The Writers of Wales Database

BRAKE, MARK

Tel: 07880 780 688
Email: markbrake@me.com
Website: www.markbrake.com

Mark Brake is a freelance author, broadcaster and communicator of science, who has engaged the public with science on five continents. The UK’s first chair in science communication, he was professor in the subject at the University of Glamorgan between 2002 and 2010. He became a Fellow of the Institute of Physics in 2008, and was previously Director of the Science Communication Research Unit at the University of Glamorgan. He was a founding member of the NASA Astrobiology Institute science communication group between 2003 and 2006, and is one of the notable academics in the European Science Communication Network. He is best known for his work in popularising the relationship between space, science and culture.

After receiving an education at Cardiff University, in 1998 Mark received worldwide publicity for developing an undergraduate university course, ’Life in the Universe’, which examined the science and culture of astrobiology. The following year he launched the world’s first undergraduate degree in Science and Science Fiction, again widely reported by the world’s media, and which attempted to establish a Third Culture for science teaching in academia. Continuing this work in 2005 whilst a member of the NASA Astrobiology Institute science communication group, Mark launched the world’s first undergraduate degree in Astrobiology. The program recognized not only that astrobiology’s key issues are grounded firmly within scientific disciplines, and its goals represented by a major driving force behind current space programs, but that the subject also had a long history in philosophy and literature, associated with the plurality of inhabited worlds tradition.

Over the last decade or so, Mark has been engaging the public with science, both nationally and internationally, through television, radio, print and electronic media. He has acted as consultant to Microsoft when they launched their Science Fiction Museum in Seattle in 2004; and to Tiger Aspect Productions and the Discovery Channel for their series on science fiction. He was also consultant to Blast! Films for ’The Martians and Us’, a season on the history of British science fiction for BBC Four, and to UKTV for a season of promotion on Doctor Who. And as one of the associate editors in the UK of the NASA Astrobiology Magazine’s European Edition, Mark helped NASA commission a rap by Jon Chase on the topic of astrobiology, which attracted considerable global media attention in 2008 and 2009.

After acting as consultant to the Science Museum (London) on their ’The Science of Aliens’ exhibition, Mark began publishing popular science books. Different Engines: How Science Drives Fiction and Fiction Drives Science was published by MacMillan Science in 2007, claiming to be the first popular science book to explore the relationship between science and science fiction. FutureWorld, which claims to be an exciting look at how science fiction has merged with reality, was published by Boxtree MacMillan and the Science Museum (London) in 2008. Since then Mark has published two books communicating science for a younger public (Space Hoppers and Really, Really Big Questions about Space and Time, both 2010), and two rather more academic works (Revolution in Science: How Galileo and Darwin Changed our World and Introducing Science Communication: A Practical Guide, both 2009). Mark is also working with Cambridge University Press on Alien Life Imagined: Communicating the Science and Culture of Astrobiology, to be published in 2012.

Reviews:
With respect to Different Engines: How Science Drives Fiction and Fiction Drives Science (MacMillan Science, 2007):  

“…Creative minds thinking in symbiosis…”
The Times

“…A fabulous digest … a sparkling summary of milestones in SF from the renaissance to the present…”
SFX

“…A thought-provoking and entertaining book about science fiction’s impact on the real world...”
New Scientist

“...details the ways in which sci-fi parallels actual discovery and innovation in the real world...”
International Herald Tribune

“...a lively tour from the genre’s Enlightenment roots to cyberpunk and the return of the Frankenstein myth through anxieties about biotechnologies...”
Times Higher Education

“...in the book Different Engines there is a genuine nexus, science fiction and science fact come to their closest point...”
Gwyneth Jones, science fiction author and Arthur C. Clarke Award Winner


Selected Publications:
Different Engines: How Science Drives Fiction and Fiction Drives Science (MacMillan Science, 2007)
Futureworld: Where Science Fiction Becomes Science (Science Museum and Boxtree MacMillan, 2008)
Revolution in Science: How Galileo and Darwin Changed Our World (MacMillan, 2009)
Space Hoppers (Macmillan Children's Books, 2010)
Really, Really Big Questions About Space and Time (Roaring Brook, 2010)

Contributed to:
Introducing Science Communication: A Practical Guide (editor) (MacMillan, 2009)

Different Engines: How Science Drives Fiction and Fiction Drives Science (MacMillan Science, 2007)

Since its emergence in the 17th century science fiction has been a sustained, coherent and subversive check on the promises and pitfalls of science. In turn, invention and discovery have forced writers to confront the nature and limits of reality. Different Engines is the first book for the general reader to explore how this fascinating symbiosis shapes what we see and do and how we dream of the future.

From the discovery of the alien universe in Johannes Kepler’s ‘Somnium’, through ‘Frankenstein’, Mary Shelley’s warning on the double-edged sword of technology and change, to Arthur C Clarke and Stanley Kubrick’s polemic on the future of humankind in ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’, science fiction emerges as a mode of thinking, complementary to the scientific method, argue Professor Mark Brake and Reverend Neil Hook. Its field of interest is the gap between the new worlds uncovered by experimentation and exploration, and the fantastic worlds of the imagination. Its proponents find drama in the tension between the familiar and the unfamiliar. Its readers, many of them scientists and politicians, find inspiration in the contrast between the ordinary and the extraordinary. Different Engines is a unique, provocative and compelling account of science fiction as the arbiter of progress.

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