Category Archives: Projects

Share Ideas | Share Research | Share the Future

It is with great pleasure that I can announce Share the Future, a public event on 3 June (tickets on eventbrite)

As regular readers of this blog know, I’ve been working alongside scientists and future-tech folk for a couple of years as part of a project with King’s College London. They do the science and I do the fiction. In fact, Christine Aicardi who leads the project wrote the foreword to my new collection.

These collaborations have been really interesting and have produced some great fiction for public events and some has made it into my new collection. Two of the scientists, Claire Steves and Danbee Kim, have each written an expert response at the back of the Biohacked & Begging

This is what Claire and Danbee have to say about sharing…

“Openness and lack of secrecy in research reduces the chance that good ideas are only exploitable by private entities.” Claire Steves.

“Hard-working humans who acknowledge how subjective, how painstakingly slow, how human the endeavour of building, organising and sharing knowledge is and needs to be – that will be the beginning of solving our problems, and the first step for anyone who truly wants to be curious.” Danbee Kim.

So, we’d love you to come along and join the conversation on 3 June. Tickets are free, but you need to book.

Find out more about the project, its impact and the background to Zygosity Saves the Day which came out of working with Claire and TwinsUK.


photo credit: mclcbooks Roots via photopin (license)

Strange Brains, Alien Minds

It’s been a very busy few months, you just need to look at my events page to see what I mean. Guess what? Every time I’ve set aside some time to sit down and write a few words about my experiences something else crops up and the chance slip by.

Although it’s a bit late, here’s a very short reflection on my ongoing collaboration with King’s College London and the Human Brain Project. It’s called ‘Transforming Future Science through Science Fiction.’ Continue reading

Science Fiction and Science Futures

Michael Reinsborough, one of the social scientists I worked with on the Bristol Robotics Lab project and co-presented with at the Science in Public conference has written a piece for the Journal of Science Communication about the work.

Here is the abstract and a link to the article.

Science Fiction and Science Futures: Considering the role of fictions in public engagement and science communication work.

Abstract: The imagination of possible scientific futures has a colourful history of interaction with scientific research agendas and public expectations. The 2017 annual UK Science in Public conference included a panel discussing this. Emphasizing fiction as a method for engaging with and mapping the influence of possible futures, this panel discussed the role of science fiction historically, the role of science fiction in public attitudes to artificial intelligence, and its potential as a method for engagement between scientific researchers and publics. Science communication for creating mutually responsive dialogue between research communities and publics about setting scientific research agendas should consider the role of fictions in understanding how futures are imagined by all parties.