Martha Wells grew up in Texas, reading science fiction and fantasy from a young age, getting books at her local library. In her teens, she was writing Star Wars and Godzilla fanfic, complete with maps of Monster Island. She received a BA in anthropology at Texas A&M but took other classes as well, including a science fiction and fantasy writing class taught by Steven Gould, where she wrote one of her first fantasy stories.

Wells’ debut fantasy novel The Element of Fire came out in 1993, earning her a Compton Crook/Stephen Tall Award nomination and making her a contender for the 1994 Crawford Award. It also started the Ile-Rien series: Nebula Award-nominated The Death of the Necromancer in 1998 and later The Fall of Ile-Rien entries The Wizard Hunters (2003), The Ships of Air (2004), The Gate of Gods (2005), and collection Between Worlds: the Collected Ile-Rien and Cineth Stories (2015). City of Bones came out in 1995 and Wheel of the Infinite in 2000, both standalones. 2006 saw the publication Reliquary in the Stargate Atlantis universe, the first of several media tie-ins for properties including Star Wars and Magic: The Gathering.

Her Hugo Award-nominated The Books of the Raksura series, launched in 2011 with The Cloud Roads, includes The Serpent Sea (2012), The Siren Depths (2012), The Edge of Worlds (2016), and The Harbors of the Sun (2017), as well as novellas “The Falling World” and The “Tale of Indigo and Cloud” (2014) and “The Dead City” and “The Dark Earth Below” (2015). In 2013 and 2014, she published YAnovels Emilie and the Hollow World and Emilie and the Sky World.

In 2017, Wells gave a landmark World Fantasy Convention toastmaster speech, “Unbury the Future,” calling for listeners to seek out and acknowledge the long history of women in science fiction, many of whom, she contended, had been overlooked. Her speech was widely discussed and lauded. The text is available here.

That same year, science fiction novella All Systems Red came out from Tordotcom Publishing. The first book in the Murderbot series, it changed everything. It landed nominations for the American Library Association’s Alex Award, the Philip K. Dick Award, the Romantic Times Reviewers’ Choice Award, and the Prometheus Award, and it won Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards. The series includes Artificial Condition, Rogue Protocol, Exit Strategy, Network Effect, Fugitive Telemetry, and System Collapse,and continues to garner accolades and awards recognitions. (Don’t miss the Subterranean Press edition of Compulsory published in 2023, which expands on an earlier Murderbot story published in Wired.) System Collapse was a Dragon Award finalist and won a Locus Award.

In 2023, Tor published Wells’ “first new fantasy in over a decade,” Witch King. This novel launched her new series, The Rising World. Witch King was a Nebula, World Fantasy, and Hugo finalist, and won both a Locus Award and a Dragon Award.

Martha Wells now has new work out, which will delight her many fans all over the globe! Book two of The Rising World, Queen Demon, came out from Tor in October 2025. Her latest Murderbot installment, Platform Decay, is due this month from Tor.

Books are sometimes optioned, but not every book ends up making it onto the screen. Apple TV recently aired series Murderbot, based on your book All Systems Red. What were the most satisfying aspects of having your work rendered into visual media, and what were the things that surprised you the most?

The whole thing was a delight. The creativity of everyone involved, from the concept artists to the props and sets and costumes, was so impressive. Just seeing the world develop from scripts and location photos to being able to stand in the hopper with the actors was amazing.

I don’t know if it was surprising, but watching Roseanne Liang, one of the three guest directors, film a scene, and tweak it and shift to different character perspectives, was a little like a three-dimensional version of editing a scene in a book. It was wild how similar it was. Also getting to see the “draft” version of all the episodes, before most of the special effects and other finishing elements were added, and when they were still working on the voice-over, was fascinating.

Thinking on your body of work to date, what would you most love to see rendered into film or TV, and why, especially having been through the process before?

I think The Death of the Necromancer would make a great limited series. There have been other sorts of Victorian supernatural series before, but I think the combination of the mystery plot and the gothic feel of the world and the fantasy elements could be really fantastic with the right production.

Is there an impact on your writing—craft, process, motivation, or anything else—after seeing your work translated into a streaming series? Does it excite you and drive you to do more, does it create a sense of pressure, or anything else?

It’s very exciting! I don’t think there’s any additional pressure, but it definitely makes me more motivated.

The article on you in The New Yorker says, “stories about robots are stories about labor and freedom.” How does The Murderbot Diaries engage with this idea; what is specific or particular to this series, and does the latest installment, Platform Decay, continue the conversation?

The Murderbot Diaries, especially the first four books, are definitely a slave narrative, as well as a bit of a discussion on how even well-meaning, moral people who aren’t in that situation don’t always understand how to help or even how to offer comfort. It also provided a good example of how some reviewers and readers wanted to resist the idea that SecUnits were enslaved. I think the later books do shift the focus more to building relationships and healing from trauma, in a lot of different ways.

Looking back at All Systems Red and Artificial Condition, what do you see as the most important developments for Murderbot across the series, and what are the questions it must face in Platform Decay?

Murderbot is learning to admit that it does have trauma and that it isn’t easy to recover from; it’s a continuing process that can go on for years. It was a big challenge to try to work out what that might look like with a partial machine intelligence. Murderbot is logical in ways humans aren’t. It’s not ambitious; it likes to examine mysteries and problems via large amounts of data that can be queried for anomalies. Its mind does not work the same way as a human mind, so its recovery had to look different. That’s been really tricky to write.

The central plot of Platform Decay features a rescue mission. What were the driving ideas for the story; what was the initial inspiration, and how did the plot and setting develop?

I wanted to do a story where Murderbot interacted more with members of Mensah’s family and then had the idea of having it take place on a planetary torus. Once I started writing it, the family road trip from hell sort of evolved naturally. Also, a lot of frustration about the lack of mass transportation.

You recently had fantasy novel Queen Demon come out. Does fantasy do something different from science fiction; does it serve different purposes or work in different ways?

For me, I don’t think there’s much difference between writing far-future SF, where the technology might as well be magic, and fantasy, where the technology is magic. They both serve the same purposes.

In our prior Clarkesworld interview, you mentioned that you are “mostly a pantser.” What has been your process for writing The Witch King and Queen Demon, especially given the complex and layered nature of the series?

It’s the same process, with a lot more revision, basically. I write the past and present timelines alternately, working on one until I get a bit stuck, then working on the other. I run into the same problems that I do working on a Murderbot story: starting in the wrong place, having to back up or move forward, throwing out sections of text that just don’t work. It sounds complicated and tiring, but it’s really just the way my brain works.

What was the initial inspiration behind the series, and does Queen Demon carry the ideas of that inspiration further, or does it veer dramatically from those ideas in different directions?

The early initial inspiration was “moving on after the end of the world,” which is something I’ve always wanted to tackle since reading a lot of postapocalyptic children’s books when I was growing up in the 70s. Then it evolved into thinking about colonialism and its aftermath. Plus, wanting to show cultures influencing each other and cultural change in a fantasy world. And trauma, and the way the characters deal with it, and continue on from it at the same time as the landscape recovers, and how the effects of trauma are still written into the world around them even years later. Queen Demon carries that forward, showing more of the world of the present, and how it’s changed and adapted.

What can you tell us about the main characters of Queen Demon, Kai, Ziede, Tahren, and Dahin? What is compelling about them for you, and what are your favorite things about them?

I made them immortals so I could show the changes the world had gone through from a more intimate perspective. They lived in the world as it was, and Kai and Ziede at least were happy there. Tahren was complacent, and while Dahin wasn’t, he had very little understanding of life outside the Blessed Realm. They all lived through and witnessed the suffering and destruction caused by the Hierarchs’ invasion. It affected them in different ways, and it was deeply personal. It’s what made them determined to protect the world that they fought for, the one that is gradually emerging from that destruction.

What are some of the most interesting or important things about the world you’ve built that you don’t mind sharing with readers?

One of my favorite things is that the Arike start out with a very binary idea of gender, and it’s dependent on the clothes that they wear. You wear pants like a soldier, then you’re a woman. You wear a skirt, you’re a man. After years of closely working with the Enalin, who have a much more complex and nonbinary view of gender, it’s become an Arike custom that if you dress in Enalin-style clothing, you are nonbinary. And Kai in the present, who doesn’t really care about his gender presentation at all, wears whatever is most convenient at the time.

What is the heart of this series for you; what are these books ultimately about?

Trauma and how it’s carried forward by future generations. How Kai has basically weaponized his pain as an alternative to using other people’s lives or pain for his power.

What are you working on now; what can readers look forward to?

Right now I’m working on Hierarch, the third Rising World novel, which picks up after the end of Queen Demon.