Benjamin Markovits: Critical Essays Available for Pre-Order

Posted on by

The first volume in my Contemporary Writers: Critical Essays series in its new home at Routledge is now available for pre-order! Edited by Michael Kalisch and featuring contributions from emerging and established scholars, Benjamin Markovits: Critical Essays provides fresh perspectives on Markovits’s place in the contemporary literary field, as well as offering a detailed survey of his work to date. It’s wonderful to see the first book in the new life of the series coming through. Do get in touch if you have an idea for a conference and collection in the series.

“The collection begins with Markovits’s early ‘campus novel’, The Syme Papers (2004), before exploring his celebrated ‘Byron Trilogy’, and the 2005 story-cycle, Either Side of Winter. Contributors consider Markovits’s best-known book, You Don’t Have to Live Like This, which won the James Tait Memorial Prize, as well as his more recent fictions focusing on the trials and tribulations of the Essinger family. Taken together, this authoritative collection brings to light the many preoccupations of Markovits’s singular oeuvre—from Byron to basketball, from race relations to real estate. It also includes a frank and wide-ranging interview with the author.”

Hello Again

Posted on by

Things have been a bit quiet on this blog for the past couple of years, mainly because, as my last post indicated, with the publication of Storylistening in November 2021, most of my public activities have been focused around our storylistening work. They are all recorded on the book’s website, rather than here, so please do pop across to that to find out what I’ve mainly been up to for the past 24 months! But after deciding to take a step back from radio broadcasting and other kinds of public activities in 2018 to focus on academic research, I’ve been gradually making my way back out there. Over the past few years I’ve contributed to BBC Radio 3’s Free Thinking programmes on the future (as Covid swept across the world), John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids, Karel Čapek’s play The Makropulos Affair, the history of dystopias, and Philip K Dick’s weird and wonderful biographical novel Valis. It’s been a pleasure to be back in the studio at Broadcasting House where I always feel so at home. I also very much enjoyed writing and presenting a BBC Radio 3 essay on an author I’ve become slightly obsessed with, Philip Wylie. His life and work is so full of contradictions, he’s there everywhere you look when you start poking around in mid-twentieth century US popular culture, and some of his later books in particular are starkly relevant in today’s climate crisis, and yet very few people have heard of him. Find out more in my essay on him here.

Easing into in person events again in 2022, I also fulfilled a life long ambition of meeting Jeanette Winterson. I’m always reminded of the line in Gustav Flaubert’s Madame Bovary when I am about to meet someone I’ve admired from afar – Il ne faut pas toucher aux idoles: la dorure en rests aux mains – but I had nothing to fear in meeting Jeanette. We bonded in the green room of AI UK 22 over our fellow northeness, and I very much enjoyed our interview focusing on her new collection of essays, 12 Bytes, encompassing the future of AI and good BIG questions about humanity, art, religion and the way we live and love! As I told Jeanette, she is (at least partially) responsible for my academic career – I read the word ‘palimpsest’ in Written on the Body, didn’t know what it meant, looked it up in the dictionary, and my PhD and first book were conceived. The rest, as they say, is history. The pages of this website are now being updated to bring the public strand of that history up to date, and I’ll endeavour to keep them so alongside the storylistening page as I enter what feels like a new and exciting phase of that career.

New book Storylistening now published!

Posted on by

I’ve been busy over the past few months doing a series of interviews, events and written pieces ahead of the publication of my new book Storylistening: Narrative Evidence and Public Reasoning, co-authored with Claire Craig. The book was published in mid-November and we launched it online at an event kindly hosted by the Bennett Institute for Public Policy at Cambridge. A recording of the launch, together with links to all the other things to watch, read or hear around the book, can be found on the book’s webpage. All of my Storylistening-related activities will be posted there, rather than here, so do check it out.

Instant Expert – Penguin Launches New Generation Thinkers Audiobook

Posted on by

Just over nine years ago, whilst digging a new vegetable path in our Scottish garden and keeping a watchful eye on my 16 month old and 3 year old, I received the news that I’d been selected as a 2013 New Generation Thinker. It was the beginning of a journey that it is no exaggeration to say changed my life. I’d already discovered a love of radio broadcasting thanks to some early work with BBC Radio Scotland for which I’ll always remain grateful. But it was the NGT scheme that led me to BBC Radio 3 and helped me to develop that passion, and learn the skills of a new trade. Interestingly, it was the move to Cambridge not (or at least not directly) the NGT scheme that led me to Radio 4. I was talent scouted by the mother of a prospective student attending my 2014 Open Day lecture, who also happened to be the wonderful Head of Books at Radio 4. She was actually a little disappointed to discover that I’d already made my radio debut and she hadn’t been the one to discover me! There followed many years of joyful, stimulating and exciting radio programme making, from my Radio 4 Open Book Close Reading feature to a series I will always treasure, Literary Pursuits for Radio 3, to my Radio 4 journey to Mars via Arizona! BBC Broadcasting house became one of my favourite places to be, and is still home to some of my favourite people. It was a very hard decision a few years ago to step away from my radio work in order to give more time to my family and release a little of the professional pressure of pursuing an academic career while making radio programmes at the same time.

Having just checked and returned the proofs for my new book, and starting to raise my eyes again to the world afresh after the intense effort to bring it to fruition amongst all the many challenges of the pandemic, I am hit again by the sense of how much I miss broadcasting. So it is with both delight and a little misty-eyed nostalgia that I see Penguin has just launched an audiobook of radio essays by the first 100 New Generation Thinkers. ‘Instant Expert’ gathers together a whole array of brilliant and inspiring journeys of the mind from across the arts, literary studies, history, philosophy, science, religion and beyond. My first radio essay features there as Chapter 27, and I remember how much fun it was in the hall at the Free Thinking Festival at Sage Gateshead to dim the lights and take the audience on a tour of science fiction. All aboard the Wombcraft! With the new book coming out in November, the transition to Professor Dillon at the beginning of October, and a major collaborative research project drawing to an official close in December, it feels like a time of change is upon me. I don’t know what the next year or so has in store for me, but I hope that it includes a return to the airwaves, as well as greater happiness and health for us all.

CogX 2021 – The Future of AI: Views from History

Posted on by

One of my pre-pandemic, end of the academic year, June treats had become a trip down to London to take part in, and absorb the atmosphere and events at, the annual CogX Festival. It’s a rare event where academics, policymakers, technologists, industry people and many more come together to share knowledge around all things AI. As part of a series of public events for the Andrew W. Mellon Sawyer Seminar – Histories of AI: A Genealogy of Power – myself, co-organiser Richard Staley, and our postdoctoral research associate Jonnie Penn took part in 2021’s hybrid CogX Festival. We talked about what we’ve been doing on the Seminar for the past year, about some of the themes that have guided our discussions, and about AI and climate change. I spoke about AI and stories, drawing off the many things I’ve learnt over the course of the Seminar, thinking that has gone into and come out of the new book, Storylistening: Narrative Evidence and Public Reasoning, and research that’s informing my plans for the next book (I think!), on the intersections of AI research and literature in the mid-twentieth century.

Literary Pursuits Audiobook!

Posted on by

I was very sad to walk away from my BBC Radio 3 documentary series Literary Pursuits back in June 2019. Although it was the right decision at the time both personally and professionally, I still miss working with my amazing producer Sara Conkey, the creative and collaborative nature of the programme, and the chance to meet such generous interviewees, like Jean Rhys’ editor Diana Athill (now sadly passed away) and William Golding’s daughter Judy Carver, to name just two.

Sara and I both remain very proud of the series and the episodes we made, so it’s great to see that an audiobook collection of some of the highlights of the series, plus the first episode by the new producer-presenter team, is now available.

‘Is Climate Change Actually Being Taken Seriously?’ – University of Cambridge ‘Mind Over Chatter’ Podcast Episode

Posted on by

In this last episode of the first series of the University of Cambridge’s new podcast – Mind Over Chatter – I joined Richard Staley (Reader in the History and Philosophy of Science department) and Martin Rees (cosmologist, astrophysicist, and Astronomer Royal), to explore how stories relate to climate change. It was fun to do some audio work again after a break from radio for a while. It was also good to have an opportunity to try out some of the ideas from the new book, Storylistening: Narrative Evidence and Public Reasoning, to which we’re currently putting the finishing touches, in particular work in the book on understanding narratives as models.

Richard is one of my collaborators on the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar – Histories of AI: A Geneaology of Power – which we’ve been running since Spring 2020, and which has been one of the most phenomenal experience of my professional career. But Richard is also leading another important research project – Making Climate History – so it was good to have an opportunity to talk with him about climate change, rather than AI, although the two are of course intimately connected, as Richard has discussed elsewhere.

This episode was produced by Nick Saffell, James Dolan, and Naomi Clements-Brod.

NEW BOOK PUBLISHED – AI Narratives: A History of Imaginative Thinking About Intelligent Machines (Oxford University Press)

Posted on by

It never fails to be an exciting moment when a book that you have worked on for years finally meets the world. My co-edited book, AI Narratives: A History of Imaginative Thinking about Intelligent Machines, is now out with Oxford University Press. Mapping AI narratives from the classical era through through to the present, the collection examines how stories about AI anticipate, and can usefully inform, many contemporary debates about the social, ethical, political and philosophical consequences of AI. It was a pleasure to work with the contributors, from whom I learnt so much and who bring such a rich range of different expertise and methodological approaches to the topic.

CONTENTS

Introduction
Imagining AI, Stephen Cave, Kanta Dihal and Sarah Dillon

PART I – ANTIQUITY TO MODERNITY
1. Homer’s Intelligent Machines: AI in Antiquity, Genevieve Liveley and Sam Thomas
2. Demons and Devices: Artificial and Augmented Intelligence before AI, E. R. Truitt
3. The Android of Albertus Magnus: A Legend of Artificial Being, Minsoo Kang and Ben Halliburton
4. Artificial Slaves in the Renaissance and the Dangers of Independent Innovation, Kevin LaGrandeur
5. Making the Machine Speak: Hearing Artificial Voices in the Eighteenth Century, Julie Park
6. Victorian Fictions of Computational Creativity, Megan Ward
7. Machines Like Us? Modernism and the Question of the Robot, Paul March-Russell

PART II – MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY
8. Enslaved Minds: Artificial Intelligence, Slavery, and Revolt, Kanta Dihal
9. Machine Visions: Artificial Intelligence, Society, and Control, Will Slocombe
10. “A push-button type of thinking”: Automation, Cybernetics, and AI in Mid-century British Literature, Graham Matthews
11. Artificial Intelligence and the Parent/Child Narrative, Beth Singler
12. AI and Cyberpunk Networks, Anna McFarlane
13. AI: Artificial Immortality and Narratives of Mind-Uploading, Stephen Cave
14. Artificial Intelligence and the Sovereign-Governance Game, Sarah Dillon and Michael Dillon
15. The Measure of a Woman: Fembots, Fact and Fiction, Kate Devlin and Olivia Belton
16. The Fall and Rise of AI: Investigating AI Narratives with Computational Methods, Gabriel Recchia

UNESCO Global Futures Literacy Design Forum Interview

Posted on by

Little did I know when I was in Paris at the UNESCO Futures Literacy Forum in December last year, that it was likely to be my last trip abroad for some time. As all of us contend with the onset of the pandemic, and as many parents and carers are trying to figure out how to juggle home schooling and their jobs, it feels almost nostalgic to see this video published of an interview I gave at the Paris event. In it I talk about how storylistening can enable creative imagining about the future, and how it is needed to inform decision making and create futures that exist, and that ‘we’ want to live in. What I said then resonates differently now, of course, as we contend with a pandemic and even at its outset start to think about what the world might look like, what it needs to look like, afterwards.

BBC Radio 3 Free Thinking – Future Thinking

Posted on by

As we contend with the uncertainty that the pandemic has brought to our lives, BBC Radio 3’s Free Thinking asked me to take part in a programme dedicated to thinking about the future, both under our specific coronavirus conditions, and in general. The programme was one of their first recorded with participants all contributing remotely, huddled in the smallest spaces we have in our homes – although the sound is best if you’re under a duvet, or have at least tried to pad the walls with one, I find that that’s not necessarily always most conducive to clear thinking! But we all tried our best and, despite everything, ended up on a surprisingly hopeful note about what the future might hold…