NOTE: For a couple reasons this screenplay does not adhere to the one-page/ minute convention. 1. Although most scenes are incredibly brief, there are more than twice as many of them here than an average script resulting in more description and scene headings. 2. Many objects in this story don't have a real-world analogue, again resulting in more description.

The first act, involving the adults in the early 1980s, is paced somewhere between a traditional narrative and the "previously on" section of a TV show (assume there is a "CUT TO" between every action). It will run at about 30 seconds a page, taking 30 minutes of screen time. The kids' story runs at 40 seconds a page for another 2 hours of screen time.

from the opening of Shane Carruth's screenplay for A Topiary

"Island foxes on Santa Cruz Island, California USA experienced precipitous declines in the mid-1990s owing to heightened predation by colonizing golden eagle. Although golden eagles were the proximate cause of the decline, feral pigs, by acting as an abundant food lured golden eagles to the island and through the process of apparent competition indirectly caused the decline in foxes. Thus, removing both eagles and pigs were necessary management actions required to save the island fox. The question at the time was: Which one do you remove first?"

from "Does the Order of Invasive Species Removal Matter? The Case of the Eagle and the Pig"

"The Western origin of the wolf, goat, and cabbage puzzle is most often attributed to a set of 53 problems designed to challenge youthful minds, 'Propositiones and acuendos iuvenes.' Although circulated around the year 1000, Alcuin of York (735-804) is said to have authored these as he referred to them in a letter to his most famous student, Charlemagne. The solution given by these works is to carry over the goat, then transport the wolf and return with the goat, then carry over the cabbage, then carry over the goat. A second solution, which simply interchanges the wolf and cabbage, is often attributed to the French mathematician Chuquet in 1484 but is found even earlier in the twelfth century in Germany in the succinct form of Latin hexameter...

Other related but different problems occur in three regions in Africa. They are similar in that they require a human to transport across a river a predator, its prey, and some food. However, closer examination shows that they have a distinctly different logical structure. Now A, B, and C must be transported across a river by a human who can only transport two of A, B,C at one time. Neither A nor C can be left alone with B on either shore...

Still one more African version of the problem is found only among the Ila (Zambia). The striking difference is that it involves four items to be transported: a leopard, a goat, a rat, and a basket of corn. The boat can hold just the man and one of these. This problem exemplifies the interrelationship of culture and logical constraints. After considering leaving behind the rat or leopard (and thus reducing the problem to one that can be solved logically), the man's decision is that since both animals are to him as children, he will forego the river crossing and remain where he is!...

The differences in logical structure suggest that the Western and African versions of the problem were independently conceived. Similarity of puzzle goal is not sufficient to imply historical connection. Although the situation depicted seems fanciful if viewed from a twentieth-century, industrial urban setting, the need to get unmanageable items across some water is not uncommon today in other settings and surely was not uncommon during the last thousand years."

from "A River-Crossing Problem in Cross-Cultural Perspective"

I wrote a column for the recently-relaunched Frieze website about paracetamol and meaning threats.

Currently I am a fellow at the The Santa Maddalena Foundation for Writers and Botanists in Tuscany, working on my fourth novel.

"A member of a given society not only codifies reality through the use of specific language and other patterned behavior characteristic of his culture, but he actually grasps reality only as it is presented to him in this code." – Dorothy Lee

"Historical novelists are generally in the business of soothing their readers with continuities rather than admitting the psychological inaccessibility of the past." - Adam Mars-Jones

Some appearances (UPDATED)

February 1st: Faber Social at The Social, London
February 19th-21st: Lahore Literary Festival at the Alhamra Arts Centre, Lahore
February 27th: LSE Literary Festival at the Sheikh Zayed Theatre, London
March 2nd: reading at the Çağdaş Sanatlar Merkezi, Ankara
March 3rd: reading at the Pera Museum, Istanbul
March 8th: Canterbury University reading series at the Sidney Cooper Gallery, Canterbury
April 15th: Remarks on Unremarkable Films of the 90s at Vout-O-Reenee's, London

May 8th: Words in the Square in St. James' Square, London
May 12th: reading at Galerie Éof, Paris
July 15th: Sceptre 30th Anniversary salon at Foyles, London

I found this 1993 linguistics paper interesting because there's something quite Borgesian about its central endeavour: to teach an "impossible" imaginary language to an autistic savant polyglot.

The languages chosen were Berber, an Afro-Asiatic language spoken in North Africa, and Epun, an invented language deliberately devised to contain constructions which violated universal grammatical principles...

Christopher, who, despite being institutionalised because he is unable to look after himself, has a remarkable talent for learning and translating languages... 

We predicted that Christopher should find it impossible or extremely difficult to master those parts of Epun which, ex hypothesi, contravened universal generalizations and were not describable in terms of parametric variation. If his status as a polyglot savant is accurately characterised - to a first approximation - in terms of his having an intact, or enhanced, language module in association with some impairment of his central, cognitive faculties (cf. Fodor 1983), it should follow that humanly possible (sets of) constructions provide no insuperable difficulties, whereas linguistically impossible constructions or combinations of properties, even if conceptually simple and transparent, should occasion him severe problems. However, it is plausible to assume that even the linguistically impossible could be learned via inductive reasoning - a 'central' process - provided only that his central system is not too impaired to cope. In such a situation the order in which he mastered different 'impossible' rules should be a joint function of their inherent complexity and their superficial similarity to constructions in languages that Christopher already knows...

The specific [impossible] additions [to Epun] were:

- Negative sentences, characterised by the Verb preceding the Subject, but with no negative morpheme.

- Transitive sentences in all three tenses. The past tense is characterised by the Object being moved to initial position, as well as by an overt prefix.

That is we now have the word-order patterns:

S V (O) Positive (Present and Future)

V S (O) Negative (Present and Future)

(O) S V Positive (Past)

(O) V S Negative (Past)

from "Learning the impossible: The acquisition of possible and impossible languages by a polyglot savant" by Neil V. Smith, lanthi-Maria Tsimpli, and Jamal Ouhalla

Favourite films of 2015
1. Mad Max: Fury Road
2. It Follows
3. Tangerine
4. The Lobster
5. Mistress America
6. Bridge of Spies
7. Timbuktu

8. Carol

9. The Duke of Burgundy
10. Inherent Vice

Favourite non-2015 films I saw for the first time in 2015
1. Army of Shadows (1969)
2. The Cranes Are Flying (1957)
3. The Thin Man (1934)
4. Trouble in Paradise (1932)
5. Vivacious Lady (1938)
6. The Killers (1946)
7. The Devils (1971)
8. Come and See (1985)
9. Woman in the Dunes (1964)
10. All That Jazz (1979)
11. Soy Cuba (1964)
12. Safe (1995)
13. House (1977)
14. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007)
15. The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)
16. Out of the Past (1947)
17. King of Kong (2007)
18. Nights of Cabiria (1957)
19. Hara Kiri (1962)
20. Stage Door (1937)

Favourite meals of 2015 (one entry per country)
1. Machneyuda (modern Israeli in Jerusalem)
2. L'Auberge du Col du Truges (traditional French in Villié-Morgon)

3. Oldroyd (modern British in London)

4. Zuari (Goan in Lisbon)
5. Tacos el Volcan (tacos in Pátzcuaro)
6. Chez Kebe (Senegalese in Tangier)

Favourite books (by people I haven't met) I read for the first time in 2015
1. The Conspiracy Against The Human Race by Thomas Ligotti (2010)
2. Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom (2014)
3. Ashenden by Somerset Maugham (1928)
4. The Miernik Dossier by Charles McCarry (1973)
5. Ninety Percent of Everything by Rose George (2013)

If you're in West Texas, you can listen to a new short story of mine on Marfa Public Radio this week. All the details here.

My story "Five Parties" is up on the Granta website. (Photo above by Martin d'Orgeval.)

One striking characteristic of Grothendieck’s mode of thinking is that it seemed to rely so little on examples. This can be seen in the legend of the so-called “Grothendieck prime”. In a mathematical conversation, someone suggested to Grothendieck that they should consider a particular prime number. “You mean an actual number?” Grothendieck asked. The other person replied, yes, an actual prime number. Grothendieck suggested, “All right, take 57.”

But Grothendieck must have known that 57 is not prime, right? Absolutely not, said David Mumford of Brown University. “He doesn’t think concretely.” Consider by contrast the Indian mathematician Ramanujan, who was intimately familiar with properties of many numbers, some of them huge. That way of thinking represents a world antipodal to that of Grothendieck. “He really never worked on examples,” Mumford observed. “I only understand things through examples and then gradually make them more abstract. I don’t think it helped Grothendieck in the least to look at an example. He really got control of the situation by thinking of it in absolutely the most abstract possible way. It’s just very strange. That’s the way his mind worked.” Norbert A’Campo of the University of Basel once asked Grothendieck about something related to the Platonic solids. Grothendieck advised caution. The Platonic solids are so beautiful and so exceptional, he said, that one cannot assume such exceptional beauty will hold in more general situations.

from "As If Summoned from the Void: The Life of Alexandre Grothendieck" by Allyn Jackson

A short story I wrote to accompany Matthew Darbyshire's retrospective at the Manchester Art Gallery is now available online as both text and audio. It may not make much sense out of context!

This year's instalment of Twelve Tomorrows, the MIT Technology Review's annual science fiction anthology, includes "It Takes More Muscles to Frown", my cyberpunk story set in the oil industry in near-future Mexico City.

Newsreel cameramen in the 1920s:

"The cameramen entered into this scuffling as part of their duties. The competition was so stark that all means were valid to cover the event, or ruin the competitor's work. Some small firms sent saboteurs among the audience in sport stadiums with mirrors to reflect the sun's rays to the authorized newsreel's cameras. Signboards held on poles were pushed up suddenly to obstruct the camera field. Smoke grenades were also used for this purpose. A firm's exclusive coverage was pirated in the most diverse ways. In baseball, football or soccer stadiums, the pirate shots were taken with long focal lenses in strategic spots from nearby buildings or towers. On one occasion, a news firm installed a cameraman inside a water tower opening a hole in it to cover a sporting match because he was not allowed to film it openly. The big firms created a security corps to find pirate cameramen. But many small firms sent several cameramen, so if some were discovered others remained to obtain the coverage."

from Motion Picture Photography: A History, 1891-1960 by By H. Mario Raimondo-Souto

"I have indeed sometimes thought that now that the House of Lords must inevitably in a short while be abolished, it would be a very good plan if the profession of literature were by law confined to its members and their wives and children. It would be a graceful compensation that the British people might offer the peers in return for the surrender of their hereditary privileges. It would be a means of support for those (too many) whom devotion to the public cause in keeping chorus girls and race horses and playing chemin de fer has impoverished, and a pleasant occupation for the rest who by the process of natural selection have in the course of time become unfit to do anything but govern the British Empire. But this is an age of specialization and if my plan is adopted it is obvious that it cannot but be to the greater glory of English literature that its various provinces should be apportioned among the various ranks of the nobility. I would suggest, therefore, that the humbler branches of literature should be practised by the lower orders of the peerage and that the barons and viscounts should devote themselves exclusively to journalism and the drama. Fiction might be the privileged demesne of the earls."

from Cakes and Ale (1930) by W. Somerset Maugham