Back in 2018 I wrote an article for the Royal Literary Fund called The Poor Cousin's Defence . In it, I pointed out the way that literary types have always treated science fiction as second-rate writing, so when they produced SF it had to be labelled as something else, denying that they had dirtied their hands with it in the first place. Infamously, Margaret Atwood, a serial offender. is said to have claimed in a BBC interview that science fiction was limited to ‘talking squids in outer space.’ I was revisiting the article to check something I'd mentioned about C. P. Snow's 'two cultures' observation from the 1950s when I noticed that something seemed to have changed. I had written: 'When has a science-fiction novel won a major literary prize? There’s no sign of SF on the Pulitzer or Booker lists.' Of course, the 2024 Booker Prize winner was Orbital by Samantha Harvey. Does this make my comment out of date? Not really. Harvey herself, true to form of such ...

It's easy to mistake this book for a historical fiction/fantasy crossover, but apart from one small element, it is straightforward fiction in a historical setting. The military had shown an interest in camouflage in the First World War, when some ships were given disruptive or 'dazzle' paintwork that made it hard to see where the ship began and ended or what its direction of travel was. But the whole business was supercharged from 1939. A rag-tag group of professionals including a zoologist, artists and a stage magician designed camouflage and fakery both to hide machinery and make fake airfields to distract bombers. Later guns and tanks would be disguised to look like trucks. Syd Moore sets her fictional team in this world, but faced with an even bigger challenge: trying to prevent the German invasion of Britain by playing on the occult leanings of Hitler's high ranking officers. The central character, Daphne Devine is stage assistant to the illusionist Jonty Trevalyan...

Over the years I have come across a number of ways that art and science have come together effectively, often in a way that makes science more accessible. Sometimes this involves the explicit illustration of scientific principles, as in Adam Dant's entertaining How it All Works , for which I had the pleasure of coming up with the scientific principles to be covered by his delightful illustrations (small version of one of Adam's images alongside, but you have to see them full size to appreciate their genius). I've recently come across a project by artist Lewis Andrews, who took a book a month for a year and used each as the inspiration for a series of artworks. Two of my books were included in the project: Dark Matter and Dark Energy , and Gravitational Waves . You can see Lewis's project Scientia in full on its web page . But I can reproduce two of the striking images here. Halo IV One of a series of digitally enhanced drawings inspired by Dark Matter and Dark Energy ...

I'm currently doing some work at the University of Bristol as a Royal Literary Fund Fellow. This excellent charity puts professional writers into universities to help students (and occasionally staff) with their writing skills.  As these days you can't do much at a university without a pass attached to a lanyard I have one - but I stand out somewhat because practically everyone else I see has a rainbow lanyard, while mine is black and white. Being of a nervous disposition, I sometimes wonder if I'm going to be stopped and accused of being anti-woke or some such thing because I'm not flying the rainbow flag. In practice, I have no objection to it at all, but I was first issued with my lanyard during my first stint as a Fellow about 10 years, and the black and white ones where all that were on offer then.  Given the thing is pretty much indestructible and will probably outlive me, on environmental grounds I really don't want to swap it to another one and throw it awa...

I'm not an AI luddite. Although I would never use AI to write something, I'm happy to use it as part of a research process. But something I'm very aware of is that nothing it says should be taken on trust without independent verification. Andrew Stephens passed on an example which I detail in full below. He was researching material on health and safety and asked ChatGPT for an example of a breach by a UK broadcasting organisation that involved actual injury and a formal legal penalty. Here's what it came up with. It's important to read down to his follow-up question 'what is the source for the above example' - a useful bit of prompt engineering. I've highlighted it in red below. 📍 Incident: BBC fined after  technician crushed by a studio door Broadcaster : BBC Date of Incident : January 2018 Location : Broadcasting House, London Legal Outcome : BBC fined £28,000 in 2020 🛠️ What Happened: A  BBC studio technician  was crushed  by a motorised door  at Br...

The first professional PC I had was an IBM PC XT - hard disc space 10Mb. That's about 100,000 times smaller than my current 1Tb storage. In those early days, particularly as images started to be stored, the requirement for space outpaced the increase in size of hard discs. As a result, there was a busy market in compression software to keep file size to a minimum. This ranged from the humble ZIP file we still know and love to a company that used fractal processing to hugely reduce the size of images. They took ages to compress, but were very quick to unpack. Over time, though, disc* space has increased at such a rate that it's rarely a problem. That word 'disc', of course, is becoming just as anachronistic as the 'Save' icon that is based on a 3.5 inch diskette (see above). I've just replaced my previous desktop, which was the last one I'm likely to have that makes use of disc technology. The new one is SSD - just as much an anachronism as there is no ...

REVISIT SERIES -  An updated post from April 2015 It's of the nature of coincidences (that's another post) that your attention is drawn to something when it comes up several times in a short time span. I'm just in the process of moving to a new desktop computer, and this reminded of the post below on mechanical computers from ten years ago, where (back then) mechanical computation came up four times in the period of a couple of weeks. The first example was when I was proofreading my 2015 title for St Martin's Press, called Ten Billion Tomorrows . The book about the relationship between science and science fiction, and I point out that when I saw 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968 (in the cinema in Cinerama , an ultra-widescreen attempt to get people away from the TV), the only computer I had ever seen before I encountered the remarkable HAL was my Digi-Comp I. This was a mechanical device with three plastic sliders, which could be programmed by adding extensions on t...

On Friday, on a beautiful sunny day, I was delighted to be awarded an honorary Doctor of Science degree by the University of Buckingham. The whole day could not have been better, from being given a chance to give to speak to graduands from the IT and Health faculties (see below) to the honour of receiving the degree, hearing about remarkable work done in those faculties, and the pleasure of meeting fascinating people, from Sir Magdi Yacoub to the University Chancellor Dame Mary Archer (who I'm pictured above alongside). Not to mention sharing this with family and Buckingham-based friends. Here's an approximate version of what I said to the students. This excellent establishment was not granted royal charter until well after I left education, but is a place I would have been proud to attend for its open-minded approach. Basing decisions on evidence, not bias, is is so important when it comes to dealing with truth - and truth is something it's essential to understand in my jo...

Science writers rarely mention astrology, other than to moan when someone accidentally uses the word instead of astronomy. There is, of course, no scientific basis for astrology, but when we are considering history of science it is impossible to ignore astrology as many of the early astronomers earned a fair amount of their living doing a spot of astrology on the side. This didn't mean that they necessarily believed in it (though Roger Bacon, for example, makes an argument for it as an environmental influence, as opposed to a predictor of the future), but it brought in the cash and often the support of the nobility. The reality with astrology and other fortune telling approaches is that, even though it has no basis for working, inevitably some of the predictions will come true. If every single prediction didn't happen, it would actually be a very significant outcome - astrologers would be successfully predicting what wasn't going to happen. I was struck the other day when w...

I'm currently enjoying Tim Harford's three part series on Houdini on his Cautionary Tales podcast . Although best remembered as an escapologist, in the later part of his life, Harry Houdini included a section in his act that involved unmasking spirit mediums as fake. Earlier, Houdini had become friends with Arthur Conan Doyle, who became a fervent spiritualist and whose wife was a medium. Apparently, in one final attempt to persuade Doyle of the folly of his beliefs, Houdini did a demonstration for Doyle in his New York apartment. He hung a small blackboard from the ceiling out of reach, asked Doyle to to go out of the apartment and write a message on a piece of paper. When Doyle returned, Houdini got Doyle to stick a cork ball soaked in white ink on the board - to Doyle's amazement, the ball then wrote out his message (the Aramaic phrase Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin - mentioned in the Bible's book of Daniel) on the board. Houdini did this to demonstrate how the apparent...

Whenever the possibility of a trade deal between the UK and the US crops up, 'chlorinated' chicken comes back to menace us, much like Frankenstein's monster. But really it's a paper tiger. (This must surely be a mixed metaphor?) There is no doubt that there are potential dangers to such a deal for the UK, notably around food and medical supplies and services. However, when the press gets over-excited about chlorinated (or more properly chlorine-washed) chicken, it dilutes the whole argument, because this is absolutely fine. If you buy a bag of ready-to-eat salad in the UK it will have been chlorine-washed. This kills off the dodgy bacteria such as E. coli, Salmonella and Listeria that can easily be carried by salad leaves - the treatment makes it safer to eat. No one seems to panic about this. Now let's consider chicken. In the old days we used to be told to wash chicken before cooking it. We don't anymore because there is a real danger that doing so will splash...