There are two new begin­nings in my life.

The first flower has opened in our new gar­den.

We recent­ly left the Big Smoke (Lon­don) in search of time, space, and a gar­den. Maybe this camel­lia augurs well. Maybe we too can put down roots here…

And the sec­ond begin­ning?

Well, this blog, of course. (Thanks for invit­ing me, Brad!)

Any­one who has fol­lowed my blog on MySpace will have noticed I’m a lazy blog­ger.

But life has been pret­ty hec­tic recent­ly, what with mov­ing house and liv­ing with builders, plumbers, plas­ter­ers, and elec­tri­cians. That lot can be noisy house-mates.

That’s my excuse any­way. I’ll try to turn over a new leaf. Promise.

What will the blog be about?

Well, my new book Dooms­day Men traces the ori­gins of the dream of the super­weapon in sci­ence and pop­u­lar cul­ture. It’s a reminder of how close we came to wip­ing out life on earth in the cold war.

This haunt­ing image is of the first atom­ic explo­sion, the Trin­i­ty test, in the New Mex­i­co desert on July 16, 1945. It was “the near­est thing to dooms­day that one could pos­si­bly imag­ine”, said one eye-wit­ness.

Just before it explod­ed, physi­cist Enri­co Fer­mi was tak­ing bets on whether it would set fire to the atmos­phere and destroy the world. He had some sense of humour.

But I don’t want to just bang on about the Bomb.

Per­haps I’ll keep that for my own site, which hope­ful­ly will be up and run­ning in a few weeks.

I’d like to range a bit wider here.

As I do a lot of review­ing, and pub­lish­ers are always send­ing me their lat­est offer­ings, there will cer­tain­ly be high­lights from new books in pop­u­lar sci­ence and cul­tur­al his­to­ry. And if any have caught your eye, then do let me know.

Beyond that, I hope to share some ideas I’m cur­rent­ly explor­ing in my own writ­ing. It helps to talk about these things.

Want to join in?

Here’s a great quote to whet your appetites:

“the pre­ci­sion of the artist should accom­pa­ny the pas­sion of the sci­en­tist.”

(I’m tempt­ed to add “Dis­cuss”. But I won’t.)

It’s from Nabokov, natür­lich.

As well as writ­ing some of the great­est nov­els of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, he was a sci­en­tist work­ing at the cut­ting edge of lep­i­doptery. In the 1940s he spent 14 hours a day glued to his micro­scope at the Har­vard Muse­um of Com­par­a­tive Zool­o­gy. He was dis­sect­ing the gen­i­talia of the South and North Amer­i­can poly­omma­tine but­ter­flies known as the “Blues”.

Well, I sup­pose some­one had to do it.

By the way, the Nabokov quote is from James Hamil­ton-Pater­son­’s beau­ti­ful­ly writ­ten book on the sci­ence and his­to­ry of the ocean, Sev­en Tenths.

I’ve just been read­ing it for review. It was orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished in 1992 and now Faber have reis­sued it.

As a writer who is also fas­ci­nat­ed by the links between sci­ence and lit­er­a­ture, what Hamil­ton-Pater­son does with words makes me green with envy. If you want a mas­ter­class on prose writ­ing, and par­tic­u­lar­ly on how to com­bine sci­ence and lit­er­a­ture, then read this book. It’s superb.

But now it’s time to go.

I have to dig a hole in the gar­den. A big hole.

There’s a six-foot bam­boo plant just itch­ing to gets its feet out of a pot and into the earth.

[orig­i­nal­ly post­ed on The Ner­vous Break­down]