Thanks to the good offices of Dr Rohn, the subject of discussion at next month’s Fiction Lab at the Royal Institution will be my novel By The Sea. I believe the drill is that people talk about the book, after which I am dragged in and ritually smeared in jam and feathers.
I am told that it’s probably a good idea to have read the book first. At this stage of the game, ordering the download will be quicker (and cheaper at £1.99) than the paperback (more expensive at £6.99 and takes about a week to arrive).
Royal Institution, Albemarle Street, 3 November, 7pm. All welcome, admission free.
When will the accompanying paper appear?
The one that has ‘now wash your hands’ printed at the bottom of each page, you mean?
You do know that it’s traditional for authors to bring their own jam?
I didn’t realize it was going to be a jam session.
I have the scones.
I think I still have some of the Maison Des Giraffes Blackberry and Apple Jam left …
A.k.a. €2.91 for some of us.
“A very determined… uh … person, is Heather.”
By the way, for future editions, the farmer was not accompanied by his wife in the painting , but by his sister.
I was disappointed with the tenor of the comment thread in your last post. Deafening silence! I myself listen to whatever is going on Radio Classique, unless they’re talking about economics, in which case I turn it off.
Heather – that link to American Gothic is amazing!
As for tenors — dull, dull, dull. Give me a bass anyday. Or a counter-tenor. Or both.
…. and Heather – the nomenclatural link was entirely coincidental. As I expect you realize. Oh cripes. I hope none of my ex-girlfriends ever get to read Siege of Stars. Mrs Gee read it over the weekend but skipped all the SF episodes. And the sex. Which rather reduced it to a smallish pamphlet.
I assume there will be extensive blogging about this momentous event? I am obviously unable to attend in person, but I should have finished reading the book by then so I can join in the online fun.
I assume there will be extensive blogging about this momentous event?
Ho. Hum. I expect so…. :)
As a kind of postscript, I’d like to show you where I wrote nearly all of By The Sea, and much of Siege of Stars and its sequelae.
This is carriage ‘C’ of the 17:30 from London to Norwich. I don’t always write on this particular train, or this particular carriage. When I work at home, I work here …
But working is working, and writing is writing.
Though, as you see, I’m not writing at the moment, I’m reading.
Heather, that’s not a farmer. It’s a dentist.
Good point, Jon. But he was posing as a model for a farmer, so I suppose it’s reasonable to say that Nan was posing as the model for his wife. Still, they look kind of related, I think.
Henry – even though I also have big feet, I didn’t take it personally. And everyone knows that dating (future) writers is dangerous. So be it for your past.
I would think reading SOS without either SF or sex – I reassure future readers, there is more of the former than the latter – is a futile gesture in page-turning. If it is any comfort, I can’t get anyone in my family to read anything I’ve written] at all.
Just to clear up this painting thing. According to your link Heather, the models were the painter’s dentist and sister but the figures in the picture are supposed to be a farmer and his spinster daughter. There – now I can relax.
Heather – I doubt that there is any sex or SF in Homozygous silencing of T-box transcription factor EOMES leads to microcephaly with polymicrogyria and corpus callosum agenesis. However, I have heard a rumor to the effect that some people think everything Nature publishes is SF.
The thing about SF, Henry, is that the ‘S’ stands for ‘Science’.
So that’s that theory out the window.
…. and your point is?
Well, I don’t read it for the latest on the release of calcium from intracellular stores.
Hey, now I come to think of it, neither do I.
@Henry: sounds perfect for Penny, then. I’ve found a reader! Hooray!
Just for the record, a significant part of my place in the author list of that particular paper was getting it into some semblance of English. I’m was not responsible for the title. All those words do mean something, though, for the rest of you.
@Stephen: The resemblance then looks less like inbreeding.
Actually, I thought it sounded rather intriguing…
Like mentioned in the Good Paper Journal Club, authors always have to struggle with making a title appealing and communicative to people in other disciplines, versus using the appropriate vocabulary to the people in your own discipline. This paper involved a vast majority of medical doctors, so they won. To parse the title, Homozygous silencing of T-box transcription factor EOMES leads to microcephaly with polymicrogyria and corpus callosum agenesis, is fairly simple:
A change in (silencing of)
the gene that makes an important protein (the T-box transcription factor, EOMES)
leads to
disease (polymicrogyria and corpus callosum agenesis).
The disease is a malformation of the brain, not severe enough to interfere with life, but enough to make it very unpleasant for the affected children and all their family. The way the gene was changed is a little different than the run-of-the-mill mutations that are more commonly transmitted, which made it worth reporting.
Okay, I’ll let you move on to other threads. :-)
It intrigued me because of this paper and the furore that erupted after its publication.
Back after a long weekend hiatus – sorry for the wait. Are you thinking that genes such as EOMES, whose regulation leads to a particular form of microcephaly, is related to smaller brains such as for H. habilis or H. floresiensis ?
I’d doubt it. The genes involved in clinical microcephaly lead to malformed brains inside the cranial vault, which indeed is correspondingly smaller than in non-affected individuals. The likelihood that archaeologists would stumble upon a few examples of H. whatever with a rare disease seems to me to be astronomically small.
It would be theoretically testable, though, if there were any long bones available. Inside the marrow, I would like to fantasize that one could recover DNA and subject that to high-throughput sequencing. But the archaeologists might be unhappy with someone dissolving a chunk of bone to find out if that were possible. Do you know if it has already been done?
Sorry – I see plenty of folks, among whom these are using similar approaches.
No, not really – I think Homo floresiensis was a proper species and not subject to any kind of malformation, other than that imposed by natural selection in response to insularity. But the debate surrounding this species has thrown various hitherto obscure forms of dwarfism and microcephaly into the spotlight.