Exit Strategy

The Murderbot Diaries is set in a future where humans have colonized space, and now live in several kinds of polities. The most powerful is the Corporation Rim, a hyper-capitalist intergalactic sprawl where corporate entities wield sovereign power. In Corporation Rim, few laws exist and almost everything, including lives, is for sale. This framework to some degree reflects historical and contemporary examples of corporate statehood. Powerful corporations, like the Company, Palisade, and GrayCris, operate their own military forces and treat interstellar territories as private assets. They can be read as updated versions of real-life entities like the Dutch East India Company, a 17th-century corporation that governed colonies, minted its own currency, and waged wars, or like Academi (formerly Blackwater) whose role in conflicts including the Iraq War illustrates how corporate actors still assume state functions with limited oversight.

Skirting the edges of the Corporation Rim are independent planets that either fall prey to corporate control or are somehow able to avoid being subsumed. The planet that Dr. Mensah and her team come from, Preservation, began as a colony settled during the early, unstable period of wormhole travel, and then was able to secure its status as an entity not subject to Corporation Rim colonization.