Spectator Books: science fiction from Jim Al-Khalili

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4.4 • 785 Ratings

🗓️ 29 May 2019

⏱️ 26 minutes

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Summary

In this week’s books podcast Sam is joined by the physicist Jim Al-Khalili (host of Radio Four’s The Life Scientific) to talk about his first novel, a science-fiction thriller called Sunfall. In it, Jim uses real science to conjure up a plausible but fantastical near-future crisis in which the earth’s magnetic field falters and dies. What would that mean? (Nothing good, is the answer.) He helps us sort our neutralinos from our neutrinos, tells us about the real existential threats we face, and explains why he’s drawn to so-called “hard sf”.

Spectator Books is a series of literary interviews and discussions on the latest releases in the world of publishing, from poetry through to physics. Presented by Sam Leith, The Spectator's Literary Editor. Hear past episodes of Spectator Books here.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Spectator Radio, the Spectator's curated podcast collection.
0:10.2	Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Books podcast.
0:13.2	I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator.
0:15.4	This week I'm very pleased to be joined by Jim Al-Khalili,
0:18.6	who's a theoretical physicist and broadcaster, best known to us all as
0:22.5	the host of Radio 4's wonderful series, The Life Scientific. But he's here not in his capacity as a
0:28.3	scientist, quite, but as a novelist. Jim's just written his first novel, which is a full-throttle
0:34.4	science fiction thriller called Sunfall. Jim, welcome. Thank you.
0:38.5	Can you give us a bit of a sense of the setup of Sunfall? I mean, it starts by being about the Sun,
0:43.0	but actually... Yes, I mean, in a sense, it's sort of a Hollywood disaster movie in a book.
0:48.4	I mean, it's hard science fiction, so it's near future. And what it does is take the science and technology that we sort of know today and extrapolate it a few decades into the future and then build in a world under threat.
1:04.1	Science tries to come to the rescue.
1:06.4	What was it that made you think I'd like to write a novel?
1:09.8	I mean, is it another way of putting scientific ideas out there in a communicating science to the public or was it the main thing I'd like to write a novel? I mean, is it another way of putting scientific
1:11.6	ideas out there in a communicating science to the public or was it just fun? It really began
1:16.3	as a vanity project, just fun, that's, you know, why not see if I can turn my hand to fiction?
1:22.4	I think in retrospect, I look back now and think, yeah, actually it's probably quite a nice
1:26.9	vehicle for getting across the positive side of science.
1:31.6	You know, a lot of people are concerned about things like artificial intelligence or genetic engineering, you know, where is science going?
1:37.5	So to try and paint science in a positive light, say that, you know, it can actually help humanity overcome challenges. It's probably
1:45.5	putting it into fiction is probably a good idea. But no, it started simply because I thought it would
1:50.6	be a great fun thing to do. And the disaster or potential disaster you've thought of is one that,
	...

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