London lit mag wants fiction inspired by science

So, you think you might fancy writing fiction and you love/do science? Well, here's an opportunity from one of the UK's coolest short story magazines. Just do it!

Litro Call for Submissions: Short stories (50-3000 words) on the subject of Science

Litro, London's premier short story magazine, wants to see your stories about science and scientists. Flash fiction is very welcome, as are short stories up to 3000 words. Please send as a Word or RTF attachment by Tuesday March 1 to editor@litro.co.uk

April: Science

Science is at the root of everything, but how often do we read stories about it? From hard sci-fi to speculative, near-future fiction, we’re looking for your work involving science, scientists, and your wildest technological imaginings.

Coming live from the lab

It's been a while since I've done this, I've been remiss, I apologise. Blogging takes a certain level of commitment, and I've slipped! But soon I will be presenting an opportunity for new bloggers to join me, so stay tuned.

In the meantime, today's lab meeting was interesting both because of the chocolate cupcakes and because it was the first time I'd been to the lab's "Journal Club" where one of the lab members picks an interesting journal paper they've found and discusses it. This time it was not one but two papers, both published in the same journal within a few months of each other and both seeming to deal with exactly the same question: Does a wound cause hair follicle stem cells to contribute to tumour formation? What is fascinating is both why the journal chose to publish two seemingly quite similar papers so close together, and also the fact that one has a much "sexier" title than the other although both actually mean the same thing!

I'm learning a lot here about publishing in journals - but to be honest I couldn't really even understand the introductory paragraph of either paper. The interesting detail I gleaned was that the possible relationship between injury and cancer was first thrown up in 1863... which just gives an indication of the evolution of scientific ideas, that nothing happens in a week or even a decade, sometimes a question is put out there and over 150 years later it is still be investigated.

The discussion of these papers also touched on something that is particularly interesting to me: what aspect of this research reached the "public"? The researcher in the lab mentioned how he had told his girlfriend about the papers and she had immediately panicked and said "Does that mean when I get a cut I could get cancer?" This might sound like an overreaction, but then I googled to see what the press has made of these publication and I found headlines such as:

How a paper cut could trigger skin tumors

which is not in the least alarmist, eh?!

But, I have to say, it's not such a stretch from the titles of these papers to the headline of this article. However, I'm sure the scientists involved would never want a wave of public panic about paper cuts! So, an interesting point to ponder about science communication. Where's the disconnect? Whose responsibility is it? Any comments?

 

Thought lab life was dull and boring? Think again!

One of the scientists at the lab I am writer-in-residence in sent this around yesterday and I think it's wonderful! It's for all of you non-scientists who think science is about hard fact, about right and wrong, about automatons in lab coats who reveal the truth of existence on a daily basis. Umm, no, not quite...

The Perfect Egg in Nature

I'm delighted to have a short story in the Futures section of the venerable science magazine Nature this week - it's just gone online today and is in the print issue which I believe comes out tomorrow. It's called The Perfect Egg,  and it was sort of my first real attempt to write science fiction. Yes, some of the short stories in my book might be kind of SF-ish, but that wasn't my aim when I was writing them. Nature Futures is "a forum for the best new science-fiction writing, exploring some of the themes that might challenge us as the future unfold" and I never expected to get my first submission to them accepted. This story seems a bit different from the other Futures stories I have read, so I am delighted to have made it - and rather thrilled that in their email to me they addressed me as "Dr Hershman"! (Don't worry, I put them straight on that...) Anyway, comments can be left on the online version, should you feel moved to! (No pressure). Read it here.

Short story inspired by the discovery of GFP

Manchester-based independent publishers Comma Press are doing something very close to my heart: commissioning fiction writers to be inspired by "eureka" moments in science across various disciplines, pairing them up with a scientist, and asking them produce short stories that explore this concept which will be published in an anthology in May.

Being commissioned is both wonderful and fairly scary. First, there was quite a detailed brief for this project. And second, it had to be a minimum of 2500 words. For someone like me who hasn't written anything over 1500 for 3 years, that was like asking me to write a novel (ok, not quite, but fairly daunting!)

 Transgenic tadpoles expressing Green Fluorescent Protein

Well, I managed it by approaching it as a set of short short fictions, and got to 2500, just... And the result, We Are All Made of Protein but Some Of Us Glow More Than Others, is inspired by the discovery of Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP), which has transformed molecular biology, as I have learned well from the biochemistry lab here and from Nicholas Love, the researcher in the Amaya Lab at Manchester University that I was paired with. GFP allows a researcher to see inside a living organism in real time. It's amazing, as the pic above from his lab shows...

You can read my story here and Nicholas' afterword here. And there are more stories on the Comma site, for physics, chemistry and neuroscience, written by, among others, Annie Clarkson, Stella Duffy and Kate Clanchy. This is very exciting, I'm delighted to be involved...!

Wellcome Collection Blog Part 2

Part 2 of my guest blog post on science-inspired fiction is now up on the Wellcome Collection blog, where I talk about examples of SciLit that I like, what works for me and what doesn't. A taster:

The first fiction inspired by science that I came across, and still my favourite, is Einstein’s Dreams, by MIT physicist Alan Lightman. Published in 1994, this could be described loosely as a novel-in-stories, an imagining of what Einstein might have been dreaming about as he was formulating his theory of relativity. Each chapter or story conjures up a different theory of time – it moves slower at higher altitudes, disorder decreases with time instead of increasing, it works in a groundhog-day fashion where people are doomed to repeat the same day again and again. Einstein’s Dreams is not only thought-provoking but beautifully written:

“In this world it is instantly obvious that something is odd. No houses can be seen in the valleys or plains. Everyone lives in the mountains. At some time in the past, scientists discovered that time flows more slowly the farther from the centre of the earth. The effect is minuscule, but it can be measured with extremely sensitive instruments. Once the phenomenon was known, a few people, anxious to stay young, moved to the mountains…Height has become status. When a person from his kitchen window must look up to see a neighbour, he believes that neighbour will not become as stiff in the joints as soon as he, will not lose his hair…”

Read the rest here.

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!