CityLife

Science - fiction's final frontier

Ann Lingard

OCCASIONALLY, great science is also great literature; Darwin’s Origin Of The Species is a case in point, but the two are not happy bedfellows and the rift between them is deep and ancient.

Nowadays, though, the scientific viewpoint has a stronger hold on popular opinion with terms like ‘genetic modification’ flying around like frisky sub-atomic particles, so surely it’s time that literature caught up with the rest of us.

Still, most writers of literary fiction shy away from using science and technology in their work, with notable exceptions including G.J Ballard and Douglas Coupland, or even worse, they dip in a half-hearted toe and end up making a mess of it.

Complex interplay

In William Golding’s classic The Lord Of The Flies, Piggy’s glasses are said to be used to start fires. Given that Piggy is myopic, his lenses would be divergent and therefore useless at starting fires. Just one of many examples of bad science in great literature.

With that in mind, The Manchester Literature Festival, in association with CityLife.co.uk, is hosting The Big Science Read Weekend; a series of readings, debates and workshops exploring the complex interplay between literature and science at various venues across the city from October 24-26.

On Saturday, Ann Lingard and Jennifer Rohn will run a ‘lablit’ writing workshop and talk about the challenges of putting modern science into fiction. Rohn is a cell biologist and science writer, as well as the founding editor of LabLit.com, a website devoted to the demystification of science for budding authors.

Fertility

Poet Gerrie Fellows will read from her new Carcanet poetry collection charting her experience of conceiving a child through IVF, followed by a discussion about the future of fertility treatment.

Down at the Cornerhouse, leading novelists Martyn Bedford, Maggie Gee and Sarah Hall will be debating the function of dystopian fiction as a method for exploring the ethical issues surrounding scientific and political developments.

Sunday brings new beasts to tackle, with a discussion of the scientific background, and the imagined future, promised by the threat of climate change, as well as a talk by Poppy Adams about her brilliant debut novel, The Behaviour Of Moths.

Ross Sutherland and Tim Clare will discuss the relationship between literature, imagination and maths, and provide a history of language games based on their encounters with the experimental French writing movement OULIPO (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle).

This will be followed by a performance of Tony Walsh’s Zeroes And Ones, which compresses 14 billion years of science and philosophy into one byte-sized poem (which should, theoretically solve all our problems).

Criticial acclaim

There is a practical writing workshop with leading crime fiction authors John Harvey and Chris Simms at the Science and Industry Museum, and, to cap it all, the Big Science read closes with a reading by one of the UK’s leading science-fiction writers, Stephen Baxter.

Baxter has published more than 40 books and won critical acclaim as well as prizes including the prestigious Philip K Dick Award and the British Science Fiction Association Award.

He is Vice-President of the British Science Fiction Association and a Vice-President of the HG Wells Society.

If anyone can help us figure out how to close the gap between the two cultures, it’s got to be this guy.