On Wednesday, 20 March 2024 at 12:00pm I’ll be talking to astronomers Jocelyn Bell Burnell and Chris Impey about efforts to bring thinking from a greater diversity of backgrounds can enhance astronomy and provide insight into the universe.
The event’s being held at Oxford Martin School’s Lecture Theatre as part of this year’s Oxford Literary Festival. You can get tickets here.
Thanks to the recent publication of Engineers of Human Souls, I got to discuss censorship, free speech and modern China with journalist Yuan Yang and philosopher Jeffrey Howard when Rana Mitter hosted Radio 3’s Free Thinking on 19 March 2024. The programme is available on BBC Sounds.
Eight days in St Petersburg, anyone?
From 27 August 2021 and 8 October 2021 I’ll be joining New Scientist’s tours round the city and its many sites of scientific interest, offering talks and walking seminars with architectural historian Andrew Spira and local guides.
Here are some details, and you can speak to an expert to book on +44 (0)20 7251 0045.
Join me on-line at the V&A’s Friday Forum Creating Wonderlands, from 10am on Friday 30 April, where I’ll be among the speakers drawn from fashion, film, theatre, music and photography to discuss the perennial appeal and inspiration of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and Through the Looking Glass.
On Tuesday 2 June I had a chat with Jonathan Strahan for the Coode Street podcast.
Despots!
Plesiosaurs!
Here.
Episode 3 of the Baillie Gifford Prize’s ReadSmart Podcast, out Friday 29 May, has me discussing trends in artificial intelligence with the mathematician Hannah Fry. Razia Iqbal is in the chair. Available from all high-class streaming emporia; this is the Spotify one spoti.fi/3bJa5v7
This year I’ll be helping judge the Baillie Gifford prize for non-fiction. Radio 4 presenter Martha Kearney will chair the panel. Fellow judges are professor and author Shahidha Bari, New Statesmen writer Leo Robson, New York Times editor Max Strasser and journalist and author Bee Wilson. The winner will be announced on Thursday 19 November.
On Tuesday 3 December at 7pm I’ll be chairing a discussion at London’s Delfina Foundation about energy utopias, and the potential of hydrogen as a locally-produced sustainable energy source. Speakers include the artist Nick Laessing, Rokiah Yaman (Project Manager, LEAP closed-loop technologies) and Dr Chiara Ambrosio (History and Philosophy of Science, UCL).There may also be food, assuming Nick’s hydrogen stove behaves itself. More details here.
Thanks (I assume) to the those indefatigable Head of Zeus people, who are even now getting my anthology We Robots ready for publication, I’m invited to this year’s Berlin International Literature Festival, to take part in Automatic Writing 2.0, a special programme devoted to the literary impact of artifical intelligence.
Amidst other mischief, on Sunday 15 September at 12:30pm I’ll be reading from a new story, The Overcast.
Come to Cinema 3 at London’s Barbican Centre, where I’ll be kicking off a season of Stanislaw Lem on film with the Brothers Quay, artists Andrzej Klimowski and Danusia Schejbal, and Dr Mark Bould, author of the BFI Classics monograph on Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris.
We’ve got some short films kick off the evening at 6.45pm on Thursday 11 April. More details here.