‘Different Engines’

Mark’s first book looks at the relationship between science and science fiction.  It’s based on the idea that since its emergence in the seventeenth century, science fiction (SF) has been a sustained, coherent and subversive check on the promises and pitfalls of science.  And in their turn, invention and discovery have forced fiction writers to confront the nature and limits of reality. Different Engines: How Science Drives Fiction and Fiction Drives Science is the first popular science book to explore how this fascinating symbiosis shapes what we see, do and dream.
From Johannes Kepler’s Somnium to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, science fiction has emerged as a mode of thinking, complementary to the scientific method. SF’s field of interest is the gap between the new worlds uncovered by experimentation and exploration, and the fantastic worlds of the imagination. Its proponents find drama in the tension between the familiar and the unfamiliar. Its readers, many of them scientists and politicians, find inspiration in the contrast between the ordinary and the extraordinary.  Different Engines is a unique, provocative and compelling account of science fiction as the arbiter of progress.

For the first time, discovery and invention delineate the evolution of science fiction:

A Plurality of Habitable Worlds: The Age of Discovery (1500 – 1800)

Remembrance of Things To Come: The Mechanical Age (C19th)

Pulp Fiction: The Astounding Age (1900 – 1940)

Cold War and Heat Death: The Atomic Age (1940s, 1950s)

Stranger in a Strange Land: The New Age (1960s, 1970s)

Information Wants to be Free: The Computer Age (1980s, 1990s)

The Frankenstein Century: The Age of Biology (C21st)

Uniquely, each chapter showcases the evolutionary symbiosis of science fiction and science: their common origins identified in The Age of Discovery; the mutual influence of machine, evolution and fiction in The Mechanical Age; the reciprocal refuelling of emergent cosmologies, space opera and real-life space travel anticipated in The Astounding Age; the evolution of bombs and apocalyptic fiction in The Atomic Age; the many worlds, multiverses and alternative histories of quantum theory in The New Age; the prophesised liberating power of the web, and the virtual and tangible realities of AIs, robots and cyborgs in The Computer Age; and fictional projections of our troubled genetically-modified future in The Age of Biology

‘FutureWorld’

Mark’s second book, also written along with colleague Neil Hook, is a popular science book for Boxtree MacMillan and the Science Museum. The book was showcased in June 2008 at the Space, Time, Machine and Monster conference, sponsored by The Welsh Academy, the book was launched on 18 July 2008 by the Science Museum.