Category Archives: Announcements

Free Thunk!

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So, I am all Free Thunk! What a fantastic weekend in Gateshead with the BBC team and my fellow New Generation Thinkers. Speed dating was a heady, super-charged, intellectual comedy with the lovely Ian McMillan hooting the hooter in his own inimicable style. I came runner up each day with my idea that we should have a National Fool to keep us all honest! In slightly more serious proceedings, my discussion of Zamyatin’s dark dystopia We and the contemporary issues we are all facing around surveillance and questions of privacy, security and freedom was broadcast last night on BBC Radio 3. I was lucky enough to participate alongside a trio of the best in the business – David Aaronovitch, Sean O’Brien and Matthew Sweet. If you didn’t catch it last night, you can listen again here.

And here’s me trying to win over the love and votes of the Speed Dating public!

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‘Who’s in control?’: BBC Radio 3 Free Thinking Festival, 25th-27th October, The Sage, Gateshead

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After a quiet, scholarly summer I’m reemerging to get going on some more public activities. First thing coming up is the fantastic annual BBC Radio 3 Free Thinking Festival at The Sage, Gateshead, 25th-27th October. This year’s theme is ‘Who’s in Control?’ and I’ll be sharing my thoughts at two gigs. On the Saturday, come along to my essay on reproduction and SF taking a tour of speculative fiction from Wells to Battlestar Gallactica. Then on Sunday I’ll be joining poet Sean O’Brien and journalist David Aaronovitch for a discussion of Zamyatin’s astonishing dystopian novel We. Tickets are free but need to be booked in advance here. All the sessions are recorded live and broadcast on BBC Radio 3 shortly after so if you can’t make it to Gateshead, stay tuned to Radio 3 instead!

 

BBC Radio 3 Night Waves Column on Analogy, Science and Literature

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I was down in London yesterday to record my first column for BBC Radio 3 Night Waves. The science media is all a-buzz about ‘analogy’ at the moment after the publication of the new book by Pulitzer prize winning cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter and his collaborator, French psychologist Emmanuel Sander: Surface and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking. They argue that rather than analogy just being a part of reasoning, it it actually the key to cognition – the only way we understand anything is by comparing it to something we already know. Interested by their arguments, I take a look at how analogy figures in literature and science and what is can tell us about the relationship between them. It’ll be broadcast sometime next week – I’ll post the link when it comes out, so watch this space.