Dutch courage: waiting to face the music

LabLit.com is now producing its very own podcasts! Our first episode aired on 17 April, with a visit to Fiction Lab – a book club for novels with science at their heart.

At this month's Fiction Lab, taking place as usual at the Royal Institution in London, the often brutal regulars put Experimental Heart, my own debut novel, under the dissecting microscope. Find out what they thought of it – and how I coped with the stress. (That's me in the picture, sweating it out in the RI bar while the book club picks apart the book in my absence.)

Did the novel contain too much science? Not enough? Which scientific facts were real, and which were made up? Did the protagonists act like real scientists? Which character in the book is the most like its author? And would James Bond have paused in a daredevil escape scene to grab his passport? The answers to these questions and more are revealed.

Future episodes will feature everything under the sun from the world of science culture and lab lit literature. Special thanks to our regular contributor Stephen Curry for guest-hosting the Fiction Lab event, and our Fiction and Poetry editor, Richard Grant, for agreeing to triple up his role as Podcast Producer.

If you have any ideas for topics that the LabLit podcast should cover in future, or are (or know) a colourful character who would like to be interviewed about life in science or the science-influenced arts, please do get in touch.