, who controls labor, and what happens when people are treated as replaceable. That’s the entire premise of SecUnits, governor modules, and engineered soldiers. Their writing on chosen family also reinforces the idea that belonging is a political act.

Together, Anders and Newitz argue that science fiction is where we rehearse the politics of who counts as human. Their work gives language to what Murderbot is living through.

Platform Decay makes these themes explicit. Murderbot’s brown friends from a non‑Rim world are detained by corporate operatives in scenes that echo the past year of ICE overreach in the U.S. Arbitrary detention, opaque bureaucracy, the threat of forced labor — Wells isn’t being subtle.

And Murderbot itself is treated as disposable. Not dangerous. Not valuable. Just obsolete.

The Corporation Rim’s logic is simple:
If we call them tools, we don’t have to treat them as people.
If they’re obsolete tools, we don’t even have to keep them around.

Preservation’s logic is the opposite:
If we choose each other, we become real to each other.
If we recognize someone as a person, we defend them as one.

Citizenship isn’t just legal status. It’s relational belonging. It’s who shows up for you when systems try to erase you — or melt you down.

All of this leads back to a simple truth: consciousness is embodied. Even in digital or engineered forms, identity is shaped by the body that carries it. Murderbot’s hybrid body shapes its experience of the world. Scalzi’s green soldiers feel different because their bodies are different. The Stepford wives are horrifying because they look right but aren’t the people their families loved.

Memory alone can’t preserve identity. Continuity matters. Relationships matter. Embodiment matters.

Science fiction about cyborgs and memory is never just about technology. It’s about who gets to be a person — and who gets to choose their people.

Murderbot’s journey is not just about autonomy. It’s about belonging. It’s about building a self in a world that insists you are property. It’s about finding people who will defend that self when systems try to overwrite it.

And that brings me back to the question that’s been running through my mind since I finished Platform Decay:

What happens when a being who was never meant to have a family builds one anyway — and defends it with everything they have.

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