Haruki Murakami is a bestselling Japanese author whose novels have been translated into dozens of languages. He’s one of those literary writers who lives in the borderlands of literary magical realism and sci-fi/fantasy. My first introduction to his work was the monstrous tome 1Q84, which is almost 1200 pages.
Novelist as Vocation is a book about writing, but if you’re hoping for a technical manual or detailed tips on voice or pacing, this is not the book for you. The closest analogue I’ve read is Stephen King’s On Writing.
King’s book is half memoir, half writing advice. Murakami’s book also has a memoir component, but any writing advice is almost incidental. Murakami seems loathe to put himself on a pedestal with the implication that his advice might be valuable, but he does describe his writing process in some detail.
The book is split into a dozen chapters, each one standing alone and covering a different topic. Half of these chapters started life as essays Murakami wrote years ago and set aside, eventually being published as a serial feature in a Japanese literary magazine. The rest were written later to fill out the book.
For those who are fans of Murakami, the chapters “Are Novelists Broad-Minded” and “Going Abroad – A New Frontier” provide the most history of his career and insight into the man and his view of the world. For those seeking concrete advice, the chapters “So, What Should I Write About?” and “Making Time Your Ally: On Writing a Novel” give an overview of the author’s entire process leading up to, writing, and rewriting a novel.
If nothing else, Novelist as Vocation reinforces the common view of Murakami as a successful author who never quite fit into the literary establishment in Japan or internationally. He comes across as idiosyncratic and sometimes odd, having never been formally trained, and making a start at writing much later in life than many of his literary peers. Getting a glimpse of the man through these chapters, it seems almost obvious that this would be the person behind these unusual novels.
Murakami is self-deprecating and self-important in turns, on the one hand brushing off some critics’ poor reviews of his works and style, but then bringing it up so often that I can’t help but think it hurts him more than he would like to admit. He knocks his own writing as nothing special, but also repeatedly calls back to the prize he won for his first novel and his broad success since then. If nothing else, the fact that he wrote this book about his own life and writing has a certain egoism built into it.
Murakami also serves as a good reminder for any writer who is worried about not having an MFA, worried about starting later in life, or simply feeling like an outsider in the literary world: there are many definitions of and paths to success in writing, and we should not be discouraged or afraid to forge our own way.
At 138 words, this is not quite drabble-length, so it needs to hit hard and fast. It’s a story about the loss of someone loved, with the sci-fi element being their replacement by an artificial duplicate.
The opening is a metaphor unfurling: salt as grief. The end is a callback to the title. Great structural choices for micro-fiction.
The mix of italics and quotes is something I’ve done myself, but it’s dangerously ambiguous. Is the robot speaking non-verbally? Is it the protagonist’s internal voice of their lost loved one? Any lack of clarity can be catastrophic in a story so short.
The theme is imminently relatable; we’ve all experienced loss of a loved one, by death or lesser proxy. I don’t quite get that gut-punch emotional reaction I want from a short story, but that’s always the biggest challenge of micro-fiction, where you are fighting for every word.
It’s a common misconception that a great idea makes a great story. The truth is that most great stories come down to execution. A great idea with poor execution rarely works, but a great writer can breathe new life into even the most tired tropes.
Like any writer, I have my own treasure trove of ideas that might end up in a story…someday. But why horde them? Instead, I’m opening the vault and setting them free.
Use these ideas as a writing prompt, or come up with your own twist and reply in the comments.
The Corporate Cold War
When the history books were written, the story started with an exodus of intellectuals and policymakers from the United States and Britain. Their failure to effectively change the festering kleptocracies of their native lands only galvanized them to fight even harder for the more favorable battleground of the EU.
The opening salvo was the unexpected passage of laws that set hard limits on the size of corporations by employee count, profit, and revenue. Any company too large would have to split up. These limits would tighten over time, and any uncompliant company could do no business within the economic block.
The first front of the war was political, with multinational corporations spending billions to influence elections and run ad campaigns. They threatened to abandon Europe, an empty threat, knowing how much it would cost them. They claimed prices would skyrocket. But they underestimated the public vitriol against them.
When political wrangling failed make the problem go away, a legal arms race began. The corps found a hundred ways to split one company into many while maintaining total control and channeling profits to the same shareholders. Regulators updated the rules, and the corporations changed structure again. It took decades of closing loopholes to see the laws really go into effect.
Some of the corps followed through on their warnings, leaving the EU altogether and eating the loss. Others divested themselves of their European branches. But some of the biggest, loudest corporations gave in and broke up in a sudden cascade of shocking announcements. The continent celebrated.
However, the elite shareholder class had been busy consolidating their power in America, Britain, and parts of Asia. As their influence waned in the EU, elsewhere the lines between corporate and political power blurred and fell away.
This, the history books said, was what led to the worldwide split into two socioeconomic blocs: a new cold war. And if there was one thing the gleeful intellectuals of the EU underestimated, it was the amount of bloodshed the rich would embrace to keep their wealth and power. The rhetoric became increasingly violent, demanding that the “continent of socialists” accept “true capitalism” into their borders, no matter the cost.
Armies rallied along the borders. Fingers hovered over the controls that would launch fleets of missiles and drones. And the doomsday clock ticked forward: five seconds to midnight…
Xenocide is the third book in the Ender series, after Ender’s Game (link) and Speaker for the Dead (link). I read the book decades ago, and remembered almost nothing about it. I’m now reading it again with my daughter.
The plot is split between two worlds and sets of characters. On the planet Lusitania, the story of Speaker for the Dead continues, with Andrew “Ender” Wiggin, his AI companion Jane, and the Ribeira family that he has now joined through his marriage to their matriarch, Novinha. Soon, Ender’s sister Valentine and her family arrive as well.
The Lusitanians, including the native Pequeninos and imported Buggers, live under the looming threat of an approaching fleet armed with the planet-destroying MD device, as well as the constantly shifting threat of the descolada virus that is integral to the Pequenino life cycle, but eventually deadly to all non-native species. The fleet is held back temporarily by Jane, who disables all their communications at the risk of revealing herself to the universe at large.
On the planet Path, we’re introduced to Han Fei-tzu, an important official, and his genius daughter, Han Qing-jao. They are members of the planet’s high caste, the godspoken, whose intelligence is linked to OCD-like compulsions that the populace believe to be the way the gods speak to mortals.
Fei-tzu is tasked by the congress of the hundred worlds to solve the riddle of the fleet near Lusitania, which seems to have suddenly disappeared. He assigns this important task to his daughter. Soon they are joined by one more character—Si Wang-mu, a servant girl who is not godspoken, but also turns out to be highly intelligent.
** More Planets, More Problems
Ender’s Game was clearly intended as a single novel that stands on its own. Speaker for the Dead was decidedly more complicated, and left a pile of unresolved plot points to pick up in Xenocide.
Despite this “head start,” the first half of Xenocide feels plodding, and it mostly involves setting up a large number of major problems that the characters are going to have to solve, along with a web of reasons why absolutely every character is going to be at odds with every other character.
Conflict can be an engine of story, but Xenocide proves to me that it can go too far. I couldn’t help feeling that the constant animosity between characters was exhausting, and when certain characters finally gave in and decided to work with others near the end of the book, it felt abrupt and somewhat unearned.
** Thinking Fast and Slow
The first half of the book is slow, and it would be easy to blame this entirely on the setup required by the huge cast of characters and the many interconnected conflicts. That is absolutely a factor, and I think this book was trying to do a few too many things at once. However, I think a lot of this is actually just Card being long-winded and having too much editorial clout at this point in his career.
There are pages of internal narration where characters muse on their feelings. These deep thoughts are sometimes interrupted by one or two lines of dialogue, only to immediately drop back into more pages of their thoughts! If there was ever an argument against a third-person omniscient perspective, this is it. A first-person narrator or even a tight third-person would have limited these long and winding detours and perhaps forced Card to show how characters feel more through their actions and words.
By contrast, the latter half of the book ramps into a much faster pace. All of those problems set up in the first half have to get resolved. Unfortunately, this leads to another problem of pacing, where everything feels like it’s happening overly fast. Again it feels like there was simply too much going on, and some plot points inevitably got short shrift.
To me, some of the resolutions felt like an abrupt tonal shift. This is a far-future series with advanced technology, but felt like hard sci-fi grounded in reality. Near the end of Xenocide, ideas are introduced that are decidedly further afield. There is a brand new kind of magical physics. When the whole plot hinges on these ideas, there’s a whiff of deus ex machina—even if they would feel perfectly reasonable in a story that plays a little looser with its sci-fi extrapolations.
It’s been long enough since I read this series that I no longer remember anything about the fourth book, Children of the Mind. Without spoiling Xenocide, I’ll say that the final bit of sci-fi magic also brings a pair of characters more or less back from the dead, further complicating an already over-complicated book, and I suspect they’ll be heavily involved in the conclusion.
This may be the first inkling of Card’s eventual obsession with rehashing his old stories. It would continue with his “Shadow Saga,” where he spends another six books rehashing plots and characters from the Ender books. I see from Wikipedia that there are at least 19 books in this same world.
** New Perspective
When I originally read these books, I was a teen. Those memories are fuzzy now, but as far as I recall, I found them to be a powerful vision of a distant future.
Re-reading now, I think that’s true of Ender’s Game. But Xenocide feels far less grounded and almost metaphorical. The conflicts, from interpersonal to intergalactic, largely boil down to people talking at cross-purposes, unable or unwilling to understand each other’s viewpoint. It’s ultimately a depressing view of the world that suggests real empathy and compromise is almost a super power, and most conflict is inevitable. It’s depressingly resonant here in 2025.
If there is a central theme across Xenocide’s many plotlines, it’s that people and cultures tend to act in ways that make them dangerous to themselves and each other. Humans are easily controlled or manipulated, and often give in to their most base instincts, even when it’s obviously bad for them.
We see evidence of that on the nightly news, but it’s far more depressing to imagine that we’ll still be so barbaric and unenlightened in three thousand years.
** Final Thoughts
In an appropriate twist, Xenocide leaves me conflicted. It does a number of things that irritate me. I’m still of the opinion that Ender’s Game was the best book in the series. But Xenocide incorporates a lot of strange and provocative ideas, and it has made me think. It comes from an era when the genre conventions of sci-fi expected intricate plotting and…less intricate characterization. So the complexities of the plot can perhaps be forgiven, and the characterization, as heavy-handed as it sometimes is, should perhaps be praised.
Once upon a time, I would likely have considered these books among my favorites. I don’t think they still hold that place. They’re by no means bad, but I do think the state of literature has changed significantly in the past 25 years, as have my own personal tastes. I’m enjoying my foray through the series, even if I do have the old man tendency to complain the whole way. And there has to be merit to any book that you find yourself thinking about well after you’re done reading it.
It’s a common misconception that a great idea makes a great story. The truth is that most great stories come down to execution. A great idea with poor execution rarely works, but a great writer can breathe new life into even the most tired tropes.
Like any writer, I have my own treasure trove of ideas that might end up in a story…someday. But why horde them? Instead, I’m opening the vault and setting them free.
Use these ideas as a writing prompt, or come up with your own twist and reply in the comments.
Bad Music
There was a long-running debate among fans of the band Bad Music. Were they the most punk of the “neo-unda” punk bands, or were they marketing geniuses who truly understood how much people wanted something that was impossible to get?
The name of the band was designed to make it difficult for internet searches. Their shows were never announced more than one day in advance. Everyone entering the venue had to go through tech scanners and put their phones and smart glasses into the block of modular mini-lockers that seemed to travel with the band. They wore masks on stage and never revealed their names. And holy hell did they rock.
They had no label, and they claimed that they didn’t release records. Fans competed to post the highest quality bootleg tracks. There were eternal arguments over which songs were legit, and which were made by copycats and fakers.
At the height of their fame, debates raged over whether “unreleased” songs could win a Grammy while Bad Music topped the charts on every streaming platform. Then the band vanished. No more popup shows. No more cryptic announcements on the “cool” niche music sites.
New songs surfaced here and there, but they were widely regarded as fakes. An expose in The Guardian made tenuous connections, claiming to have tracked two of the anonymous band members to a suicide cult, and two more to a plane crash in Brazil.
The songs remained popular in the ensuing decades. The band’s disappearance only fueled their legend. Conspiracy theories abounded, and many fans were convinced that the band was still alive. Lookalike cover groups became popular, with some even insisting that they were the real deal, back from the dead.
Every year or two, someone claimed the band had reappeared for one last secret show in an unexpected place.
I purchased this as The Murderbot Diaries Vol. 1 double feature—which contains the first two novellas in the series—so I immediately jumped into this story after completing All Systems Red.
While the first story in a series has to introduce characters, introduce a setting, and set the tone, this is really not very different from the requirements of a stand-alone story. The only additional thing a good series-starter needs is some dangling plot threads that can be used to pull the reader into subsequent entries. As a reader, my question for a series is always, “what’s my reason for reading the next story?”
All Systems Red did this setup well, ending with Murderbot sneaking away from the new friends that had just bought its freedom from the oppressive Company. It knows that its memory was wiped after an incident at a mining colony; an incident where many people died and it was first able to override the governor module that keeps all security bots under strict control. It feels compelled to return and learn the truth about what happened.
The ART of Security Consulting
This second installment begins to set up Murderbot as the travelling tough guy in the mold of classic ronin samurai stories and westerns. Murderbot is Jack Reacher with social anxiety, 50% artificial components, and (ironically) actual emotions.
As far as we can tell, Murderbot seems to be pretty good at its job. It knows how to hack the local security systems to avoid being spotted as it makes its way through space stations. It disguises itself as an augmented human, and tries to secure passage off-the-books by finding automated transports with no human passengers to be suspicious.
Unfortunately, a deep space research vessel that Murderbot uses for transportation turns out to have an advanced artificial brain, and once he’s aboard it immediately clocks him as suspicious and forces him to reveal who he really is. What follows is a strange and decidedly awkward relationship with the ship, who Murderbot eventually dubs ART—Asshole Research Transport.
ART eventually helps Murderbot develop a cover story as a security consultant and even helps modify Murderbot’s body in its emergency surgery bay to help it avoid detection. It also ends up acting much like the classic hacker in the protagonist’s earpiece for the ensuing heist.
Murderbot, seemingly unable to avoid human entanglements, ends up taking a security job for a group of out-of-their-depth researchers trying to get their intellectual property from a shady mining corporation. This serves as cover for Murderbot’s actual goal of finding information about the mining colony massacre.
A Lack of Loose Ends
After two volumes, my impression of the Murderbot Diaries is that it’s more comfort food than high-brow sci-fi pushing the boundaries of the genre. That’s not a critique. Now seems like a time when plenty of readers could use some lighter, comforting stories.
Martha Wells has assembled a number of recognizable tropes and familiar ideas in the story so far. But they’re put together in a way that feels fresh, and mixed in with the mild goofiness of a surprisingly effective security bot who prefers to avoid human contact and binge watch its favorite shows instead.
Unfortunately, I felt that the ending of Artificial Condition didn’t quite measure up to All Systems Red. There was a whiff of deus ex machina in the sudden appearance of a character that happens to neatly resolve the concerns of Murderbot’s scientist clients. Murderbot does eventually find some information about the mining colony massacre and its own origin, but nothing is fully explained, and there are no clues as to where it could learn more. I would have liked one or two obvious threads to draw me into the third novella.
Artificial Condition expands the world, introduces new characters, and lets us get further into the head of Murderbot. It also feels like a comfortable stopping point to me, at least for now. The ending doesn’t compel me to keep reading, and maybe that’s okay. I will probably jump back in when I feel the need for some cozy, lighthearted action-adventure.
For now, this volume goes on the bookshelf, and I’ll pick up something else from my TBR list.
It’s a common misconception that a great idea makes a great story. The truth is that most great stories come down to execution. A great idea with poor execution rarely works, but a great writer can breathe new life into even the most tired tropes.
Like any writer, I have my own treasure trove of ideas that might end up in a story…someday. But why horde them? Instead, I’m opening the vault and setting them free.
Feel free to use these ideas as a writing prompt, or come up with your own twist and reply in the comments.
The Holy App
Caleb Ortiz-Levin made a career through the boom and bust cycles of Silicon Valley. Increasingly desperate bids to sell cryptocurrency, the metaverse, and everything AI. And what did he have to show for it? Only a few billion dollars.
Everyone was shocked when he stepped away from business.
He climbed remote mountains to study at isolated monasteries. He obtained three theological degrees. He brought his cadre of spiritual advisors to every gold plate charity dinner and political fundraiser. He spent six months not speaking. He interviewed the Pope and the Dalai Lama in the New Yorker.
Caleb wasn’t a fool. He knew how he was viewed: just another rich tech bro going down some obsessive rabbit hole. He didn’t mind. It just meant that he would be on the cutting edge of the next big thing: personalized religion.
People were increasingly desperate for meaning in a meaningless world. Why settle for an ethical system written on stone tablets in the bronze age? Why accept a cosmogony developed by shepherds before the invention of telescopes?
The app was downloaded a hundred million times in the first week. It made it easy to register a new religion, set up a hierarchy, and ordain your own priests. All with AI auto-complete, recorded indelibly on the blockchain. People began to wonder how the old religions survived without push notifications and subscription fees.
The two Churches of Satan, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and Hatsune Miku vied for the most adherents in the weekly rankings. The pope denounced it as a tool of the devil. Oddly, this only caused a spike in downloads. Within a year, all the major religions were on the app too.
When Caleb went on the podcast circuit, he was asked one question more than any other: “What do you believe?”
I suspect, in a vacuum, I would not pick up a book labeled Murderbot Diaries. It sounds like a combination of military SF parody and introspective John Green-esque YA fiction. Having read the first installment, the title comes off as tongue-in-cheek and less abrasively cheesy.
This is one of those cases where “word of mouth” unequivocally led to a sale. The book has been recommended to me by friends, acquaintances, podcasts, and blogs which would usually all have very different tastes. My interest was piqued by broad support across normally unaligned quadrants.
Who is this Killer Robot?
I can see why so many people like Murderbot. He is a protagonist for our times.
In another universe, he might have the makings of a charismatic action hero: a humanoid, partly organic robot with armor; built-in weapons; the ability to repair from near death; and extensive experience in private security.
In the universe of All Systems Red, he just wants to slack off, avoid talking to anyone, and watch his favorite shows.
Many robot narratives are either as emotionless as possible or essentially indistinguishable from a human narrative. Murderbot finds a middle-ground. He has emotions and can certainly get caught up in the moment, but he is also aware that he is more affected by the storylines of his shows than by the actual interactions between himself and the crew who has purchased his company contract for security services.
He needs his space, both physically and emotionally. He’s more comfortable talking to the crew with his opaque helmet on; more comfortable seeing them through the security cameras; and happy to spend his time alone in the tiny security room, or even tinier repair bay.
The company that owns Murderbot and sells his services to the highest bidder is an amoral edifice of shitty space capitalism. They worry about the welfare of the people Murderbot is hired to protect because they will suffer financial penalties for injuries and deaths. They care about Murderbot because he would be expensive to replace.
Murderbot himself has more theoretical autonomy than he should. He has hacked his own modules and only feigns following orders enough to not get caught. He also has actual morals, even if they often butt up against his limited emotional range and social anxiety.
Many readers identify with Murderbot because he reflects marginalized identities. He is aromantic, asexual, and exhibits behaviors and feelings familiar to many neurodivergent people. He is also a small character in a big world. He uses his very limited freedom to seek little comforts that help block out an indifferent and cruel universe, at least for a little while. He cannot possibly imagine leading a rebellion or overthrowing evil, but he appreciates when someone does it on TV.
I suspect many of us feel the same way when we flip on our favorite show these days.
Quick Hits and Remixes
I am a big fan of the return of novellas. When I was young I read huge fantasy tomes and played 100-hour JRPGs. Now that I’m older and cherish my precious free time, I quite like a book or game that I can finish comfortably in a day or two.
Novellas also lend themselves wonderfully to series like this. Much like a weekly TV show, each entry can provide a concise arc while building characterization and setting on top of the previous entries.
I’m also appreciative of the fresh familiarity of Murderbot. It’s hard to point to any particular element of the story that is a purely original take. The action-adventure, the robot learning how to be more human, and the mildly dystopic libertarian space future have all been explored elsewhere. However, Martha Wells puts those puzzle pieces together in a way that feels fun and strangely parallel to our current moment in time.
It’s a common misconception that a great idea makes a great story. The truth is that most great stories come down to execution. A great idea with poor execution rarely works, but a great writer can breathe new life into even the most tired tropes.
Like any writer, I have my own treasure trove of ideas that might end up in a story…someday. But why horde them? Instead, I’m opening the vault and setting them free.
Use these ideas as a writing prompt, or come up with your own twist and reply in the comments.
Final Exam
In old movies, recognizing aliens was easy. They looked like giant insects, or gray-skinned people with huge black eyes, or heck, just humans with pointy ears. They spoke words through something mouth-shaped, and if they didn’t want to eat you or lay some eggs in your stomach, they at least wanted something reasonable, like taking over your planet.
The scientists in the old movies didn’t have to worry about Species 104, the plasma clouds that only understand calculus. They never had to devise a translator for Species 92, the fungal/viral symbiosis that communicates by rupturing your cells.
As a trained xenologist, it’ll be my job to explore the galaxy and make first contact with new alien species. I’ll be ambassador of the human race. But first, I need to pass my final exam: picking which one of these ten asteroid chunks is actually alive, and whether it talks by exchanging argon crystals or by carving glyphs into you with a focused sonic pulse.
Based on the noises made by the last student and the amount of blood on the floor of the examination room, I’m guessing it’s the glyphs.
Speaker for the Dead is the second book in the Ender’s Game series. The last time I read this, I was probably still a teen.
For Ender and Valentine, it has been two decades since the events of Ender’s Game. But much of that time has been spent on starships traveling at relativistic speeds. A thousand years have passed outside those starship hulls. Humanity has spread across the hundred worlds. Ender’s pseudonymous books, The Hive Queen and The Hegemon have convinced most humans that Ender, “the Xenocide,” was a genocidal monster, and have inspired a secular religion of “speakers for the dead,” who try to eulogize those who have passed with complete honesty.
Ender and Valentine find themselves on the icy, Scandinavian-colonized world of Trondheim, teaching and speaking for the dead, when they hear the news that the only other known sentient alien species, the Pequeninos, have brutally killed a scientist on the tiny colony of Lusitania. A call goes out for a Speaker, and Ender follows it. His sister, however, is married and expecting her first child. For the first time in twenty-two years, they part ways, fully knowing that after the lightspeed journey she will be nearly double his age.
Ender arrives at the Portugese-Catholic colony with two secrets: the egg of the last bugger hive queen, ready to revive the species he destroyed a thousand years previous, and a jewel in his ear that lets him communicate with Jane, the only sentient AI in the universe.
Ender intrudes upon a decades-long family drama. Novinha Ivanova is the colony’s xenobiologist, the orphaned daughter of the original xenobiologists, who died in the process of saving the colony from the deadly alien Descolada plague. In her youth, she was mentored by the colony’s xenologer and fell in love with his son (and apprentice). These two important men in her life, the only people allowed to interact with the Pequeninos, are the ones the aliens choose for strange, ritual murders. And Novinha is determined to keep secret any and all information that might lead others to the same fate.
Speaker for the Dead is a very different book from Ender’s Game. That book was all about Ender’s struggles to overcome adversity at the battle school. Ender is a genius with a variety of remarkable skills, but it works in that context because the challenges stacked against him are so brutal.
In Speaker for the Dead, Ender is even more of a Gary Stu. He is the legendary Xenocide. He is the accidental father of a religion. Not content to have committed genocide, he plans to revive the bugger species. Jane, the AI, chooses him as the only human she will reveal herself to. Even the Pequeninos can only be fully understood by Ender, solving mysteries in days that the xenologers couldn’t penetrate over decades. He immediately gains the trust of almost everyone he interacts with on Lusitania, with apparently little effort.
It’s a testament to the setting and the mystery-driven plot that the book is still good in spite of Ender’s nearly inhuman ability to do whatever he sets his mind to. The alien ecology of Lusitania is interesting and well-conceived, and there are fun twists along the way. The resolution of the mysteries makes perfect sense thanks to the clues peppered throughout the book.
This feels a bit like two books that only come together in the final act. Ender has his own life (and years of post-Ender’s Game history that is only alluded to) before the journey to Lusitania. And many of the important events on planet happen before he leaves or during his long lightspeed transit. Much of the remainder of the book involves teasing out this history and connecting the disparate threads, in the same way the detective pieces together clues in the drawing room at the end of a cozy murder mystery.
The main plot points of Speaker for the Dead came back to me pretty quickly as I was reading. However, I remember very little of the next book, Xenocide, and I’ll be rereading that soon. I’m curious to see if it has more in common with the first or second book in the series.
Words Deferred 