Wednesday 24 November 2010

Wellcome Collection blog

I've been fairly silent here recently, mostly due to a recurrence of my repetitive strain injury! Hands feeling somewhat less sore now, so here's a quick update... I have Part 1 of a 2-part blog post up on the Wellcome Collection blog, on science-inspired fiction. A taster:

Whenever I tell people I’m writer-in-residence in the Science Faculty at Bristol University, they look puzzled. What are you actually doing? they ask. They assume I am reporting in some way on what goes on, or helping the scientists to write. They don’t imagine – especially if they are scientists themselves – that I am writing fiction inspired by being in the labs. When I explain this, if it is a scientist I am talking to, a funny look comes over their face. But what we do is mostly boring, they say. Oh no, I say. You have no idea – every little thing in the lab is fascinating to me, from the purple latex gloves to the sandwiches people eat in lab meetings. It’s a different world.

If you Google ‘fiction inspired by science‘ many of the results you will find are actually science inspired by fiction, or science inspired by science fiction....

Read the rest here. Comments welcome!