An interview with Neal Stephenson
Neal Stephenson talked to Arc about breaking the human body out of its IT prison. His collection of short pieces, Some Remarks, had just been published in the UK, bringing into one volume his writings about the rise and fall of Wired-style digital culture.
An interview with Ned Beauman
Ned Beauman talks Arc about The Teleportation Accident, a genre-splitting novel that, unlike his dark debut Boxer Beetle, wears its comic impulses on its sleeve. When culpably naive Weimer emigre Anton Loeser stumbles into the Los Angeles dreamtime in the late 1930s, he triggers a series of world-shattering incidents, none of which involve him getting laid.
An interview with Liz Jensen
Liz Jensen dropped into Arc’s offices to discuss her new book The Uninvited, an accessible and very frightening vision of ecological and political crisis.
“I thought about John Wyndham a lot,” she says, “and the ways he found to tell a complex, global story from a single, intimate point of view.” The result is chilling. Across the world, children are killing their families. The experts say it’s an isolated incident – and they’re wrong.
An interview with Jake Arnott
In June 2012 novelist Jake Arnott, best known for period thrillers The Long Firm and He Kills Coppers, talked to Arc about his novel The House of Rumour, an esoteric and sometimes disturbing reimagining of science fiction’s Golden Age.
Under Tomorrow’s Sky
On June 16 2013, urbanist Liam Young brought together an ensemble of thinkers, writers and artists to forge the collaborative blueprint for a future city. I went along to rub shoulders with, among others, Warren Ellis, Rachel Armstrong and Bruce Sterling, and to film this wrap-up discussion between Sterling and Young.
An interview with Liam Young
I talk to the architect and urbanist Liam Young for Arc about his brush with Special Branch, and how a robotic ballet at Dublin’s Science Gallery led to him and his colleagues being recorded under the UK’s Terrorism Act.
An interview with Lee Smolin
Can the future be predicted? In his book Time Reborn (2013), physicist Lee Smolin set out to show that the world is an unpredictable place, and that common-sense, Newtonian habits of thought prove seriously mistaken when applied to the great unbounded problems of our age, from economics to climate change.
In the first part of this interview, conducted for Arc magazine, Lee Smolin explains why Newtonian physics cannot be applied to the world as a whole, and why the work of Newton’s great rival, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, may hold the key to a new model of the universe.
… and in the second part Smolin explores the human implications of a world where time is real and true novelty in nature is possible.
An interview with Anthony Dunne
I went along to London’s Design Museum to catch the opening of United Micro Kingdoms (UMK): A Design Fiction. The exhibition, conceived and curated by design studio Dunne & Raby, uses elements of industrial design, architecture, politics and science to explore the future of design. Anthony Dunne talked to Arc about his four fictional kingdoms, his love of science fiction, and the value of dystopic thinking.
An interview with China Miéville
China Miéville speaks to Arc about Railsea, his delirious and parched recasting of Herman Melville’s epic Moby Dick.