Humans

Fugitive Telemetry, the latest instalment of the Murderbot series, shows readers still can’t get enough of the killing-machine that prefers boxsets to interacting with humans. What’s its secret, asks Sally Adee

Humans

14 April 2021

Murderbot must figure out how to relate to and live among peoplegremlin/Getty Images
Fugitive Telemetry, The Murderbot Diaries, volume 6
Martha Wells

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WHO loves Murderbot? We all love Murderbot. Many of the books in Martha Wells’s series have won (or been shortlisted for) Nebula, Hugo, Locus and other awards. Writers and reviewers are open about their feelings for the eponymous protagonist. “I love Murderbot!” was sci-fi writer Ann Leckie’s take. “I might have a little bit of a thing for a robot,” wrote Jason Kehe, a culture critic at Wired. I have to sheepishly put my hand up as well.
So why are we fawning over a grouchy, ungendered hybrid of human neural tissue and integrated AI combat weapons?
Fugitive Telemetry, the latest instalment, only deepens the devotion. The 176-page novella is set between the five novellas of the All Systems Red series and the novel Network Effect.
Here we find the titular android settling into the uncomfortable novelty of working with – not in the forced service of – humans.
It has just defected from the Corporation Rim, where it was manufactured to kill people and protect others, according to the priorities of whoever purchased it. This is how it lived for years before secretly hacking the module that controlled it. (Murderbot isn’t its official name – it is how the security android, or SecUnit, wryly refers to itself in private.)
Having decamped to a faraway station whose governing principles are decidedly more communal and humane, Murderbot is trying to figure out how to relate to and live among people when none of them can tell it what to do.
“Murderbot is lonely because of the gap between how people see it and how it feels inside”
But before it can do much introspection, someone turns up dead. Thus ensues a great noir-ish, Agatha Christie-ish murder mystery typical of the series, with far less shoot-’em-up than the series name suggests, plenty of deduction and the navigation of awkward relationships.
Like all the Murderbot books, the plot is fast and the dialogue punchy, a snappy vehicle to carry the bigger narrative arc of Murderbot as it emerges from its defensive psychological cocoon.
None of this explains why everyone is catching feelings for the SecUnit. However, like the deeper plot points that join it to the previous books, Fugitive Telemetry shows the android’s tentative, insecure integration into a tight-knit group of humans, doubting all the while that they really like it for who it is inside.
If this is starting to sound familiar, that is because this is a basic coming-of-age story. Like all sensitive adolescents, Murderbot’s grumpy mien is a front to disguise its loneliness. It is lonely because of the gap between how people see it and how it feels inside.
Another clue to our feelings might lie in the inspiration for the character. Wells has acknowledged that the series was inspired by a sci-fi love story called The Silver Metal Lover by Tanith Lee. She was intrigued, she told tech website The Verge, that this human-robot romance focused on the bond that might develop between a young woman and a robot rather than the usual “robots take over” fare.
If you like your robot stories to focus on relationships, I have another book for you: Marge Piercy’s underrated and underread He, She and It, which was published in 1991 and immediately disappeared under Snow Crash, Neuromancer and the rest of the cyberpunk genre.
It, too, is a story of a human and a robot learning to look at who the other really is, not who each was built to be. That, I guess, is what a good love story is always about.

Sally also recommends…
Book
Autonomous
Annalee Newitz
Tor/Forge Autonomous is another great love story, between a military agent and his robotic partner in hot pursuit of an anti-patent scientist turned drug pirate, by New Scientist columnist Annalee Newitz. Read their latest column on page 22 More

A bold new book by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein combines her love of physics with a strong analysis of the inequalities rife in science

Humans

14 April 2021

The Disordered Cosmos argues that science needs close scrutinySOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
The Disordered Cosmos: A journey into dark matter, spacetime, & dreams deferred
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

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Bold Type Books
THIS isn’t just a popular science book. There is plenty of physics in it – from the big bang and relativity to particle physics, it is all there. But attention rapidly shifts to the author’s other preoccupation: social injustice, such as inequalities, prejudices and the kind of social grooming and timidity that also hinder us from calling out these vices.
The author of The Disordered Cosmos is Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, assistant professor of physics and astronomy, a core faculty member in women’s and gender studies at the University of New Hampshire – and a New Scientist columnist. This gives her an excellent position from which she can both engage in rich detail with science’s most fascinating theories and grapple with human and inhuman social failings.
She works patiently to disabuse readers of the delusion that their favourite pop-sci ideas – those lofty products of cerebral ingenuity and academic brilliance – are immune from the prejudices pervading society.
Prescod-Weinstein’s heritage is a mix of Black American, Black Caribbean, Eastern European Jewish and Jewish American histories. She identifies as agender, and has a history of debilitating health conditions. The inequalities she covers in her book are issues she has dealt with at first hand.
Some readers may question whether, say, there are indeed damaging racist undertones in the term “dark matter”, or in the way colour analogies are used in quantum chromodynamics, a theory sometimes referred to in textbooks as “colored physics”. But it is hard to dismiss the broader issues Prescod-Weinstein argues: inequalities around race, gender, class, nationality and disability.
Diversity and inclusivity are today’s buzzwords, but she quotes Jin Haritaworn and C. Riley Snorton in their appraisal of trans politics theory, and questions whether it is enough for the scientific establishment to aim to be inclusive if what people are included in retains what she calls “a strong relationship with totalitarian, racialized structures”.
“The author disabuses readers that favourite popsci ideas are immune from everyday prejudices”
Despite the obvious conflict between her love of physics and her outrage at some of the social and personal injustices she sees in institutions propagating physics, the different focuses of the book aren’t necessarily competing for airtime. And Prescod-Weinstein often uses physics explanations as a springboard or analogy for the social issues she wants to discuss.
Take the description of “non-binary” wave-particle duality in the double-slit experiment, which precedes her dissection of attitudes to people identifying as non-binary or otherwise. “It should be obvious that when you refuse to respect someone’s pronouns you are making a statement about what’s important and what is not,” she writes. “To tell students that it is too difficult is an egregious, brazen lie.”
Although there are times when discussions of minority politics get quite dense, perhaps more so than the physics, on the whole, the book feels very intimate – I sometimes felt like I was reading her diary. This can be a treat, such as when she is musing over some charming quirk of particle physics: “I tend to think of bosons as pep squad particles: they are happy to share the same quantum energy state… Fermions? Not so much.”
At other times, it gets more uncomfortable, as when she lays bare episodes of anguished introspection, self-doubt and emotional fatigue caused by traumatising experiences. It is all recounted to serve a point, but is incredibly personal and confiding.
So no, her book isn’t a typical popular science read and she makes some comments that may prove unpopular. Beyond the already ardently persuaded, it will be interesting to see how much a broader readership may be convinced by the arguments she presents.

More on these topics: More

Paid-for newsletters on Substack were a great innovation, but the way it has changed means I will no longer be writing for it, writes Annalee Newitz

Humans

| Comment

14 April 2021

Eternity in an Instant/Getty Images
ONE of the breakout social media stories of the past year has been Substack, a start-up that specialises in helping writers get paid for their newsletters. But in recent months, the company has become infamous for secretly providing financial incentives to a small group of people to write some of the biggest ones on its platform.
It was the kind of tale we are used to in the gig economy age. In 2017, Substack was a baby start-up on shaky ground. Nobody was sure newsletters could compete with Twitter or other platforms.
But Substack’s … More

Award-winner Sally Davies, a former chief medical officer for EnglandPaul Grover/Shutterstock
Suffrage Science
First Create the Media, with MRC London Institute of Medical Sciences

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ON 8 March every year, millions of people celebrate International Women’s Day, a slot in the global calendar that is both a unifying recognition of the achievements of women and an urgent warning that gender inequality is still rife.
Science, of course, is no exception to this. Women still make up just 28 per cent of the STEM workforce, while men dominate the highest-paying sectors, such as engineering. A decade ago, to mark the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day and to help address these crucial gaps, the Suffrage Science awards were born.
The Suffrage Science podcast, hosted weekly by science communicator Kat Arney, explains the prizes’ origins by shining a spotlight on past winners, women who have achieved extraordinary things in their careers despite facing an all-too-familiar bias and a lack of opportunities.
In the first episode, Arney talks to the founders of the project: Amanda Fisher, director of the MRC London Institute of Medical Sciences, and Vivienne Parry, a science writer and broadcaster. As Arney explains, the awards work by selecting the next winners based on nominations from previous ones, thereby helping to grow a global network of inspirational female role models. The awards, bespoke pieces of jewellery that pay homage to scientific research and the suffrage movement, are passed on to new winners every two years.
Since 2011, 148 women across many scientific disciplines and countries have won awards. Their impact and reach surprised Parry – as she tells Arney, they have seen some early nominees become fine scientists, heading their own departments and creating a new cohort of great scientists.
The episode also features women’s rights activist Helen Pankhurst, the great-granddaughter of Emmeline Pankhurst, who led the UK suffragette movement.
In episode two, Arney talks to Sally Davies, the first female master of Trinity College, University of Cambridge, and former chief medical officer for England, who won a Suffrage Science award in 2011. Among Davies’s many achievements – and the one she is most proud of, she tells Arney – was putting the global threat of antimicrobial resistance firmly on the UK’s radar.
Her successes were accompanied by the difficulties of simply being a woman, as she explains: “I’ve always felt throughout my career that I had to be better than the men to get the job, not as good as [them].”
Listening to Fisher and other guests, I felt connected to them through our shared struggles as women and the recognition of how deeply gender discrimination is etched into every aspect of our experience. But underlying this solidarity, a tough message remains: we haven’t made the progress in improving prospects for women that we like to think we have, says Fisher. For example, there is much to be done in addressing issues faced by women from ethnic minority backgrounds.
The pandemic has widened the divide and even reversed progress in some cases, with women doing by far the majority of homeschooling and childcare, often putting their own jobs at risk. For Helen Pankhurst, there needs to be a new narrative. “Fundamentally, it’s about saying this isn’t good enough – this isn’t good enough for me, for the next generations, for those that came before us. We can and we must do better.”

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Francesco Berardinelli/Netflix
Watch
Zero is the story of shy teen Omar, a boy from Milan, Italy, who no one notices and who feels invisible. In this sci-fi series, as his inner turmoil morphs into real invisibility, Omar must adapt to his new status. On Netflix from 21 April.

Read
The New Breed of robots are best understood as animals, says Kate Darling, an expert in robot ethics. She forecasts that like real animals, robots will supplement, not replace, our own skills and abilities. Review to come next week.
EMAF
Visit
European Media Art Festival is going online this year, from 21 April, with a programme of films, installations, performances and lectures exploring questions about ownership and forms of possession.

More on these topics: More

By Catherine de Lange

A study is looking at the effects of income on child developmentCavan Images/Getty Images
Growing up in poverty can have long-term negative consequences for children. Now, a study offering unconditional cash to a group of mothers on low-incomes in the US is beginning to discover the precise role of parental income in child development. It is the first randomised trial to look at whether a basic income might affect the way a child’s brain develops in this critical period.
Studies of children born into families with low income have found they tend to have more behavioural problems and … More

By Karina Shah

How we expect chocolate to taste depends on the colour of the wrapperTim Gainey/Alamy
People expect chocolate to taste more bitter if it is in black packaging, while yellow and pink packaging is associated with sweeter-tasting chocolate.
Iuri Baptista at the University of Campinas in Brazil and his colleagues wanted to investigate how people respond to the colour of chocolate packaging.
The researchers sent a survey to 420 people between the ages of 18 and 60. Half of the participants were in Brazil and the other half were in France. The survey contained two photos of milk chocolate bars … More

Josie Ford
Ever keeps on Given
The world rejoiced as the banking of the possibly good, but mainly just rather big, ship Ever Given at the southern end of the Suez Canal supplied an endless source of memes, a new unit for the horizontally stupidly oversized – about 0.5 Burj Khalifa – and a threat to global commerce and trade that wasn’t coronavirus. Or Brexit in UK parts, for that matter.
Our favourite related time-waster is a site brought to our attention by Elizabeth Barner from Leeds, UK: evergiven-everywhere.glitch.me.
Starting from a position that (shame on us) only by zooming out very, very far do we identify as the harbour of Boston, Massachusetts – whose famous tea parties were also some sort of statement about global trade practices back in the day – it allows us to “get the Ever Given stuck wherever you want it. Drag and zoom the map to move this big old boat somewhere else. Click the rotate button to get it wedged perfectly. Hit the ‘to scale’ button to make it approximately the right size. Or you can make it whatever size you feel like: get it stuck in a swimming pool or across the entire Atlantic Ocean.”

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Great fun, and all in the good cause of encouraging donations to the Boston Public Library’s Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center, we see.
Stressed out
Something has agitated the citizens of Leeds, as Martin Pitt also writes in from that city to add ire to our disparagement of “experiential” units of measurements rooted in no one’s experience (27 March).
The example we highlighted from The Wall Street Journal of an elephant suspended by a rope the diameter of a table tennis ball is meaningless for its stated purpose of measuring tension, or tensile force, he fulminates. “What the analogy should express is the tensile stress, which is the force per unit area, which would have been clear if they had also expressed it in conventional units such as Newtons per square metre.”
We are far from demurring, Martin. Mind you, the whole thing reminds us of the entry that used to stand in the good old Yellow Pages telephone directory under “Boring”: “See civil engineers”.
Don’t drink the water
We mean that only in self-referential jest, of course, as we do when we also say that our natural inclination on encountering any message beginning with the words “as a chemist” is to avert our eyes and hurry onwards in the hope we haven’t been seen.
Bill Appelbe writes in from Toronto, Canada, to take issue with our ridiculing of hydrogenated water as a facial exfoliation agent (13 March). Hydrogenated water, or H3O+, Bill points out, also using equations, is in fact a natural product of the ionisation of water in most environments save interstellar space – an environment where, he rightly points out too, few New Scientist readers are to be found, enjoying a facial scrub or not.
We stand corrected, Bill. We aren’t so sure about your advice to use a concentrated solution of sulphuric or hydrofluoric acid to get a really good dose of hydrogenated water with all its exfoliation benefits, but we understand you were writing as a chemist, not a beautician.
Oversight oversight
What we can only moodily and obliquely refer to as “other duties” leads Feedback to the website of the Oversight Board (motto: “Independent Judgment. Transparency. Legitimacy”), a body whose mission is so transparent it is apparently not necessary to state in its name what its independent judgement is lending legitimacy to.
To fill in the gaps, it has to do with a well-known social media company, which by appointing said board hopes to convince the world – we paraphrase, slightly – that while its medium may sometimes seem antisocial, it isn’t actually media, so doesn’t need regulating as such.
Not increasing our faith about the outfit’s resourcing is that, approaching its website using a well-known open-source browser, we see a confused mishmash of text and hyperlinks resembling the web circa 1999. Repeated links saying things like “A person scrutinizing a sphere she’s holding in her hand, while shapes and clouds float around her”, suggest images, yet lead to more text. The only thing that isn’t entirely 20th century is a warning that appears hovering above a “Share” link saying that if we click on it, a well-known social media company will be able to track our visit.
Oddly, when we use a well-known web browser associated with a well-known search company, we are transported back to the third decade of the 21st century, drawings of people scrutinising spheres surrounded by other geometry included. The power of big tech, eh?
Shining example
In a policy violation that our own Oversight Board shall investigate forthwith, we highlight Marc Abraham’s discovery of a paper from 2005. Very much in the spirit of a paper on incontinence by J. W. Splatt and D. Weedon that brought to life the monster of nominative determinism the best part of three decades ago – 5 November 1994, to be precise, we remember it as if it were yesterday – “Transparent Organic Light-Emitting Devices With LiF/Mg:Ag Cathode” is by B. J. Chen, X. W. Sun and S. C. Tan.
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