The future of science fiction writing
Friday 4 May 2007 21:45-22:30 (Radio 3)
Ian McMillan hosts the weekly cabaret of new writing and performance, with an edition devoted to the future of science fiction writing. Featuring a sci-fi eartoon from Peter Blegvad and a new drama from Ira Lightman.
THE VERB - LIVE AT THE HAY ON WYE BOOK FESTIVAL!
Come and join Ian McMillan at a live edition of The Verb Live at the Hay Festival Audience members should come to The Swan Hotel, Church Street, Hay on Wye on Friday 25th May. You will need to be seated by 21.30.
The programme begins at 21.45 and ends at 22.30 Ian McMillan presents Radio 3's award-winning literature and performance show. The Verb at Hay is a thrilling event.
This year the eccentric and brilliant Ken Campbell and the School of Night Poets; writer Peter Ho Davies; poet Gwyneth Lewis and the Verb's audio cartoonist Peter Blegvad all star.
All welcome: come and make live national radio! FREE - call the Festival Box Office to Reserve tickets on 0870 990 1299 Or leave your name and number at 0207 765 5758 Or email name and daytime phone number to [email protected]
Playlist
Ian McMillan has a special edition of The Verb this week - our literature and performance programme blasts off at nine forty five tonight on a mission to the frontiers of Science Fiction.
From Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea to the writings of Kurt Vonnegut; from H G Welles to Philip K Dick and Anthony Burgess, the Science Fiction section of English Literature contains some of the most imaginative and visionary books ever written. But, as Ian McMillan discovers, the genre is not currently in the best of health. Who has pushed boundaries since William Gibson foresaw the internet and invented the term cyberspace, way back in 1984? And why is an indisputably great book, like George Orwell's 1984, not classed as Science Fiction?
Joining Ian in what he insists is the Verb's zero gravity off-earth studio, are Gwyneth Jones, a leading British Sci Fi writer; Francis Spufford, a writer, critic and bibliomane who is not embarrassed to call himself a Sci Fi Addict; Ira Lightman, a young writer with an unusual new commission, Peter Blegvad with a new audio cartoon and Piers Blofeld, who left his job writing story lines for the computer games industry to start a science fiction list at a major commercial publisher. He tells Ian his golden rule for the future of the genre: no elves, no space ships.
Where does that leave us? Ian McMillan finds out on the Verb, at quarter to ten, on BBC Radio 3.
