Simon Ings's Blog, page 48

“Seasoned with a sprinkling of science”

That’s what it says here. I’m never going to live this one down.

From 19 – 24 August 2013 I’ll be at Totleigh Barton, “a thatched, pre-Domesday manor house, nestled in the rolling hills of one of the most peaceful and beautiful parts of Devon,” teaching for the Arvon Foundation alongside Tania Hershman, one of the country’s more energetic champions of the short story. We’ll be guiding new, uncertain, confused and increasingly anxious writers through the interzone between fiction and science writing in a course imaginatively titled Science and Writing.

It says here that “we will be giving you different ways to sprinkle science into your writing, encouraging you to play!”

Ha. Expect intense intellectual rigour, cut with grotesque displays of temper, as we attempt to fuse the two cultures in the magnetic bottle of us getting paid for once.

Heidi Williamson, who was was poet-in-residence at the Science Museum’s Dana Centre, is our guest reader.

The course costs between £620 and £680 and grants are available for those on low income – click here for more information.

Bedding Heather

So I was on this panel about sexuality at EightSquaredCon, paraphrasing a pick-up scene by professional Yorkshireman John Braine and hazing people with the idea that maybe we didn’t invent same-sex attraction last week, and that anyone writing novels or reading them may for the longest time have had a fairly sophisticated take on the subject; one we just can’t see these days, obsessed as we are by labeling everything. And then I read The Productions of Time by John Brunner, an indispensable book if only for its jaw-dropping overuse of the expression “fullblown Les”. As in:

“And me as a fullblown Les,” Heather said. “It’s so frightening, Murray! They said ‘the urge was on her tapes’ and if you hadn’t worried me so much… I’d have been seduced by Ida and then…”

“But it might not have worked, young woman!”

“It would have,” she said obstinately. “There’s a bit of it in all of us — you should know that, as a doctor. I used to get crushes on older girls when I was at school, so it’s probably still in me, just below the surface, waiting for—“

Hysteria on the way, Murray diagnosed, and wondered if he was going to have to slap her face to quiet her.

So that’s my oh-so-sophisticated take on the historiography of sex blown out of the shallows. Though of course Brunner, while capable of writing like a dog and thinking like a dog, was not incapable of irony, and this was published (in 1967) by New American Library, so maybe there’s a sneery transatlantic joke being played here on the cowpokes.

All that remains is to write a cracking outline to go with “Fullblown Les” – a title too po-mo to waste.

Going to @EightSquaredCon in Bradford this Easter? Then you need…

(Swiped from an @io9 tweet. Obviously.)

Stand me a vodka at this year’s Scifiweekender and I will sing to you of the steppe…

I’m off to north Wales on St David’s Day to take part in this year’s Scifiweekender. It’s being held at the Hafan y Mor Holiday Park near Pwllheli and will probably look something like this

though given the weather it could end up looking like this

and will add a chilly authenticity to Simon’s exploration of Soviet cinema, space exploration, and all things Klushantsev.

Saturday’s RAILWAY TO THE STARS is, a celebration of Russia’s spirit of exploration through Russian film. I’ll also bring along some off-prints of Arc to give people a flavour of what we’re up to.

The 2013 Scifiweekender runs from 1 to 3 March. Call the ticket hotline on 08700 110034.

Come see Arc in Amsterdam

On the afternoon of Sunday 24 February, Arc visits the Netherlands to explore the dark universe as guests of Sonic Acts, a long-running Dutch festival exploring the interzone between art, music and science.

The invitation a very happy coincidence for us as Arc‘s first edition of 2013, out soon, focuses on the fact that most of our universe is missing.

Come see us if you can: Alastair Reynolds will be riffing mischievously off Fermi’s paradox, science writer Frank Swain will map where the wild things are, I’ll explain why a theory of vision that ignored light completely served us well for over 800 years, and Tim Maughan will offer us a first glimpse of his experimental AR entertainment Watching Paint Die.

(I’m especially looking forward to that as I’ve just received Tim’s latest story for Arc – a cracking sequel to Paintwork called Ghost Hardware.)

Sonic Acts 2013 runs from Thursday 21 to Sunday 24 February. (Here’s the programme.) Arc’s bit of it runs from 1.30 to 3.30 on Sunday afternoon, in a former gaol called De Balie. They say it’s a chic theatre cafe-restaurant now, but I’m beginning to wonder if there isn’t a pattern developing here.

Last time I did something with Sonic Acts they put me up in a student house next door to Joseph Fritzl.

Conference & Festival Passepartout 80 euro

24 Feb day and evening 25 euro

24 Feb day: Conference 20 euro

Follow the event on Twitter:

@arcfinity @sonicacts @aquilarift @sciencepunk @simonings @timmaughan

Of Martians and machines

Thought arises, not from matter, but from the way it is organised. Alexander Bogdanov, science fiction pioneer, philosopher, physician, Lenin’s friend and rival, explored the idea of automating society. The West calls this cybernetics and it fuels consumer culture. But in the Soviet Union, Bogdanov’s philosophy was discredited and suppressed. On Tuesday 18 December at 7.30pm I’ll be asking why the Soviets abandoned their early dreams of automating Man.

The talk’s at Pushkin House, 5A Bloomsbury Square, London WC1A 2TA, and you can find more details here.

Let maths illuminate your life!

Thanks to the review I wrote of Thinking in Numbers, an excellent collection of essays about the psychology and culture of numbers, the RSA has invited me along to talk with the author Daniel Tammett on 27 Nov 2012 at 13:00. Follow this link for details of venue etc; you can also follow the event remotely through the following links

http://www.thersa.org/events/listen-live

http://www.thersa.org/events/watch-live

BioPunk comes to the Durham Literary Festival

On Saturday 27 October, 2012 I’ll be reading from and discussing “The Wrestler”, one of the stories that make up Bio-Punk: stories from the far side of research. It’s a new anthology edited by Ra Page of Comma Press, pairing up writers and scientists. (Dr Ian Vincent McGonigle was my collaborator on “The Wrestler”: he’s currently studying Socio-Cultural Anthropology at the University of Chicago, with research interests in bioethics, epistemology, ethno-pharmacology and medical anthropology.)

Other writers in the anthology include Toby Litt, Sara Maitland, Adam Marek, Justina Robson, Jane Rogers and Dilys Rose.

On Saturday, Dilys and her collaborator Dr Jane Haley will be with me at Durham Town Hall at 2pm to launch the book with readings and discussion. Thanks to Waterstones Newcastle for their support, and the long-suffering Rebecca Wilkie of New Writing North for finding me the correct train ticket. (I was LOST, I tell, you LOST, the Interwebs had BROKEN…)

Electric Shadows

From 12-14 October 2012, the Kontraste Festival – curated by Sonic Acts – reverberates across Krems, a pretty town on the Danube famous for its art galleries, staggeringly good white wine, and one of the world’s best preserved panopticon prisons. On Saturday I’ll be discussing how, adapted as we are to a rich visual world, we will have to learn to tolerate the limited colour palette and visual monotony of the rest of the universe. This is one of the more left-field contributions; for the most part the weekend is filled with a wild assortment of scientifically literate sound artists Playing with Our Brains. This sort of thing:

There’s also a film programme, like this:

with a touch of this:

If you can’t make it up the Danube, there’s always the book.

Thinking in Numbers by Daniel Tammet, reviewed for Culture Lab

To be “afraid of numbers” is a pose, a position, an aesthetic choice, as surely as not “getting” jazz, or condemning this or that kind of art as “rubbish”. http://bit.ly/PTPFN9