With contributions from both sides of the science/humanities divide, this is a quirky collection of essays on science and the imagination. It springs from the Science Museum's construction of Charles Babbage's "difference engine", the mechanical computer which he designed in the 1830s but never built. The essays deal with topics such as the invention of the phonograph, the Victorian delight in robots and automata such as the steel tarantula spider which crawls out of its box and runs around, microphotography and the minuscule, and the Internet and the British.
I'm a writer of non-fiction who is creeping up gradually on writing novels. I write slowly and I always move to new subject-matter with each book, because I want to be learning something fresh every time, both in terms of encountering history and people and thinking which are new to me, and also in the sense of trying out a new way of writing. My idea of a good project is one that I can only just manage. I've written a memoir of my childhood as a compulsive reader, an analysis of the British obsession with polar exploration, a book about engineers which is also a stealth history of Britain since 1945, and now "Red Plenty", about the moment in the early 1960s when it looked as if Soviet communism really might be beating the capitalist west in the race to abundance. But "Red Plenty" isn't exactly history, and it isn't exactly a novel either: it's a fusion of the two, to try to bring the world of the early-60s USSR alive. It's a comedy of ideas, and a sad story about the cost of ideas, all at once. I haven't finished my slow crabwise crawl into fiction yet; my next book, or maybe the one after next, will be a full-on freestanding novel with (I promise) no notes at the back of it at all. But this is where I've got to so far. I hope you enjoy it. The book has its own website at www.redplenty.com, where I've put out-takes, Soviet jokes, background material on the main characters, clips from Soviet music and film of the time - generally, things I used or enjoyed when I was doing the writing.
(Oh, biography. I was born in 1964, I'm married with a six-year-old daughter, and I teach on the MA in Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths College, London.)
