The Turk on stage and screen
July 2003
The Turk was the subject of several plays and stories during its lifetime, and continued to inspire storytellers long after its demise. This month the classic 1927 silent film, "The Chess Player", based on the story of the Turk's mythical encounter with Catherine the Great, is being re-released on DVD. (I provided an extra commentary track.) Meanwhile, at the Edinburgh Festival, a new play, The Principle of Motion, inspired by my book, intertwines the story of Wolfgang von Kempelen with that of Alan Turing as both contemplate the possibility of a thinking machine.
The Turk in paperback
March 2003
The paperback edition of The Mechanical Turk is now out in the UK, with the US edition to follow in August. Both have jazzy new covers, the UK edition's inspired by a Victorian handbill, and the US edition's based on a computer-graphics model of the Turk. The book has also been belatedly noticed by the New York Review of Books, which calls it "lively and thoroughly researched".
The Turk is BBC Radio 4's Book of the Week
September 2002
An abridged version of The Mechanical Turk is BBC Radio 4's Book of the Week starting on Monday, September 2. It is read by Robert Bathurst, otherwise known as "the slimy one" from Cold Feet. In other Turk news, the book has been reviewed by The Onion (America's real paper of record, of course), and is also the subject of a multimedia Bookwrap.
Turk on CNN.com, in New York Times
June 2002
More reviews are in, including an article on CNN.com and a review in the New York Times Book Review (registration required) which curiously describes the book as having "a lot of cleavage". Once I get back to Britain, I will be speaking about the Turk at The Royal Institution (June 6), the Hay Festival (June 7) and the Extreme Computing 2002 Festival (June 9).
The Turk on tour in America
May 2002
The Turk spent many years touring America, and I will be spending the next few days doing the same to promote my book on the subject. My US campaign kicked off with an interview on NPR, recorded from London; over the next few days I will be popping up in San Francisco (May 27-29), Seattle (May 30), Los Angeles (May 31), New York (June 1-3) and Boston (June 4-5). Full details are available on my publisher's website.
The Turk is wheeled out
April 2002
The Turk was officially published on April 25th. So far it has been excerpted in Wired, The Sunday Telegraph and The Independent, and reviewed in publications including The Guardian, the Wall Street Journal, the Daily Mail, Time Out, the Chicago Tribune and the Providence Journal. The Wired excerpt was also picked up by Slashdot (yay! I've been Slashdotted). I've updated my Turk page with review quotes accordingly; I also invite you to visit the book's official site.
Not my next book
April 2002
My recent article on Ethics and Archaeology in The Economist was partly an excuse to enable me to do a lot of research into a proto-archaeologist and tomb raider called Giovanni Belzoni. I've long been interested in him; he's the prototype for Indiana Jones, Lara Croft, and other torch-carrying, "kick down the door first and ask questions later" archaeologists. He broke into the Great Pyramid, discovered several tombs, rediscovered the entrance to the temple at Abu Simbel, and thus helped to lay the foundations for modern archaeology and Egyptology. In short, he was just the kind of glamorous character most people imagine archaeologists to be; and no matter how much they try to distance themselves from his dubious exploits, modern archaeologists have no choice but to acknowledge him as their forebear. I was thinking of writing about Belzoni for my next book, wrapping up his amazing life story (he was a former circus strong-man) with the modern questions he raises about archaeological ethics, and his enduring influence on popular conceptions of archaeology. But I decided against it. Instead, I'm doing something else.
The Turk goes online
April 2002
In anticipation of the publication of The Turk in late April, the book's dedicated website, TheTurkBook.com, has gone live. It has reviews, the introduction and first chapter, a Q&A with me, and so on. And the opening animation is actually amusing, rather than just annoying.
The Victorian Internet, in physical form
March 2002
An exhibition inspired by The Victorian Internet is currently on show at the National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, Maryland. "The Once and Future Web" is also available online. It shows the similarities between the telegraph and the Internet and looks at the life-saving and medical uses of both technologies. A review of the exhibition has just been published by the British Medical Journal.
The Turk in Wired
February 2002
Wired has published an excerpt of The Mechanical Turk in its latest issue (10.03). It briefly tells the automaton's story and then examines why the Turk struck such a chord with audiences in the late-18th and early-19th centuries. The article is one of several related pieces in the magazine on artificial intelligence, a subject that is suddenly fashionable again. Articles in Technology Review and The Economist are also propagating the "AI is back" meme. Its emergence coincides with the publication of a number of books (mine included) on the history of automata, machines that imitate living things. Ah, historical parallels...
The Mechanical Turk due in April
January 2002
My third book, The Mechanical Turk, will be out in April. (It will be called simply The Turk in the US.) The book tells the story of the chess-playing machine built by Wolfgang von Kempelen, a Hungarian nobleman, in 1769 in response to a challenge from Maria Theresa, empress of Austria-Hungary. It defeated Napoleon, Benjamin Franklin and Charles Babbage, among many others. But could a machine really play chess, or was it all a hoax? The Turk, as the machine became known, caused a vigorous debate about the possibility of machine intelligence 150 years before the first computers were constructed.
The Victorian Internet goes wireless
October 2001
My 15,000-word magnum opus on the future of the wireless Internet has just appeared in The Economist. There's a large dose of historical analogy, with particular reference to horseless carriages and, of course, telegraphs. This survey ended up answering the question that I posed at the end of The Victorian Internet -- which technology will take the Internet mainstream, in the way that the telephone took the telegraph mainstream? My guess is: the Internet-enabled mobile phone.
The Internet's new borders
August 2001
Has the Internet killed geography? Can you really run a dotcom from the top of a mountain? Will the Internet prevent national governments from enforcing local laws? Er, no. It turns out that the Internet is more constrained by geography than you might think, as I explain in this article in The Economist. Its cables piggyback on previous infrastructure, such as railways, sewers and (as I can't resist pointing out) the pneumatic tubes that once carried telegrams. Honestly, I'm like a cracked record sometimes.
Neptune File paperback out now
July 2001
More Neptune File news: the UK paperback came out on July 5, and the US paperback will be out in November. The UK paperback cover (shown here) is my favourite ever cover of all the books I have had published; I love it. The handful of typos should be fixed, too. So, er, buy a copy, or something. I wrote a piece for the Guardian to coincide with the publication. Also this month, I have finished my third book, which will be published next spring. I will post some more information about it here soon.
I explain myself, as it were, to NPR
April 2001
I spent February 2001 working out of The Economist's San Francisco office, and while I was there I recorded an interview with Moira Gunn which aired on her NPR show, Tech Nation. The main subject of the interview was The Neptune File, but Moira also asked me to explain the common strand that links my first two books together, and extends into my forthcoming third book. I talk much too fast and ramble, as usual, but all in all it's a pretty decent summary of what I'm trying to say in my books about the modern-day lessons we can learn from the history of science and technology. The interview aired on March 27th; click here to listen to it. (Streaming RealAudio format, 30 minutes.)
The Neptune File hits bookstores
November 2000
My new book, The Neptune File, which links the 1846 discovery of Neptune with modern discoveries of extrasolar planets, is now available on both sides of the Atlantic. Unlike The Victorian Internet, which was a rag-bag of telegraph anecdotes, the Neptune book has more of a conventional quest narrative, with a hero, a sort-of-villain, what screenwriters call a story arc, and so forth. Arthur C. Clarke has declared the book "fascinating", and New Scientist has already published a favourable review.
A "last hurrah" for The Victorian Internet
September 2000
Any Economist readers who have read my book The Victorian Internet may have found the tone and content of the August 19th cover leader somewhat familiar. Using material from the book and elsewhere, I had a go at suggestions that the rise of the Internet will lead to world peace, less pollution, and reduced inequality. Last time I wrote an article for The Economist that drew heavily on my book I got letters accused me of plagiarising everything from a book by Tom Standage called The Victorian Internet. I await a similar deluge this time, and I will then admit that yes, I stole it all. From myself. Anyhow, putting the ideas in the book into a broader context seemed like a good way to draw the past two years since its publication to a close.