T H E S C I E N C E FA C T O R Y A L I TER ARY AGE N CY FO R C UR I O US M I N DS
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CONTENTS NEW DEALS Sex by Rachel Feltman 1 Wondrous Transformations by Alison Li 2 The Patriarchs by Angela Saini 3 The Elephant in the Universe by Govert Schilling 4 The Invention of Tomorrow by Thomas Suddendorf, Jon Redshaw & Adam Bulley 5 A World Without Stars by Roberto Trotta 6 FORTHCOMING TITLES Keep Calm and Log On by Gillian ‘Gus’ Andrews 7 Exponential by Azeem Azhar 8 Liftoff by Eric Berger 9 Speed Limit by Tanya Bub & Jeffrey Bub 10 How To Be Authentic by Skye C. Cleary 11 The Wood Age by Roland Ennos 12 The Fear Paradox by Frank Faranda 13 Once Upon a Time I Lived On Mars by Kate Greene 14 The Spike by Mark Humphries 15 The Century of Deception by Ian Keable 16 Ouch by Margee Kerr & Linda Rodriguez McRobbie 17 The Last Stargazers by Emily Levesque 18 Cryptography by Keith Martin 19 Shikake by Naohiro Matsumura 20 Children of the Flood by Vann R. Newkirk II 21 How to Think Like a Woman by Regan Penaluna 22 A Field Guide to a Happy Life by Massimo Pigliucci 23 Untitled Moral Biography of Socrates and Alcibiades by Massimo Pigliucci 24 Strike Patterns by Leah Zani 25 RECENTLY PUBLISHED Waters of the World by Sarah Dry 26 Stop Being Reasonable by Eleanor Gordon-Smith 27 Dark Data by David Hand 28 The Gaming Mind by Alexander Kriss 29 How to Live a Good Life edited by Massimo Pigliucci, Skye Cleary & Daniel A. Kaufman 30 Bad Data by Peter Schryvers 31 Beyond the Valley by Ramesh Srinivasan 32 BACKLIST TITLES 33–37 RECENT WORLD RIGHTS DEALS* 38 FOREIGN LANGUAGE CO-AGENTS 39
For further information about rights in all titles in this catalogue, please get in touch with us at table 7o (Louisa Pritchard Associates) or table 7n (Science Factory) in the International Rights Centre on the second floor of Olympia. Louisa Pritchard (mobile: +44 7714 721 787; email: louisa@louisapritchard.co.uk) Jeff Shreve (mobile: +1 917 576 8531; email: jeff@sciencefactory.co.uk) Tisse Takagi (mobile: +1 646 404 4886; email: tisse@sciencefactory.co.uk) Peter Tallack (mobile: +49 151 4246 1109; email: peter@sciencefactory.co.uk)
* World rights sales are not described in detail in the rights list.
The Science Factory
London Book Fair 2020
NEW DEALS
SEX A Rousing History RACHEL FELTMAN
Did you know that someone won a Nobel prize for treating syphilis by giving people malaria? Have you heard the one about women in Ancient Egypt using crocodile dung as a contraceptive? How about the fact that Nikola Tesla was probably in love with a pigeon? From our tangled cultural relationships with genitals and gender to our endless quest for pills and potions to make sex happen when and where we want it and without consequences, history is packed with provocative, humorous and illuminating stories about our bodies and ourselves. In SEX, the science populariser Rachel Feltman gathers these delicious nuggets into chapters about birth control, aphrodisiacs, disease, courtship and more, showing us how much things have changed – and how much they haven’t. SEX will have readers laughing at the retrospective absurdity of ‘normal’ practices from years long past. We learn a lot about biology and safe sex in the process – there’s nothing quite like the bizarre for tricking an audience into studying esoteric facts – but we also come to understand just how many waves of sexual attitudes and practices humanity has ridden throughout our species’ history. From the Zuni tribe’s non-binary lhamana to the Dominican Republic’s third-gender guevedoces, to the bachelor marriages among cowboys in the American West, we learn just how weird all sex is, and has always been. So who’s to say what’s normal? There have been books that take readers on scientific tours of the neuroscience and physiology of sex, but no one has really delved into the hot mess that is sex and culture. SEX is that hot mess, for a whole new generation – it’s sex-ed meets ‘Drunk History’ for science geeks, history buffs and curious readers everywhere. RACHEL FELTMAN has a degree in environmental science from Bard College at Simon’s Rock and a masters in science, health and environmental reporting from New York University. She runs science and health coverage for Popular Science magazine, and also hosts and produces Popular Science’s podcast ‘The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week’. As of December 2019, the show boasted more than 36,000 weekly listeners, and has had a run of sold-out live shows at Caveat in New York City. In 2014 Feltman founded the Washington Post’s irreverent ‘Speaking of Science’ blog. She appears regularly on ‘Cheddar’, ‘Science Friday’ and MSNBC to comment on science news, and has been a speaker at the annual meetings of the National Association of Science Writers, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Online News Association, as well as the International Conference on High Energy Physics, the World Conference of Science Journalists and the World Government Summit in Dubai. Agent: Jeff Shreve Publisher: Bold Type Books Delivery: Summer 2021 Publication: Summer 2022 Status: Proposal Length: 75,000 words All rights available excluding World English Language (Bold Type Books)
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The Science Factory
London Book Fair 2020
NEW DEALS
WONDROUS TRANSFORMATIONS A Maverick Physician, the Age of Hormones and the Transsexual Phenomenon ALISON LI
The story of hormone therapy told through the fascinating life of Dr Harry Benjamin, who pioneered the use of hormones to assist in gender transitions. Today it’s unexceptional to think of ourselves as hormonal beings. We hold hormones responsible for making our bodies morph through our lifetimes and for sparking quixotic changes in temper. We blame ‘raging hormones’ for the tempests of puberty and midlife and spend our days ‘running on adrenalin’ in ‘testosterone-fuelled' workplaces. Yet this view is relatively recent. In WONDROUS TRANSFORMATIONS, Alison Li tells the fascinating history of the rise of hormones through the life of one of its foremost pioneers. A daring explorer in the areas of sex and ageing, as well as a celebrity doctor in 1920s’ New York, German-born physician Harry Benjamin (1885– 1986) first became acquainted with the science of hormones in 1916. He then devoted his life to using this new technology to help people transform themselves – from old to young, in his famed practice on Central Park West, or, decades later, from male to female. Benjamin’s sympathetic work with those who wanted to transition from one biological sex to another was groundbreaking in mid-century America, when homosexuality and any behaviour that crossed gender lines was not just pathologized but criminalized, too. Li shows how, over the course of the twentieth century, Benjamin helped pave the way for our understanding of ourselves as chemically malleable, exquisitely receptive to hormone manipulations as subtle as the tweaks needed to dial down the symptoms of menopause or as radical as the reshapings undertaken by body builders. In doing so, she traces the development of the influential concept of biological control and the then-revolutionary idea that we can transform our bodies to match our minds. It’s ultimately a tale not only about the chemical transformation of our bodies but also about the transformation of the very concept of identity and self. ALISON LI is an historian of science and medicine. The author of the biography J. B. COLLIP AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF MEDICAL RESEARCH IN CANADA (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2013), she has lectured at universities as well as to the public, presented papers at numerous conferences and appeared in a television documentary about the discovery of insulin. She holds an MA and a PhD in the history and philosophy of science and technology from the University of Toronto and completed her postdoctoral studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Previously an assistant professor of science and technology studies at York University in Toronto, she now writes full-time. She lives in Toronto with her husband and two children. Agent: Tisse Takagi Publisher: University of North Carolina Press Delivery: Autumn 2020 Publication: Autumn 2021 Status: Proposal Length: 80,000 words All rights available excluding World English Language (University of North Carolina Press)
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NEW DEALS
THE PATRIARCHS How Male Domination Began and How It Might End ANGELA SAINI Praise for SUPERIOR Deeply researched, masterfully written, and sorely needed, SUPERIOR is an exceptional work by one of the world’s best science writers – Ed Yong, author of I CONTAIN MULTITUDES
A bold and provocative new book from the author of SUPERIOR, a finalist for the 2020 LA Times Book Prize Historians and anthropologists agree that the ways in which we live now are not how we have always lived. Monogamous marriage, nuclear families, all our varied social structures and gender norms across the globe are social and cultural constructions, sometimes in part underscored by biology, but certainly not defined by it. When it comes to the oldest and most pervasive hierarchical human system of all – patriarchy – this too, was an invention. It emerged in some place at some time in our past, and spread through the world. In THE PATRIARCHS the acclaimed science writer Angela Saini explores the complex, often mysterious story of how human domination of women by powerful men may have first appeared, what forms it has taken and still takes, and the exceptional societies in which male domination is not the norm. She sets to lay out in one volume the breadth and depth of one of the most barbaric human hierarchies, a brutal way of organizing society that has crushed the lives of billions of people and continues to do so, through institutions such as religion and law, as well as baked-in social values, customs and traditions. She reflects on the glorious myths that linger in our hinterlands about matriarchal societies that may have existed in the past, and discovers whether there is any truth to them. And she looks at the sheer breadth of human culture today and through time, offering examples of radically different ways of living that transcend common gender models and upend the hierarchies that we have treated for so long as immutable. Drawing on scientific storytelling, historical and social science studies, as well as firsthand reportage around the globe, Saini paints a portrait of how society changed when patriarchy emerged, what this means for how we think about ourselves today, and how a radical new future may look. ANGELA SAINI is an award-winning British science journalist and broadcaster. Well known for presenting science programmes on BBC Radio 4 and the BBC World Service, she also writes for the Guardian and New Scientist, as well as prominent journals including Science. A former BBC and ITN television news reporter, she has a masters degree in engineering science from the University of Oxford and a second masters in science and security from the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. She is the author of three books, GEEK NATION: How Indian Science is Taking Over the World (Hodder, 2011), INFERIOR: How Science Got Women Wrong – and the New Research That’s Rewriting the Story (Fourth Estate (UK)/Beacon (US), 2017) and SUPERIOR: The Return of Race Science (Fourth Estate (UK)/Beacon (US), 2019). Agent: Peter Tallack Publisher: Fourth Estate (UK)/US — TBC Delivery: Autumn 2022 Publication: Autumn 2023 Status: Proposal Length: 100,000 words
All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth (Fourth Estate) 3
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London Book Fair 2020
NEW DEALS
THE ELEPHANT IN THE UNIVERSE Thirty-three Glimpses of Dark Matter... and How They Might Unlock the Secrets of the Cosmos GOVERT SCHILLING Praise for RIPPLES IN SPACETIME Schilling’s deliciously nerdy grand tour takes us through compelling backstory, current research, and future expectations – Barbara Kiser, NATURE
Scientists are faced with a crisis that encompasses particle physics, astronomy and cosmology, and, as yet, there’s no solution — though hints may be in plain sight. Some 80 per cent of all matter in the Universe consists of unknown particles, but despite decades of research by the most brilliant minds on Earth, no one knows what the stuff really is. It’s a thoughtprovoking and humbling conclusion: even the matter we are composed of is little more than the visible tip of a weird, non-luminous iceberg. Current wisdom has it that dark matter consists of a so far undiscovered type of elementary particle that hardly interacts with normal matter, making it almost impossible to detect. A whole industry of detectors is looking for the enigmatic particle – usually installed in deep underground laboratories to shield the sensitive equipment from spurious cosmic rays. Meanwhile, other physicists are searching for evidence of decaying dark matter in the wider Universe, or trying to create dark-matter particles in collider experiments. But so far none of these approaches has yielded any results. Little surprise, then, that some scientists have started to doubt that dark-matter particles really exist. Who knows, the mysterious stuff may be a new state of matter, more akin to an all-pervasive field. Dark matter’s properties may be somehow connected to the equally puzzling discovery that empty space must also contain loads of mysterious ‘dark energy’ to account for the accelerating expansion of the Universe. Or our current understanding of gravity may be all wrong, leading us to believe in the existence of huge amounts of dark matter while there may be none at all. In THE ELEPHANT IN THE UNIVERSE, Govert Schilling take readers on a comprehensive tour through space and time and across the globe to explore the story of the dark-matter mystery and the researchers working to crack it. The book takes the form of 33 brief chapters, each giving a separate insight into just what this strange missing stuff might be. Taken together they provide a unique, state-of-the-art overview of the latest ideas and findings. With so many new particle experiments coming online, telescopes dedicated to finding a solution and bright researchers exploring the limits of theoretical physics, there is real hope, he says, that this combined effort will soon shed light on dark matter and open up a deeper understanding of the nature of reality itself. GOVERT SCHILLING is a prize-winning freelance astronomy writer based in the Netherlands. His articles appear in Dutch newspapers and magazines as well as in New Scientist, Science, BBC Sky at Night and Sky & Telescope. He has written more than 50 books, appears frequently on Dutch radio and TV and gives talks for a wide variety of audiences. In 2007, the International Astronomical Union named asteroid (10986) Govert after him. His most recent English-language book is RIPPLES IN SPACETIME: Einstein, Gravitational Waves and the Future of Astronomy (Harvard University Press, 2017 – ‘Schilling has achieved the fascinating trifecta of historical and scientific accuracy, a grand sense of wonder and curiosity, and brilliantly accessible storytelling’, Ethan Siegel, Forbes.com). Agent: Peter Tallack Publisher: Harvard University Press Delivery: Spring 2021 Publication: Autumn 2021 Status: Proposal Length: 75,000 words All rights available excluding World English Language (Harvard University Press) 4
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London Book Fair 2020
NEW DEALS
THE INVENTION OF TOMORROW How Foresight Conquered the World THOMAS SUDDENDORF, JON REDSHAW & ADAM BULLEY
Praise for Thomas Suddendorf’s THE GAP Beautifully written, well researched and thought provoking – Jane Goodall
The first trade book dedicated to the emergence of foresight, how this prodigious capacity drove human evolution and how we’ll continue to rely and improve on it in the future. Chimpanzees tend to grunt excitedly to say hello. But, curiously, our closest animal cousins never say goodbye. In fact humans may well be the only animals who bid one another farewell in mutual recognition that we are going our separate ways, and often in the hope our paths may cross again. Your mind is a virtual time machine. You can relive past events and imagine future possibilities – even ones that you have never experienced or which may never materialize. Because you are a mental time traveller, you can prepare for threats and opportunities well in advance and deliberately shape the future to your own design. Humans run the zoos not because we are stronger than other animals, but because we can foresee what these animals need and what they can do. Foresight is essential to our dominance on the planet. In THE INVENTION OF TOMORROW, three pioneering researchers in the field of mental time travel provide a ground-breaking exploration of one of humanity’s greatest powers, showing that humans are fundamentally a species of farsighted vision, not one of myopia and impulsivity. Far from being unequipped to deal with the challenges it now faces, our species has evolved to deal with future dangers more than any other creature that has ever existed. An avalanche of discoveries in the past decade has dramatically transformed our understanding of our mental time machines and how we use them to envisage, predict and control the future. Drawing on cutting-edge research from many disciplines – cognitive neuroscience, archaeology, psychology, economics, evolutionary biology, and more – THE INVENTION OF TOMORROW tells a revolutionary story of discovery that is providing a new perspective on the story of humanity. THOMAS SUDDENDORF is a full professor in the School of Psychology at the University of Queensland, Australia. His research on how memory and foresight are part of the same mental time machine is some of the most widely cited research in psychology and neuroscience. His first trade book was THE GAP: The Science of What Separates Us from Other Animals (Basic Books, 2013 ). JON REDSHAW is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Queensland who has published extensively on the development and evolution of mental time travel. One of his 2016 collaborations with Suddendorf in Current Biology was covered by over 50 news outlets, and his findings have been disseminated to over 700,000 Twitter users. ADAM BULLEY is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, where he researches the cognitive neuroscience of foresight. A passionate science communicator, he has given numerous radio interviews and talks and won acclaim for his university teaching. Agent: Peter Tallack Publisher: TBC Delivery: Autumn 2021 Publication: Autumn 2022 Status: Proposal Length: 90,000 words All rights available 5
The Science Factory
London Book Fair 2020
NEW DEALS
A WORLD WITHOUT STARS How the Night Sky Made Us Who We Are ROBERTO TROTTA Praise for THE EDGE OF THE SKY A master storyteller – FOREIGN POLICY A poetic primer on the universe – BRAIN PICKINGS
An astrophysicist’s reappraisal of humanity’s history that takes readers on a wonder-filled journey to discover the human connection with our cosmic environment. Imagine looking up to the sky on a dark night and seeing... nothing. Imagine Earth permanently shrouded in clouds – a thick blanket of dark grey clouds, blotting out even the face of the Sun during the day and that of the full Moon at night. Imagine a star-starved civilization struggling to take hold with our ancestral connection to the sky severed. The night sky makes us feel small and insignificant, yet proud of our ability to marvel at it and to decrypt its mysteries. Beyond the stars, at the beginning of time, at the origin of the Universe, religion and science meet and collide. Amazingly, these indifferent pinpricks of light inspired the highest expressions of human creativity: beauty and meaning, courage and hope, sprung from remote balls of gas burning away in the coldness of space. We are stardust imbued with the longing to understand where we come from and to sing what we cannot comprehend. Thousands of years ago, the sky was a constant companion to our forebears. The rhythm of their lives revolved around the stars. Not so today: for most of us the night sky is largely lost in the glow of artificial lighting. We hardly bother to look at the sky any more, and when we do there is little for us to see. Even professional astronomers study the Universe by staring at screens rather than through eyepieces. We have lost our intimate relationship with the Universe. In A WORLD WITHOUT STARS, Roberto Trotta explores the surprisingly deep influence of astronomical phenomena in shaping the trajectory of human history. From mythology, religion, farming and the creative arts, to mathematics, astronomy, technology and pop culture, he reveals how the very fabric of who we are has been shaped by our ability to see the stars. What’s more, by daring us to imagine other worlds without stars – from lifeforms beneath the icy crust of distant moons, to the prospect of pure energy beings emerging in a dark, cold, empty Universe – he impresses on us just how special and important our own view of the cosmos is. After reading this book, you will never look at the night sky in the same way as before. For we are made by stars, in many more ways than we ever imagined. ROBERTO TROTTA is a professor of astro-statistics at Imperial College London, director of Imperial’s Centre for Languages, Culture and Communication and a visiting professor of cosmology at Gresham College, London. He has published more than 50 scientific papers, contributed to two books and received numerous awards for his research work and science communication activities. His first book for the public, THE EDGE OF THE SKY (Basic Books, 2014), explains the Universe using only the most common 1,000 words in English, and was widely acclaimed. He lives in London with his wife and their two young children. Agent: Peter Tallack Publisher: Basic Books Delivery: October 2020 Publication: Autumn 2021 Status: Proposal Length: 90,000–100,000 words All rights available excluding World English Language (Basic Books), Italy (Il Saggiatore) 6
The Science Factory
London Book Fair 2020
FORTHCOMING TITLES
KEEP CALM AND LOG ON Your Handbook For Surviving the Digital Revolution GILLIAN ‘GUS’ ANDREWS Empowering, practical, and profound, Andrews has written the survival manual for our age – Finn Brunton, Associate Professor, Department of Media, Culture and Communication, New York University, and author of DIGITAL CASH A fine collection of digital age skills we all need to equip ourselves with in order to survive and thrive in a world swimming with information – Dan Gillmor, Cofounder, ASU News Co/Lab, Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, Arizona State University
How to survive the digital revolution without getting trampled: your guide to online mindfulness, digital self-empowerment, cybersecurity, creepy ads, trustworthy information, and more. Feeling overwhelmed by an avalanche of online content? Anxious about identity theft? Unsettled by the proliferation of fake news? Welcome to the digital revolution. Wait – wasn’t the digital revolution supposed to make our lives better? It was going to be fun and put the world at our fingertips. What happened? KEEP CALM AND LOG ON is a survival handbook that will help you achieve online mindfulness and overcome online helplessness – the feeling that tech is out of your control. Taking a cue from the famous Second World War morale-boosting slogan ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’, Gus Andrews shows us how to adapt the techniques our ancestors used to survive hard times, so we can live our best lives online. She explains why media and technology stress us out and offers empowering tools for coping. Mindfulness practices can help us stay calm and conserve our attention purposefully. She shares the secret of understanding our own opinions’ ‘family trees’ to identify misleading ‘fake news’. She provides tips for unplugging occasionally, overcoming feelings that we are ‘bad at technology’ and taking charge of our security and privacy. She explains how social media algorithms keep us from information we need and why creepy ads seem to follow us online. Most importantly, she urges us to work to rebuild the trust in our communities that the internet has broken. GILLIAN ‘GUS’ ANDREWS has an unusual background as both a hacker and an educator. A graduate of Teachers College, Columbia University and former Google Academic Research Fellow, she has been tracking warnings about digital privacy and security issues for over a decade and is the creator of ‘The Media Show’, an award-winning YouTube series that shares media and digital-literacy insights with a young adult audience. In her work for ThoughtWorks, Second Life, Simply Secure and the Open Internet Tools project, she has helped developers make systems easier for everyday people to use. She has taught media literacy and digital media skills at Marist College and was a former panelist on the digital-rights radio show ‘Off The Hook’ and an organizer of the Hackers On Planet Earth conference. In addition to academic articles in Fibreculture Journal, E-Learning and Digital Media and the Teachers College Record, she has written popular pieces for Salon.com, the Village Voice, .net magazine, ReadWriteWeb and io9 and has been anthologized in Bitch magazine’s tenth anniversary collection ‘Bitchfest’. Agent: Jeff Shreve Publisher: MIT Press Publication: 7 April 2020 Status: Proofs Length: 408 pages All rights available excluding World English Language (MIT Press)
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FORTHCOMING TITLES
EXPONENTIAL Shaping the World in an Age of Accelerating Change AZEEM AZHAR Praise for Azeem Azhar’s newsletter ‘Exponential View’ ‘Exponential View’ is a must-read and always provides a thoughtful perspective on our exponential world – Daniel Ek, Founder, Spotify I love the way ‘Exponential View’ carefully brings together and celebrates so many different perspectives, and I look forward to being challenged and inspired by it every week – Mustafa Suleyman, Co-founder, DeepMind
A refreshing lens on our near future from an influential tech entrepreneur, investor, advisor and communicator. At some point between 2016 and 2017, technology took over the public space. Mutterings about the application of new dark digital arts – the nefarious manipulation of our social media against us, the hacking of our very democracies – crescendoed. Computers got better at many things – playing games, translating between languages, describing what is in a picture – and we began to talk about AI taking our jobs, driving our cars and supplementing nearly all our human capabilities. Tech giants – Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix – rose to impressive, then disturbing, new heights. At the time, Azeem Azhar had just sold PeerIndex, one of the startups he founded, and he went from being an overworked founder to a senior executive with a bit of time and space to look around. And he noticed something: across today’s disparate storylines – the political rifts, the rise of tech leviathans towering over civic life, the tsunami of AI development – there was a pattern. In short, a gap had opened between accelerating technological capability and incremental social adaptation, between everyday culture and the bubble of tech culture. Azeem dubbed this the ‘exponential gap’, and since then he has sought to find a way to bridge these two cultures, to unite technologists and humanists in a collective effort to shape our world for the better. Channelling the grand scope of Harari and Tegmark, the rigour of Zuboff and Mazzucato, and the entrepreneurial attitude of Brynjolfsson and McAfee, EXPONENTIAL is that bridge – across cultures, across the exponential gap – that offers readers a clear vista of our future. AZEEM AZHAR writes ‘Exponential View’, a widely acclaimed newsletter with over 24,000 subscribers. It deals with the impact of AI and exponential technologies on society and the economy and is accompanied by his highly lauded podcast, distributed by Harvard Business Review. Following an MA in politics, philosophy and economics from the University of Oxford, he started his career as a journalist with the Guardian and the Economist before founding PeerIndex, and is now a trusted advisor to firms such as PricewaterhouseCoopers, a venture partner at Kindred Capital, a board member of the Ada Lovelace Foundation and a regular international keynote speaker on topics such as the impact of AI, ethics and technology, exponential technologies and the human dimensions of technology. Agent: Jeff Shreve Publisher: Random House Business (UK) Delivery: October 2020 Publication: Autumn 2021 Status: Proposal and sample writing Length: 90,000–100,000 words All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth (Random House Business)
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FORTHCOMING TITLES
LIFTOFF The Fall, Fall, Fall, and Rise of SpaceX ERIC BERGER
Photo credit: Lee Hutchinson
The little-known story of SpaceX’s first four rocket launches, and the engineers, mathematicians and visionaries that gave everything they had to usher in a new age of space exploration. From 2006 to 2008, on a remote atoll in the Pacific, the private US rocketry company SpaceX struggled to get its homemade single-engine rocket, the Falcon 1, into orbit. The first rocket exploded about 30 seconds into its flight. The second reached space… for all of eight minutes, when its engine sputtered out. The third was looking more promising until its just-separated first stage actually caught up with the second stage, triggering an explosive collision at the edge of space. With one rocket remaining, SpaceX’s young team knew its fate was tied to the fourth attempt. ‘If we had not reached orbit on that attempt, SpaceX would not exist’, the company’s founder Elon Musk himself acknowledged in a statement in 2018. (Spoiler alert: the fourth rocket operated like a dream, of course, and SpaceX has spent the past 10 years building a leading position in humanity’s space exploration efforts.) Yet owing to the reclusive nature of SpaceX, the full story of these early years, far from the gleaming headquarters and high-profile successes of today, is largely unknown. In LIFTOFF, Eric Berger draws on his unprecedented access to SpaceX to reveal the full narrative of this foundational generation, profiling the pioneering team that grew SpaceX from nothing, survived three straight failures and lifted SpaceX from mockery to ascendancy in space exploration. LIFTOFF is the story, not of Elon Musk, but of the people who gave up safe jobs elsewhere to build the future of space exploration. ERIC BERGER has been a reporter and editor in Houston for more than two decades. With a background in astronomy and a master’s degree in journalism, he has written mostly about science and, more recently, spaceflight. After a long career at the Houston Chronicle, he joined Ars Technica in 2015 as the website’s senior space editor, covering SpaceX, NASA and everything beyond. For his reporting since then, he won the 2015 NewSpace Journalism award from the Space Frontier Foundation and a 2015 Space Pioneer award from the National Space Society. A certified meteorologist, he also maintains a widely read weather forecasting website for the greater Houston area, Space City Weather. He was a Pulitzer prize finalist for his coverage of Hurricane Ike at the Houston Chronicle in 2008. Agent: Jeff Shreve Publisher: Wiliam Morrow (Harper Collins US) Publication: Spring 2021 Status: Draft manuscript Length: 75,000–85,000 words words All rights available excluding World English Language (Morrow), China (Guomai Culture and Media), Korea (3rd Moon Book), Russia (Eksmo)
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FORTHCOMING TITLES
SPEED LIMIT A Light-speed Trip Into Einstein’s Mind-bending, World-changing Theory of Relativity TANYA BUB & JEFFREY BUB Praise for TOTALLY RANDOM Accessible, smart, and funny. An entanglement page-turner! – David Kaiser, author of HOW THE HIPPIES SAVED PHYSICS
A book about relativity that puts the pictures in Einstein’s head into the heads of its readers. Like many people interested in the theory of relativity, the artist, philosopher and humorist Tanya Bub had never read Einstein's original work, somehow assuming she would be better off with more modern takes on the subject. But after idly clicking on a link to the 1905 paper Einstein had written when he was 24 years old – a first stab at explaining to the world his revolutionary ideas on space, time and matter – she ended up spending two years absorbed in his imaginative vision of the world. What particularly struck her was that Einstein used words and maths to draw pictures in his readers’ minds. As she worked through his paper, she sketched in little diagrams and doodles to help her keep track of the thread of his argument and understand the rationale behind his equations. Soon her imagined scenarios became more elaborate, with props ranging from trains, mirrors and light guns to balloons, ice-cream cones and baseballs. Much to her surprise it turned out that the pictures could also generate numbers – the same values usually calculated with abstract mathematical equations. But here the pictures made intuitive sense because they came with a story. In SPEED LIMIT, Tanya Bub teams up with her father, the distinguished physicist Jeffrey Bub, to explain relativity in a way that’s never been done before. It’s a deliciously visual, wildly creative journey that reveals astonishing truths about the world we inhabit: time is relative, lengths get shorter with motion, the Universe has a speed limit, energy and mass are interchangeable, and gravity is the same thing as acceleration. The result: a quirky, funny accessible blend of science and art that goes to the heart of one of science’s most revolutionary discoveries. TANYA BUB is the founder of 48th Ave Productions, a web-development company. She has degrees in philosophy of science from McGill University and fine arts from the Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver. JEFFREY BUB is a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland. He studied physics with David Bohm at Birkbeck College, London, and philosophy of science with Karl Popper and Imre Lakatos at the London School of Economics. Tanya and Jeff’s first book together, TOTALLY RANDOM: Why Nobody Understands Quantum Mechanics (Princeton University Press, 2018), was voted best quantum physics book of 2018 by Ethan Siegel of Forbes magazine (‘If you ever wondered about quantum entanglement and why it's so weird, this book is perhaps the best, simplest explainer of how it actually works’). Agent: Peter Tallack Publisher: Yale University Press Delivery: Spring 2020 Publication: Autumn 2020 Status: Proposal and sample spreads Length: 240 pages All rights available excluding World English Language (Yale University Press) 10
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FORTHCOMING TITLES
HOW TO BE AUTHENTIC Simone de Beauvoir and a Guide to Rebellious Living SKYE C. CLEARY
What Simone de Beauvoir can teach us about how to live. The French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir famously wrote that ‘One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman’. Her book The Second Sex went on to lay the groundwork for second-wave feminism and inspire thinkers such as Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem and Kate Millett. Yet it wasn’t in a gender studies class, but in a business school lecture that Skye Cleary first encountered Beauvoir. Struggling her way out of a finance job and ambivalently paired with a boyfriend sceptical of her ambition, Cleary found a wake up call in Beauvoir’s ideas: about how to live freely in a world full of chains, how to strive for authenticity and how, for women, to live is to rebel. After a decisive pivot, Cleary decided to devote her career to exploring – and living a life inspired by - Beauvoir. In HOW TO BE AUTHENTIC, Cleary reveals how Beauvoir’s thought can help us all become more attuned to living purposefully, thoughtfully, and with vitality. Drawing on her own experiences as well as the ideas of other existentially rebellious women thinkers, Cleary explains – in chapters on happiness, friendship and parenting, among others – why Beauvoir’s philosophy remains such a compelling way to think about how to live and love. Existential philosophy emerged out of a postwar moment of despair and loss of meaning, and we live in similarly troubled – and seemingly unprecedented – times. HOW TO BE AUTHENTIC ultimately offers a guide to help us navigate the absurdity of being in the world today. SKYE C. CLEARY has devoted her life to popularizing the philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir. A philosopher, writer and popular lecturer, she teaches at Barnard College, City College of New York, and Columbia University, and has lectured on love and philosophy at institutions and venues all over the world. She previously served as the associate director of the Center for New Narratives in Philosophy at Columbia University, which supports research on women and other marginalized groups in the history of philosophy. She is the author of EXISTENTIALISM AND ROMANTIC LOVE (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) and is co-editor, with Massimo Pigliucci and Daniel Kaufman, of the anthology HOW TO LIVE A GOOD LIFE (Vintage, forthcoming 2020). Her writing has appeared in Aeon, the Paris Review, the Independent, the HuffPost, Business Insider, the New Republic and Quartz, among other outlets. She lives with her husband and son in New York City. Agent: Tisse Takagi Publisher: St Martin’s Press (US)/Ebury (UK) Delivery: 30 June 2021 Publication: Spring 2022 Status: Proposal and sample writing Length: 65,000 words All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth (Ebury), US & Canada (St Martin’s), China (United Sky (Beijing) New Media), Netherlands (Ten Have)
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FORTHCOMING TITLES
THE WOOD AGE How Our Relationship With Wood Transformed Us from Tiny Tree Shrews to World-dominating Industrialists ROLAND ENNOS Most histories of humanity begin with us coming down from the trees and striding out onto the plains, and then follow a hackneyed journey through the successive ages of stone, bronze and iron. This book tells a far longer and more enlightening story… How did we, the descendants of small arboreal primates, manage to stand on our own two feet, become top predators and spread about the world? How did we transform the world’s vegetation and build large settlements, develop civilizations and produce a globalized economy? In THE WOOD AGE, Roland Ennos shows that the key to our success has been our relationship with a material usually whitewashed from world histories: wood. Drawing together recent research and reinterpreting our existing knowledge in fields as wide-ranging as primatology, anthropology, archaeology, history, architecture, engineering and carpentry, he charts for the first time how our ability to exploit wood’s unique properties has shaped our bodies and minds, societies and lives. Our binocular vision, upright stance and grasping hands, our intelligence and empathy, the ability to make and use tools, and even to walk on two legs – all evolved to help our ancestors live among the narrow wooden branches of the rainforest canopy. Wood was also vital to our success as huntergatherers: we burnt wood to keep warm, protect ourselves and cook our food, and carved it to make increasingly sophisticated weapons. Novel woodworking tools enabled us to clear forests, plough the land and build the first houses, boats and wheels. And during historical times wood shaped our culture and history through architecture, shipbuilding and industrialization, responsible for the rise and fall of empires and the emergence of the modern world. Wood is still among the world’s most important structural materials and fuels, and in the past 150 years we have learnt to transform it into a whole new range of wood products including paper, plywood and laminates. So great is the demand for these energy-intensive materials that their use is starting to degrade the global environment. At the same time, by treating trees as commodities, we have paradoxically begun to devalue wood and turn our back on it. We need, Ennos argues, to relearn what we have forgotten about trees and traditional woodworking practices. Because our relationship with wood is so engrained in us, for our own welfare and for the benefit of the planet we must return to more traditional ways of growing and using trees locally. We must return to the Wood Age. ROLAND ENNOS is a visiting professor of biological sciences at the University of Hull. An expert on the mechanics of wood and the design of trees, he has investigated how our fingers are modified for gripping, how apes move about and make their nests in the forest canopy, how early humans designed better axes to cut down trees and how we have managed and altered forests. In addition to over 120 scientific publications, he has written a popular book on trees for London’s Natural History Museum and several pieces for Physics World and the Conversation (including one on keeping your house warm which has been read one-and-a-half million times). Agent: Peter Tallack Publisher: Scribner (US)/William Collins (UK) Publication: Autumn 2020 Status: Draft manuscript Length: 80,000 words All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth (William Collins), US & Canada (Scribner), China (United Sky (Beijing) New Media), Japan (NHK), Korea (Forest Book Publishing Co.)
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FORTHCOMING TITLES
THE FEAR PARADOX How Our Obsession with Security Imprisons Our Minds and Shapes Our Society FRANK FARANDA Frank Faranda is an accomplished student of the mind, and especially of the interplay between fear and imagination. He’s not only a great thinker and writer, but also a terrific storyteller, keen observer of humanity, and gentle mentor on how we can do better – Douglas Rushkoff, bestselling author and Professor of Media Theory and Digital Economics, Queens College, City University of New York
A clinical psychologist reveals how fear – which evolved to keep us safe and enhance our existence – has grown into the greatest single threat to our humanity and our collective survival. What if our exciting innovations and continuous technological progress are driven not by curiosity, pure creativity or bright ideals of human advancement but instead by fear, an evolutionary state embedded in our brains and reinforced over countless millennia? In THE FEAR PARADOX, Frank Faranda shows how most of our technological and social changes are simply more imaginative ways for us to run from danger. Yet no matter how many dangers, real or imagined, we neutralize, new ones emerge. Superbugs arise from our battle with bacteria; worldwide social media platforms give propagandists, trolls and outside operatives unprecedented power to manipulate and control; industrial robotics are devouring our workforce; and as we seek to share more of ourselves online, we feel less connected and more alone. Our level of fear remains constant. Faranda’s argument serves as a universal translator for our current state of affairs in politics, in Silicon Valley, online and in the real world – a lens that gathers diffuse light and focuses it into a sharp, incisive point. Our opioid crisis, our smartphone addictions, the rise of ‘strong’ authoritarian leaders who leverage our fear to gain power, the constant march of ever-more-convenient technologies that minimize genuine interaction with others, the rush to develop artificial intelligence – at the root of all of this is fear of pain, of domination by others, of outside threats, of the unknown. THE FEAR PARADOX tackles all this and more, uncovering the evolutionary roots of our heedless advancement and examining our personal and societal obsession with that mythical, always-just-outof-reach utopian future: a provocative, important and original work that connects the state of our world to the state of our minds. FRANK FARANDA is a clinical psychologist with 15 years of experience in private practice. He has helped thousands of patients deal with fear and conducted more than 30,000 hours of depth psychotherapy. He earned his master’s degree in developmental psychology and education from Columbia University, Teacher’s College, and his PhD in clinical psychology from the Derner Institute at Adelphi University. He was awarded postdoctoral fellowships from New York University’s Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, and the Rusk Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine, where he trained in neuropsychological testing and cognitive remediation. Between 2003 and 2012, he taught several semesters of ‘The Development of the Self’ and ‘An Introduction to Jung’ courses at The New School in New York. Over the past several years he has published academic articles on mind, metaphor and imagination and guest-edited two themed journal issues for Psychoanalytic Inquiry. Agent: Jeff Shreve Publisher: Mango Media Publication: 19 May 2020 Status: Manuscript Length: 224 pages All rights available excluding World English Language (Mango Media) 13
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FORTHCOMING TITLES
ONCE UPON A TIME I LIVED ON MARS Space, Exploration, and Life on Earth KATE GREENE
Observations and insights on space exploration, as inspired by the author’s experience of living in a simulated Martian environment on the slopes of Mauna Loa in Hawaii. When it comes to colonizing Mars, so often we focus on how to get there: the rockets, the engines, the fuel. Yet once we arrive, what will it actually be like? In 2013, Kate Greene came one step closer to finding out. Along with five fellow crew members, she was chosen for NASA’s first HI-SEAS mission, a simulated Martian environment located on the slopes of Mauna Loa in Hawaii. For the next four months she lived, worked and slept in an isolated white dome, conducting a sleep study on her crew mates but also gaining incredible insight into human behaviour in tight quarters, as well as the nature of the boredom, dreams, isolation and irritation that arise despite the promise of scientific progress and glory. In ONCE UPON A TIME I LIVED ON MARS, Greene uses her experience to contemplate humanity’s broader impulse to explore and asks: what kind of wisdom will we take to Mars and elsewhere in the Universe? It is an examination of our time in space right now, as a pre-Mars species, poised on the edge, readying for launch. KATE GREENE is an essayist, journalist and former laser physicist whose work has appeared in Aeon, Discover, Harvard Review, the New Yorker, Pacific Standard, Slate, the Economist and Wired, among others. She holds a BS in chemistry and an MS in physics. The co-author with Nathan Eagle of REALITY MINING: Using Big Data to Engineer a Better World (MIT Press, 2014), she lives in New York City. Agent: Tisse Takagi Publisher: St Martin’s Press Publication: 14 July 2020 Status: Proofs Length: 240 pages All rights available excluding US & Canada (St Martin’s Press), China (Ginkgo (Beijing) Book Co. Ltd)
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FORTHCOMING TITLES
THE SPIKE An Epic Journey Through the Brain in 2.8 Seconds MARK HUMPHRIES
An original snapshot of how the brain works that takes readers to the cutting edge of neuroscience research. Our brains use electricity to communicate. Each nerve cell, each neuron, talks to other neurons by sending a tiny blip of voltage down a gossamer-thin cable. Neuroscientists call that blip ‘the spike’. And spikes are how we do anything: talk, eat and run; see, plan and decide. In THE SPIKE, Mark Humphries takes us on the journey of a single spike in a single act, from seeing to thinking to moving. Even in these few seconds, more than 10 billion spikes will fire all across the brain. As he follows just one spike across just a few moments in time, we meet dark neurons, the literal silent majority, who sit unmoved by anything and everything going on around them. They are invisible to neuroimaging, and challenge our most deeply held theories of what neurons do. We meet spontaneous spikes: spikes created by neurons without any input from the outside world; spikes created solely by the myriad feedback loops between neurons that drive each other to spike endlessly. Crazier still are spikes born without any input even to the neuron that created them, spikes created solely by the internal cycling of molecules inside a neuron. We encounter layers upon layers of mystery and wonder and almost unimaginable complexity. New technologies have begun to draw back the curtain on this neuronal drama, and every day new research upends our understanding of how neurons talk to each other. Of how we see, of how we decide, of how we move. But until now we've had no big-picture narrative; no story of how all our discoveries fit together. THE SPIKE tells that story. MARK HUMPHRIES is a professor of computational neuroscience at the University of Nottingham, where he holds a prestigious seven-year senior fellowship from the UK’s Medical Research Council – the only computational scientist ever to have been awarded one. Before moving to Nottingham in 2018, he was a senior research fellow at the University of Manchester, a fellow at École Normale Supérieure in Paris and a postdoctoral and PhD student at the University of Sheffield. His work has been published in leading scientific journals including Neuron, eLife and Nature Communications. In 2016 he founded the Medium publication ‘The Spike’ to bring the unheralded golden age of systems neuroscience to the general public. His stories there have amassed close to half a million views in the publication’s first two years. Agent: Jeff Shreve Publisher: Princeton University Press Publication: Autumn 2020 Status: Manuscript Length: 60,000 words All rights available excluding World English Language (Princeton University Press)
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FORTHCOMING TITLES
THE CENTURY OF DECEPTION The Birth of the Hoax in Eighteenth-Century England IAN KEABLE
‛Fake news’, ‛going viral’ and ‛social media’ may be phrases from the twenty-first century but the concepts were all born in a series of absurdist events some 250 years ago. England, 1749. A newspaper advertisement appears stating that a man will climb inside a bottle on the stage of a London theatre. Unfortunately, although the audience turns up, the conjurer doesn’t. Earlier in the same century a woman said she was giving birth to rabbits; later a new Shakespearian play was supposedly discovered and performed – like the Bottle Conjurer for one night only. In THE CENTURY OF DECEPTION the magician and historian of conjuring Ian Keable tells the stories of these and several other eighteenth-century hoaxes including a sociopathic liar, a hilarious astrological prediction, a rapping ghost and a Frenchman attempting to go airborne in a Chinese temple. Hoaxes, of course, have always been around. But this was the era when they were first extensively reported, vividly depicted and reliably described – as well as forensically investigated. They were also widely influential, drawing in many celebrities of the day such as Samuel Johnson, Benjamin Franklin and Jonathan Swift and inflaming concerns about ‘English credulity’. Embracing history and society, literature and the theatre, medicine and religion, satirical prints and paintings, imprisonment and capital punishment, and questions of ‘whodunit’ and ‘whydunit’, this entertaining and eye-popping book reveals how these hoaxes provide the perfect mirror for reflecting universal truths about our susceptibility to being duped. IAN KEABLE obtained a first-class degree from the University of Oxford in philosophy, politics and economics, qualified as a chartered accountant and then became a professional magician. A member of The Magic Circle with gold star, he has won several awards for his unique brand of comedy magic and is the author of three books for the general public as well as three works for professionals including Stand-Up: A Professional Guide to Comedy Magic and Charles Dickens Magician: Conjuring in Life, Letters and Literature. He has made numerous appearances on television including ‘New Faces’, the predecessor to ‘Britain's Got Talent’, and has written and presented programmes for BBC Radio. An accredited lecturer for The Arts Society, he gives talks on cartoons, satirical prints and eighteenth-century hoaxes. He still performs as a magician at corporate events and private parties and also does a show about Dickens's interest in conjuring and spiritualism. He is married with two children and lives in London. Agent: Peter Tallack Publisher: Westbourne Press Publication: Autumn 2020 Status: Manuscript Length: 80,000 words All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth (Westbourne Press) 16
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OUCH The New Science of Pain MARGEE KERR & LINDA RODRIGUEZ MCROBBIE
Whether you’re suffering from chronic pain or simply curious about the workings of the human body and mind, this book will change the way you think about this fundamental human experience that, directly or indirectly, affects us all. From the mounting casualties of the opioid crisis to doctors downplaying and misdiagnosing patients’ suffering, we clearly have an increasingly dysfunctional relationship with pain. As children we’re taught to avoid pain at all costs and rely on painkillers to dull even the mildest of aches. Yet this strategy of avoidance and suppression has unexpectedly resulted in our feeling worse. The first step to feeling better, argue Margee Kerr and Linda Rodriguez McRobbie, is to stop being scared and lean into the pain. In OUCH, they reveal that pain is a rich, layered experience governed not only by the signals tripped the moment a needle pricks our skin but also by where we are, who we’re with, why we’re there, and our individual history. By understanding the complexity of how pain is made, we can learn in many cases how to reduce the perceived intensity of pain as well as recast and transform the negative emotions – the fear and helplessness – associated with it. On their journey Kerr and McRobbie seek out pain-sensing robots and pain-seeking parishioners, explore burning bug bites and blissful lashings and witness for themselves – at the Tough Mudder, a team-oriented 18–20-kilometre obstacle course designed to test physical strength and mental grit – the power of pain to bring people together. Ultimately, OUCH offers us a deeper understanding of this incredibly subjective yet universal experience, revealing a truth we instinctively know: not all pain is bad, not all pain is harmful. As they discover, pain can be not just useful, but even rewarding. Through immersive reporting, in-depth interviews and original research, OUCH takes us on an adventure to discover that pain is not just something that happens to us, and that we have more control over our experience than we think. MARGEE KERR is a sociologist who has been teaching and conducting research since 2004. The author of SCREAM: Chilling Adventures in the Science of Fear (PublicAffairs, 2015), she holds a PhD from the University of Pittsburgh. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon and the New York Post, among other publications. She lives in Philadelphia. LINDA RODRIGUEZ McROBBIE is a freelance writer and journalist specializing in science, culture and history. Her work has appeared in the Guardian, Smithsonian Magazine, the Boston Globe, Slate, Atlas Obscura and other outlets. She is the author of PRINCESSES BEHAVING BADLY: Real Stories from History Without the Fairy-Tale Endings (Quirk Books, 2013). She lives in London. Agent: Tisse Takagi Publisher: Bloomsbury Sigma Delivery: Spring 2020 Publication: Autumn 2020 Status: Proposal and sample chapter Length: 90,000 words All rights available excluding World English (Bloomsbury Sigma) 17
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FORTHCOMING TITLES
THE LAST STARGAZERS The Enduring Story of Astronomy’s Vanishing Explorers EMILY LEVESQUE
An astronomer pulls back the curtain on the ‘rigors and delights and jerry-rigging absurdity’ of the past century of observational astronomy, while looking ahead to a future in which robots, not humans, peer skyward in pursuit of the Universe’s secrets. Emily Levesque’s 15-year career as an observational astronomer has been full of surprises, hardships, worldwide travel and awe-inspiring discoveries. She’s shared that road with a unique cohort, a group of astronomers braving mountain passes, subzero temperatures, poisonous or otherwise hostile fauna and flora, and the pulse-quickening technical difficulties of telescopes the size and weight of apartment buildings. In THE LAST STARGAZERS, she weaves together the incredible episodes and experiences of over a hundred astronomers and observatory employees to build a narrative history of observational astronomy, offer a tour d’horizon of the research behind our current understanding of the Universe and reveal the transformative developments in the field’s immediate future. That future includes the rise of robotic telescopes such as the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope – a triumph of modern technology, able to map the Universe in unprecedented detail and generate dozens of terabytes of data in a single night. The LSST will usher in a new age rich in data and potential discoveries, but it will also signal the end of a certain type of human discovery and creativity that has been with us since Galileo. THE LAST STARGAZERS tells these human stories not simply to preserve them but also to remind us that our ingenuity and curiosity should not be wholly sacrificed in the pursuit of gleaming columns of big data. Levesque’s own story shows us that brilliant scientists can do more than move the wheel of scientific progress forward; they can also inspire future generations to take up the effort. EMILY LEVESQUE is a professor of astronomy at the University of Washington. She received her BSc in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2006 and her PhD in astronomy from the University of Hawaii in 2010. From 2010 to 2015 she was an Einstein Fellow and Hubble Fellow at the University of Colorado at Boulder. In 2014 she was awarded the Annie Jump Cannon Prize by the American Astronomical Society, and in 2017 she was selected as an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow in Physics. Her primary research area is observational stellar astrophysics, with an emphasis on the explosive supernova deaths of massive stars. She has observed for upwards of 50 nights on almost all of the world’s largest optical telescopes, visiting more than a dozen leading observatories (including Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona, the Very Large Array in New Mexico, Mauna Kea Observatory in Hawaii, and the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile). She has also been a principal investigator on the Hubble Space Telescope and has led research using data from the entire breadth of the electromagnetic spectrum, as well as gravitational waves. Agent: Jeff Shreve Publisher: Sourcebooks (US)/Oneworld (UK) Publication: 4 August 2020 Status: Manuscript Length: 336 pages All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth (Oneworld), US & Canada (Sourcebooks), Korea (Sigongsa)
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CRYPTOGRAPHY The Key to Digital Security, How It Works, and Why It Matters KEITH MARTIN
A concise, accessible and authoritative guide that tells you everything you need to know about cryptography. What are the implications of connecting to an unprotected Wi-Fi network? Is it really that important to have different passwords for different accounts? Could you lose all your money if you convert it to bitcoin? Can we ever be truly anonymous when online? Will quantum computers break all known cryptography, or will smarter machines make our world more secure? Cryptography is being used, behind the scenes, to secure most of the technologies that each of us uses every day in cyberspace. It protects half of all global connections made to the world wide web. We use it when we withdraw cash from an ATM, log in to a computing device, search for information on Google, watch movies on Netflix or even use a key fob to open our car door. With Forbes predicting that cybercrime will be worth two trillion dollars by 2019, cryptography really is something that none of us can afford to ignore. Yet in cyberspace we often leave our front doors wide open. We hand over our bank account details to strangers and we etch personal messages into tablets of digital stone that will remain legible forever. At the same time some political leaders are calling for cryptography to be weakened. A former director of the FBI says he is ‘concerned’, even ‘depressed’, about how it it is hampering intelligence gathering. Two UK prime ministers have openly stated they wanted to ban it. Indeed, a former contractor to the US National Security Agency was so worried about attempts to subvert the use of it that he gave up his career and personal freedom to share his concerns with the world. This book is the first to demystify cryptography for the general public. By looking at why we need cryptography, what it does, how we use and abuse it, what its limitations are and why it is so controversial, it aims to provide readers with a profound yet practical perspective on their own personal security in cyberspace. KEITH MARTIN is a professor of information security at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is a chartered mathematician and a fellow of the Institute for Mathematics and Its Applications. He has worked in cryptographic research for almost 30 years, formerly holding positions at the University of Adelaide, Australia, and the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium. The author of Everyday Cryptography (Oxford University Press, 2017 – 2nd edn), he has written over 100 scientific papers on aspects of cryptography and cybersecurity, articles for the technical press including Computing Magazine, Infosecurity Magazine, Cyber Security Law and Practice and Cyber Talk, and many pieces for the Conversation. Agent: Peter Tallack Publisher: Norton Publication: 19 May 2020 Status: Proofs Length: 320 pages All rights available excluding World English Language (Norton), China (CITIC), Korea (ROK Media) 19
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FORTHCOMING TITLES
SHIKAKE The Japanese Art of Shaping Behavior Through Design DR NAOHIRO MATSUMURA
An entirely fresh way of thinking, living and connecting with others. The field of ‘shikakeology’ (pronounced shē-kä-kā-ology), as Osaka University professor of economics Naohiro Matsumura defines it, is the study of ‘shikakes’: things that influence our behaviour, not through direct requests or demands but rather through mindful, pleasant designs that invite action. It is a field that has the potential to shape our personal habits, boost professional success and even tackle social issues such as public health and civic engagement. Shikakes are often simple: a small hollow pipe placed at eye level to direct attention; a urinal with a bullseye to direct another sort of attention; a piano staircase to encourage exercise; a miniature Shinto gate placed on the floor in a high-traffic hallway to discourage littering. Yet this simplicity can be extremely powerful, engaging our curiosity in ways that directly stated guidelines, or brute-force application of willpower, never will. Dr Matsumura has devoted his career to the pursuit of shikake solutions for all sorts of problems in the public sphere. In this book, he does much more than simply show readers charming examples of existing shikakes: he gives us specific, concrete tools to invent our own shikakes to forge creative solutions to almost any problems we face. DR NAOHIRO MATSUMURA is a professor in the graduate school of economics at Osaka University, specializing in behavioural economics. He received a BS and MS in engineering science from Osaka University, and a PhD in engineering from the University of Tokyo, where he studied artificial intelligence. In 2015, he advocated for a new research field called ‘shikakeology’. He wrote a paper with his Stanford University colleagues Renate Fruchter and Larry Leifer that laid out the principles of shikakeology and formally defined a shikake as ‘an embodied trigger for behaviour change to solve social or personal problems’. In 2017, Dr Matsumura was awarded the Osaka University Award in recognition of his pioneering contributions to shikakeology and data-science education. He has since collected and conceived of hundreds of shikakes in his pursuit to understand the myriad mechanisms that make them work. Agent: Jeff Shreve Publisher: Liveright (Norton) Publication: Autumn 2020 Status: Manuscript Length: 25,000 words All rights available excluding World English Language (Liveright)
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FORTHCOMING TITLES
CHILDREN OF THE FLOOD Three Towns, Rising Waters, and the Fate of Black America VANN R. NEWKIRK II
An award-winning journalist unearths the roots of African-American dispossession. In CHILDREN OF THE FLOOD, Vann Newkirk weaves together the incredible stories of three of the earliest free black towns in the United States – Princeville, North Carolina; St Helena, South Carolina; and Ironton, Louisiana – and their pioneering inhabitants, who, imperilled by both climate change and more than a century of white-supremacist policy, face a manmade environmental disaster on the scale of the 1930s’ Dust Bowl. In so doing, he reveals how black Americans throughout history have been forced to negotiate an impossible choice: self-preservation or the preservation of their ancestral lands and culture. A powerful – and timely – story about survival, resilience and spiritual longing, CHILDREN OF THE FLOOD offers lessons for us all on how to endure in the face of environmental catastrophe. VANN R. NEWKIRK II is a staff writer for The Atlantic, where he covers politics and policy. He is the host and reporter for The Atlantic’s forthcoming flagship documentary podcast on Hurricane Katrina. In 2017, he was named to The Root 100, and in 2018, he received the Next Award from the American Society of Magazine Editors. In 2019, he was named a 2020 11th Hour Fellow at New America. His work has been published in outlets such as the New York Times Book Review, the New York Times, the New Yorker, GQ and Ebony. He lives in Hyattsville, Maryland. Agent: Tisse Takagi Publisher: Random House (US) Delivery: November 2021 Publication: Autumn 2022 Status: Proposal and sample chapter Length: 100,000 words All rights available excluding World English Language (Random House)
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HOW TO THINK LIKE A WOMAN Four Women Philosophers Who Taught Me How to Live a Life of the Mind REGAN PENALUNA
An alternative history of philosophy told through one woman’s own search for beauty and truth. As a young woman growing up in a small, religious town in Iowa, Regan Penaluna daydreamed about the big questions: who are we and what is this strange world we find ourselves in? In college she discovered philosophy and fell in love with its rationality, its abstractions, its beauty. After graduation, it seemed an obvious choice to enter a philosophy PhD programme – the first step, she believed, to becoming a self-determined woman and living a life of the mind. What Penaluna didn’t realize was that philosophy – at least the Western philosophical canon that’s taught in American universities, as well as the culture that surrounds it – would slowly grind her down through its misogyny, its sexual harassment, its devaluation of women and their minds. Women were nowhere in her graduate curriculum, and feminist philosophy was dismissed as marginal, unserious. Meanwhile Penaluna realized she had transformed from an energetic, independent seeker of wisdom to a quiet, passive student, complicit in the silencing of her own mind. Where were the women? One day, while digging through footnotes in an obscure monograph, Penaluna came across the work of a seventeenth-century woman named Damaris Cudworth Masham. On a whim she pulled up Masham’s work and it was like reaching through time: writing 300 years ago, Masham was speaking directly to her. Masham wrote about knowledge and God, but also the condition of women. Her work eventually led Penaluna to other remarkable women philosophers of the era: Mary Astell, who moved to London at the age of 21 and made a living writing philosophy; Catharine Cockburn, a philosopher, novelist and playwright who explored women’s humanity; and the better-known Mary Wollstonecraft, who wrote extensively and passionately in defence of women’s minds. Together these women rekindled Penaluna’s love of philosophy and taught her how to live a truly philosophical life. In HOW TO THINK LIKE A WOMAN, Penaluna tells the stories of these four women as well as of her own personal and intellectual voyage in a moving, beautiful meditation of what a philosophy by women might look like. REGAN PENALUNA is a senior editor at Guernica magazine, a global magazine of art and politics. Previously she was an editor at Nautilus magazine, where she wrote and edited long-form stories. A feature she wrote on the ‘fish kick’, the fastest yet relatively unknown swim stroke, was listed in The Atlantic as one of ‘100 Exceptional Works of Journalism’. She has also written for the Chronicle of Higher Education, Philosophy Now and the Philosophers’ Magazine. She has a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University and a PhD in philosophy from Boston University. She lives in Brooklyn, New York. Agent: Tisse Takagi Publisher: Grove Atlantic Delivery: Spring 2020 Publication: Spring 2021 Status: Proposal and sample chapter Length: 80,000 words All rights available excluding World English Language (Grove Atlantic) 22
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A FIELD GUIDE TO A HAPPY LIFE 53 Brief Lessons for Living MASSIMO PIGLIUCCI Praise for HOW TO BE A STOIC Proves… that profound wisdom can be delivered in lively, breezy prose; and that Massimo Pigliucci is uniquely gifted at translating philosophy into terms helpful for alleviating and elevating the lives of many – Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, author of PLATO AT THE GOOGLEPEX
By an acclaimed Stoic philosopher, a modern reimagining of an ancient manual for happiness. In his latest project, the philosopher and author Massimo Pigliucci takes inspiration from Epictetus’ Enchiridion, an ancient Greek how-to manual for living a happy life, where ‘happy’ means eudaemonia – that is, a life worth living. In A FIELD GUIDE TO A HAPPY LIFE, Pigliucci reboots the original manual with modern examples and science, retaining the insight and aims of the original: life needs to be lived for what it is, and not what we wish it to be; we control only our judgments and adopted values, and nothing else; the point of a human life is to be helpful to the human cosmopolis; and if we follow this advice we will achieve ataraxia, a state of enlightened serenity. A brief, but powerful, guide to seeking the life worth living, A FIELD GUIDE TO A HAPPY LIFE is not merely a self-help book for succeeding in one’s own life, but a guide to creating a better world, too. MASSIMO PIGLIUCCI is the K. D. Irani Professor of Philosophy at the City College of New York. He has written for publications such as the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal, among others. He is the author or editor of 12 books including HOW TO BE A STOIC: Using Ancient Philosophy to Live a Modern Life (Basic Books (US)/Rider (UK), 2017) and, most recently, A HANDBOOK FOR NEW STOICS (The Experiment (US)/Rider (UK), 2019). He lives in New York City. Agent: Tisse Takagi Publisher: Basic Books Publication: Autumn 2020 Status: Manuscript Length: 20,000 words All rights available excluding World English Language (Basic Books), Korea (Darun)
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FORTHCOMING TITLES
UNTITLED MORAL BIOGRAPHY OF SOCRATES AND ALCIBIADES MASSIMO PIGLIUCCI Praise for HOW TO BE A STOIC A good case for the enduring relevance of 2,000year-old precepts – TIMES HIGHER EDUCATION
Following in the tradition of Plutarch’s Lives, a moral biography of the philosopher Socrates, the Athenian general Alcibiades, and the relationship between politics and philosophy, exploring the question: can wisdom be taught? MASSIMO PIGLIUCCI is the K. D. Irani Professor of Philosophy at the City College of New York. He has written for publications such as the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal, among others. He is the author or editor of 12 books including HOW TO BE A STOIC: Using Ancient Philosophy to Live a Modern Life (Basic Books (US)/Rider (UK), 2017) and, most recently, A HANDBOOK FOR NEW STOICS (The Experiment (US)/Rider (UK), 2019). He lives in New York City. Agent: Tisse Takagi Publisher: Basic Books Delivery: Autumn 2021 Publication: Autumn 2022 Status: Idea Length: 65,000 words All rights available excluding World English Language (Basic Books)
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FORTHCOMING TITLES
STRIKE PATTERNS Lives After a Secret War LEAH ZANI
In the tradition of Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, a vividly drawn narrative that asks: how do people create meaningful lives after war? From 1964 to 1973, the United States engaged in a covert air war and counter-insurgency programme against Laos. Ultimately it dropped two million tons of ordnance on the tiny Asian nation, killing a tenth of its inhabitants and leaving it the most heavily bombed country per capita in the world. Known as the Secret War, the conflict in Laos remains the longest and most intense air war in history, but despite its becoming a kind of model for modern warfare, it is not well-known – in part because its casualties and effects feel so remote. In STRIKE PATTERNS, the poet and ethnographer Leah Zani brings home – and down to earth – the aftermath of this war. A strike pattern is a signature of violence etched into the land – as bomb craters, unexploded ordnance, the fragments left behind by war. Yet, as Zani movingly shows, the human consequences of war far exceed this zone of physical destruction. Through a collection of linked stories, STRIKE PATTERNS excavates the far larger human impact zone of loss, longing, fear and shared hope. Our stories of war generally focus on the gore of the battleground – but what happens after the soldiers leave and the planes fly away? A half-century after the war, Zani tells the stories of Communist Party cadres, spies, shamans and ritual healers, ghosts, war scrap traders, farmers and explosives-clearance technicians whom she encounters in her fieldwork. Despite residing in a country pockmarked by bombing and with the daily threat of buried explosives underfoot, the people she speaks to find meaning and hope, leading lives delicately balanced between the mundane and the extraordinary. Combining rigorous ethnography and gorgeous prose, Zani paints a rich picture of lives lived in a land ravaged by a long-ago war. LEAH ZANi is an anthropologist and author writing on the social impact of war. She received her PhD and MA in anthropology from the University of California, Irvine, and has since been awarded several grants and fellowships, including the Human Rights Center Fellowship, the Social Science Merit Fellowship, the Social Science Research Network Fellowship, and the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Program Fellowship. She has conducted research with both academic and development organizations internationally, including as a Human Rights Research Fellow with the Nobel prize–winning Mines Advisory Group in Laos. She is the author of BOMB CHILDREN: Life in the Former Battlefields of Laos (Duke University Press, 2019). Her writing has appeared in American Anthropologist, Cultural Anthropology, Environmental Humanities, Asian Ethnology, Anthropology and Humanism, Somatosphere, Platypus, Los Angeles Review of Books, Broad Street Magazine, Consequence Magazine and Tikkun Magazine. Agent: Tisse Takagi Publisher: Stanford University Press Delivery: Autumn 2020 Publication: Autumn 2021 Status: Proposal and sample chapters Length: 65,000 words All rights available excluding World English Language (Stanford University Press) 25
The Science Factory
London Book Fair 2020
RECENTLY PUBLISHED
WATERS OF THE WORLD The Story of the Scientists Who Unravelled the Mysteries of Our Seas, Glaciers ands Atmosphere – and Made the Planet Whole SARAH DRY Sparkles with lyricism and wit. Dry is a gifted storyteller, and her research into the pre-history of Earth system science has turned up gripping tales of risk, adventure, defiance, and discovery. A unique and important book – Deborah R. Coen, author of CLIMATE IN MOTION Not only timely but also one of the most beautifully written books on science that I have seen in a long time… seductive, poetic, enthralling – Philip Ball, author of H2O: A Biography of Water Brings to life [the] chain of researchers who helped to reveal the dynamics of Earth’s planetary systems and humanity’s growing impact on them – NATURE
How did we come to have a global climate? What role do the complex interactions of ice, ocean and atmosphere play in sustaining life on Planet Earth? And who are the scientists who worked out all these intricate processes? WATERS OF THE WORLD is a tour through 150 years of the history of a significant but underappreciated idea: that the Earth has a global climate system made up of interconnected parts, constantly changing on all scales of both time and space. A prerequisite for the discovery of global warming and climate change, this idea was forged by scientists studying water in its myriad forms. This is their story. Linking the history of the planet with the lives of those who studied it, Sarah Dry follows the remarkable scientists who ascended volcanic peaks to peer through an atmosphere’s worth of water vapour, cored mile-thick ice sheets to uncover the Earth’s ancient climate history and flew inside storm clouds to understand how small changes in energy can produce both massive storms and the general circulation of the Earth’s atmosphere. Each toiled on his or her own corner of the planetary puzzle. Gradually, their cumulative discoveries coalesced into a unified working theory of our planet’s climate. We now call this field climate science, and in recent years it has provoked great passions, anxieties and warnings. But no less than the object of its study, the science of water and climate is – and always has been – evolving. By revealing the complexity of this history, WATERS OF THE WORLD delivers a better understanding of our planet’s climate at a time when we need it the most. SARAH DRY is a writer and historian of science. She has a PhD in the history of science from the University of Cambridge, where she was awarded a Gates Cambridge Fellowship from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and studied history and literature as an undergraduate at Harvard University. Her previous books include CURIE: A Life (Haus, 2004) and THE NEWTON PAPERS: The Strange and True Odyssey of Isaac Newton’s Private Manuscripts (Oxford University Press, 2013). She lives in Oxford with her family. Agent: Peter Tallack Publisher: University of Chicago Press (US)/Scribe (UK) Publication: 25 October 2019 (US)/10 October 2019 (UK) Length: 336 pages All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth (Scribe), US & Canada (University of Chicago Press), Japan (Kawadeshobo-Shinsha), Russia (Alpina)
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RECENTLY PUBLISHED
STOP BEING REASONABLE True Stories about How We Change Our Minds When It Matters Most ELEANOR GORDON-SMITH I knew how piercingly smart Eleanor Gordon-Smith is, and what a curious and resolute interviewer. But I was unprepared for how entertainingly she writes! I read this with pleasure – Ira Glass Relevant and accessible… a witty book – GUARDIAN
What if you aren’t who you think you are? What if you don’t really know the people closest to you? And what if your most deeply held beliefs turn out to be… wrong? In STOP BEING REASONABLE, the philosopher and journalist Eleanor Gordon-Smith tells six lucid, gripping stories that show the limits of human reason. From the woman who realized her husband harboured a terrible secret, to the man who left the cult he had been raised in since birth, and the British reality TV contestant who, having impersonated someone else for a month, discovered he could no longer return to his former identity, all of the people interviewed radically altered their beliefs about the things that matter most. What made them change course? How should their reversals affect how we think about our own beliefs? And in an increasingly divided world, what do they teach us about how we might change the minds of others? Inspiring, perceptive and often moving, STOP BEING REASONABLE explores the place where philosophy and real life meet. Ultimately, it argues that when it comes to finding out what’s true or convincing others about what we know, being rational might involve our hearts as well as our minds. ELEANOR GORDON-SMITH is a writer and radio broadcaster working at the intersection of academic ethics and the chaos of human life. Currently at Princeton University, she has produced ‘The Philosopher’s Zone’ on Australia’s Radio National, appeared as the ‘Clinical Ethicist’ on 702 Sydney radio and lectured on ethics, from political contract theory to the philosophy of sex, at the University of Sydney. Her work has appeared on National Public Radio’s ‘This American Life’ and in the Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian and Meanjin. She came to fame through her ‘This American Life’ piece on responding to cat-callers: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/603/once-morewith-feeling. Agent: Jeff Shreve Publisher: NewSouth Publishing/UNSW Press (Australia & New Zealand)/Scribe (UK)/Public Affairs (US) Publication: 1 May 2019 (Australia & New Zealand)/11 July 2019 (UK)/22 October 2019 (US) Length: 240 pages All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth (Scribe), US & Canada (PublicAffairs), Australia & New Zealand (NewSouth Publishing/UNSW Press), China (Beijing Xinchang Cultural Media), Netherlands (Ten Have)
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RECENTLY PUBLISHED
DARK DATA Why What You Don’t Know Matters DAVID J. HAND David Hand shines a bright light onto the dark corners of statistics. This is a learned book but a witty, readable and important one. I learned a lot and so will you – Tim Harford, author of FIFTY INVENTIONS THAT SHAPED THE MODERN ECONOMY and presenter of the BBC radio series ‘More or Less’ It is hard to think of anyone having anything at all to do with data-driven decisions who couldn’t benefit from reading this book. David Hand effortlessly guides the reader through the many pitfalls of dark data – Arno Siebes, Universiteit Utrecht This unique and much-needed book provides an accessible guide to dark data at a time when general awareness of the phenomenon is declining – Geert Molenberghs, Universiteit Hasselt and KU Leuven
A much-need counterpoint to the big-data hype of recent years – and a clarion call for us all to be constantly on the alert to unknown unknowns as well as the known unknowns. A good cartoon captures the important features of a face or behaviour, but there is no guarantee of this. It can easily miss much that matters. Indeed, it can easily miss the most important things. Big data is like a cartoon simplification. Although it’s meant to represent and describe the world, its abundance can mislead people into thinking they know everything. In DARK DATA, the eminent statistician David Hand explores the implications of what we might be missing. He shows, through many real examples, just how serious things can get – how missing data can lead to death and disaster, failed economies and societies, and ruined lives. Hand lays bare the ubiquity of dark data, what causes it and where it is likely to manifest itself. It can arise for many reasons, which themselves may not be obvious – asymmetric information in wars, time delays in financial trading, dropouts in clinical trials and deliberate selection to enhance apparent performance in hospitals, policing and schools. What is clear is that measuring and collecting more and more data are not guaranteed to lead to more relevant information or to better understanding. But there’s also a more positive side to dark data. When approached from the right angle, it can lead to insights that cannot be obtained any other way. Counterintuitive though it might seem, deliberately obscuring some of the data can lead to improved predictions and better understanding – providing, of course, the right data are obscured in the right way. The modern world of big data holds huge potential for improving the human condition as well as for misleading us. DARK DATA shows how to achieve the first while avoiding the second. DAVID J. HAND is a senior research investigator and emeritus professor of mathematics at Imperial College, London. He is also chief scientific advisor to Winton Capital Management. He is a fellow of the British Academy and an honorary fellow of the Institute of Actuaries, and has served (twice) as president of the Royal Statistical Society. He is a non-executive director of the UK Statistics Authority, and is chair of the board of the UK Administrative Data Research Network. He has published 300 scientific papers and 28 books, including THE IMPROBABILITY PRINCIPLE (Scientific American/FSG, 2014). In 2013 he was made OBE for services to research and innovation. Agent: Peter Tallack Publisher: Princeton University Press Publication: 18 February 2020 Length: 344 pages All rights available excluding World English Language (Princeton University Press), China (CITIC), Italy (Rizzoli), Japan (Kawadeshobo-Shinsha), Korea (Gilbut), Russia (Alpina), Taiwan (Locus)
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THE GAMING MIND A New Psychology of Videogames and the Power of Place ALEXANDER KRISS Gaming is an undeniable growing phenomenon, and THE GAMING MIND puts it under a magnifying glass. Alexander Kriss sheds light on longoverlooked deeper questions: Why do we rage quit? Why did we create videogames in the first place? And what do they trigger in us? There’s a reason videogames have had a visceral impact on our culture in recent decades – and the answer lies within our own minds – Naomi Kyle, actor, producer and host of YouTube’s ‘Last Week in Gaming’ I’m a gamer and have been my whole life from my first Apple 2+ when I was six. Alexander Kriss’s work is not only a nostalgic tour de force, but it also powerfully explains the positive impact of gaming on our minds and psyches – Jared Polis, Governor of Colorado
A therapist reveals the role of video games in the lives of his patients. Are video games bad for us? It’s the question on everyone’s mind, given teenagers’ captive attention to video games and the media’s tendency to scapegoat them. It’s also – if you ask clinical psychologist Alexander Kriss – the wrong question. In his therapy office, Kriss looks at video games as a window into the mind. Is his patient Liz really ‘addicted’ to Candy Crush – or is she evading a deeper problem? Why would aspiring model Patricia craft a hideous avatar named ‘Pat’? And when Jack immerses himself in Mass Effect, is he eroding his social skills – or honing them through relationship-building gameplay? Weaving together Kriss’s personal history, patients’ experiences and professional insight – and without shying away from complex subjects such as addiction, violence and online harassment – THE GAMING MIND disrupts our assumptions about ‘gamers’ and explores how gaming can be good for us. It offers guidance for parents, clinicians and the rest of us, to better understand the gaming mind. Like any mode of play, at their best, video games reveal who we are – and what we want from our lives. ALEXANDER KRISS is a clinical psychologist and writer based in New York. He has a private psychotherapy practice, where he specializes in treating adolescents and adults who feel they are suffering from video-game addiction. He is an adjunct professor of psychology at Fordham University and a clinical supervisor at the New School for Social Research and the City College of New York. He writes regularly on the intersections of mental health, politics and popular culture, and his work has appeared in Psychology Today, Kill Screen, Logic and various academic journals and books. Agent: Tisse Takagi Publisher: Robinson (Little, Brown) (UK)/The Experiment (US)* Publication: 4 July 2019/31 March 2020 Length: 288 pages All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth (Robinson), US & Canada (The Experiment) *Published in the UK as UNIVERSAL PLAY: How Video Games Tell Us Who We Are and Show Us Who We Could Be
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RECENTLY PUBLISHED
HOW TO LIVE A GOOD LIFE A Guide to Choosing Your Personal Philosophy Edited by MASSIMO PIGLIUCCI, SKYE C. CLEARY & DANIEL A. KAUFMAN The editors have chosen contributors who are able to present the views they favor in a style that is not only clear and informative, but in many cases, entertaining as well. This is an excellent introduction to the field of ‘philosophies of life’ – Peter Singer, author of THE MOST GOOD YOU CAN DO A fascinating and practical guide. I would happily lend you my copy, but it’s too filled with underlinings and scribbles in the margins to be legible – A. J. Jacobs, author of THE YEAR OF LIVING BIBLICALLY
Socrates famously said the ‘unexamined life is not worth living’, but what does it mean to truly live philosophically? In this thought-provoking, wide-ranging collection, Massimo Pigliucci, Skye Cleary and Daniel Kaufman have collected essays by 15 leading philosophers reflecting on what it means to live according to a philosophy of life. From John Kaag’s experience grappling with Pragmatism and William James’s question of whether life is worth living, to Skye Cleary’s examination of how the Existentialists’ view of love altered the course of her romantic and professional paths, to Bryan van Norden’s rumination of Confucianism’s relationality and what it means in a Western world where we hold dear the individual self, contributors offer accounts of how they find meaning in the practice of their 15 chosen philosophical traditions (including Neo-Aristotelianism, Daoism and Judaism, among others). Together, the pieces provide not only a beginner’s guide to choosing a life philosophy but also a timely portrait of what it means to live an examined life in the twenty-first century. MASSIMO PIGLIUCCI is the K. D. Irani Professor of Philosophy at the City College of New York. He has written for publications such as the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal, among others. He is the author or editor of 12 books, including HOW TO BE A STOIC (Basic Books (US)/Rider (UK), 2017) and, with Gregory Lopez, A HANDBOOK FOR NEW STOICS (The Experiment (US)/Rider (UK), 2019). He lives in New York City. SKYE C. CLEARY is a philosopher, writer and popular lecturer. She teaches at Barnard College, City College of New York, and Columbia University, and has lectured on love and philosophy at institutions and venues all over the world. She previously served as the associate director of the Center for New Narratives in Philosophy at Columbia University, which supports research on women and other marginalized groups in the history of philosophy. She is the author of EXISTENTIALISM AND ROMANTIC LOVE (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) and lives in New York City. DANIEL A. KAUFMAN is a professor of philosophy at Missouri State University. Together with Massimo Pigliucci, he hosts the ‘Sophia’ programme on BloggingHeads.TV, a dialogue-based show devoted to philosophy and the humanities, and he edits ‘The Electric Agora’, an online magazine that publishes essays, dialogues and reviews at the intersection of the humanities, social sciences and popular culture. He lives in Springfield, Missouri. Agent: Tisse Takagi Publisher: Vintage/Penguin Random House US Publication: 7 January 2020 Length: 320 pages All rights available excluding World English Language (Vintage/Penguin Random House US), Japan (KagakuDojin), Russia (Alpina), Spanish rights in the US (Vintage Español) 30
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BAD DATA Why We Measure the Wrong Things and Often Miss the Metrics that Matter PETER SCHRYVERS Schryvers’s insights will provide valuable tools to readers, enabling them to think critically about the myriad uses of data today – PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
‘Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts’ – William Bruce Cameron Big data has arrived. The concept is so ubiquitous, in fact, that the term may sound anachronistic in just a few more years – 'big data' is just data at this point. Our new obsession with ‘datafication’ began benignly enough, with data-nerd sports GMs and improved Netflix recommendations, but has metastasized into invasive Facebook harvesting and massive data breaches. In 15 years, we’ve gone from Moneyball to Black Mirror. Despite the rapid rise and ubiquity of big data today, there is a fundamental question, underlying all of data science, that has so far been mostly ignored: how does the data we choose to collect change our thoughts, values, actions and achievements? After all, every metric we use does not really exist, statistically speaking, until we consciously choose to measure it. The way we measure something – even the choice to simply begin measuring – unavoidably colours how we approach a problem, and often determines whether we solve it or simply transform it into a different problem. In BAD DATA, Peter Schryvers looks at the use and abuse of metrics, including the pitfalls associated with misunderstanding them. There is a dark side to metrics, a blind faith in the power of big data that can lead to death-spiral thinking. He highlights the dangers of this unthinking adherence in our personal, professional, national and global endeavours. Along the way, he shares many stories of metrics-gone-wrong, but unlike similar books on the subject, BAD DATA is defined by his dogged pursuit of solutions. Big-data metrics are here to stay; no amount of hand-wringing or cautionary tales is going to put them back in the bottle. Across all spheres of public life – education, health, city development, even the state of our planet – we use metrics to shape our future. As an urban planner, Schryvers has faced countless examples of poorly chosen or constructed metrics, and he has devoted himself to spotting their flaws and solving them. BAD DATA is not a book about statistics, analytics or mathematics. It is a book about metrics – about when they work, when they don’t and when they never will. Ultimately, it seeks to answer a simple question: are we measuring the right thing? Does what we are counting really count? PETER SCHRYVERS is a senior planner for the city of Calgary, and is the founder of the Beltline Urban Murals Project. He earned his master’s degree in environmental design from the University of Calgary. He has devoted his career to uncovering metrics-based errors in an attempt to create a more productive relationship between the measurements we make and the lessons we draw from those measurements. Agent: Jeff Shreve Publisher: Prometheus Publication: 10 January 2020 Length: 352 pages All rights available excluding World English Language (Prometheus), China (CITIC) 31
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RECENTLY PUBLISHED
BEYOND THE VALLEY How Innovators around the World are Overcoming Inequality and Creating the Technologies of Tomorrow RAMESH SRINIVASAN If you're tired of the surveillance, bias, and propaganda that are warping our world, read this book to see how things can be different – Cathy O'Neil, author of WEAPONS OF MATH DESTRUCTION Beyond the Valley shows that there is nothing inevitable about the technology we have. Let's reach for something better – Patrisse Cullors, cofounder of Black Lives Matter Global Network
How to repair the disconnect between designers and users, producers and consumers, and tech elites and the rest of us, to bring about a more democratic internet. In this provocative book, Ramesh Srinivasan describes the internet as both an enabler of frictionless efficiency and a dirty tangle of politics, economics and other inefficient, inharmonious human activities. We may love the immediacy of Google search results, the convenience of buying from Amazon and the elegance and power of our Apple devices, but it is a one-way, top-down process. We're not asked for our input, or our opinions – only for our data. The internet is brought to us by wealthy technologists in Silicon Valley and China. It’s time, Srinivasan argues, that we think in terms beyond the Valley. Srinivasan focuses on the disconnection he sees between designers and users, producers and consumers, and tech elites and the rest of us. The recent Cambridge Analytica and Russian misinformation scandals exemplify the imbalance of a digital world that puts profits before inclusivity and democracy. In search of a more democratic internet, Srinivasan takes us to the mountains of Oaxaca, East and West Africa, China, Scandinavia, North America and elsewhere, visiting the ‘design labs’ of rural, low-income and indigenous people around the world. He talks to a range of high-profile public figures – including Elizabeth Warren, David Axelrod, Eric Holder, Noam Chomsky, Lawrence Lessig, and the founders of Reddit – as well as community organizers, labour leaders and humanrights activists. To make a better internet, Srinivasan says, we need a new ethic of diversity, openness and inclusivity, empowering those now excluded from decisions about how technologies are designed, who profits from them and who are surveilled and exploited by them. RAMESH SRINIVASAN studies the relationship between technology, politics and societies across the world. He is an associate professor in the Departments of Information Studies and Design|Media Arts at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the founder of the UC-wide Digital Cultures Lab. His fieldwork and research engagements span Latin and South America, South Asia, West Africa, Papua New Guinea, Australia, New Zealand and indigenous communities in the United States and Canada. He has given keynote talks on every continent in the world (except Antarctica), discussing new technology and culture. He is the author of WHOSE GLOBAL VILLAGE? (New York University Press, 2017) and (with Adam Fish) AFTER THE INTERNET (Polity, 2017). He makes regular media appearances on MSNBC, NPR, Al Jazeera, The Young Turks and more. His writing has been published by Al Jazeera English, National Geographic, CNN, Washington Post, Forbes and HuffPost. Agent: Jeff Shreve Publisher: MIT Press Publication: 29 October 2019 Length: 424 pages All rights available excluding World English Language (MIT Press), Japan (Newton Press) 32
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BACKLIST TITLES
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The Great Invention The Story of GDP and the Making (and Unmaking) of the Modern World
Ehsan Masood
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RECENT WORLD RIGHTS SALES In addition to the titles described in previous pages, the Science Factory has sold world rights in the following recent titles. For information about the availability of translation rights, please contact the publishers directly. CAN FISH COUNT? What Animals Reveal About Our Uniquely Mathematical Minds by Brian Butterworth (Quercus/Basic Books, 2022) THE IDEA OF THE BRAIN: A History by Matthew Cobb (Profile, 21 April, 2020) – US rights sold on to Basic Books LIFE, EDITED: Genetic Engineering, Utopia and Technofear by Matthew Cobb (Profile, 2024) – US rights sold on to Basic Books NUMBERS IN MINUTES by Julia Collins (Quercus, 7 November 2019) UNDERSTANDING NUMBERS: Simplify Life’s Mathematics, Decode the World Around You by Marianne Freiberger and Rachel Thomas (White Lion Publishing/Quarto, 11 April 2019) THE DANCE OF LIFE: Symmetry, Cells and How We Become Human by Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz and Roger Highfield (W. H. Allen/Ebury, 27 February 2020) – US rights sold on to Basic Books COLDER: How We Use Extreme Cold to Save Lives, Change Medicine and Alter Our Experience of Space and Time by Philip Jaekl (Public Affairs, 2021) THE RULES OF CONTAGION: How Outbreaks Happen – From Ideas to Infectious Diseases by Adam Kucharski (Profile, 12 February 2020) – US rights sold on to Basic Books THE GENESIS QUEST: The Geniuses and Madmen Who Tried to Uncover the Origin of Life on Earth by Michael Marshall (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 20 August 2020) – US rights sold on to University of Chicago Press LIQUID: The Delightful and Dangerous Substances That Flow Through Our Lives by Mark Miodownik (Viking UK, 6 September 2018) – US rights sold on to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt IT’S A GAS by Mark Miodownik (Viking UK, 2020) – US rights sold on to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt IFL SCIENCE 117: Things You Should F*#king Know About Your World by Paul Parsons (Running Press/Hachette, 2019) WATCHING THE DETECTIVES: The Birth of a Modern Hero by P. D. Smith (Bloomsbury, 2021) EINSTEIN’S WAR: How Relativity Conquered Nationalism and Shook the World by Matthew Stanley (Viking UK, 23 May 2019) – US rights sold on to Dutton/Penguin US – represented by Jeff Shreve DO DICE PLAY GOD? The Mathematics of Uncertainty by Ian Stewart (Profile, 6 June 2019) – US rights sold on to Basic Books THE USES OF MATHEMATICS by Ian Stewart (Profile, 2020) – US rights sold on to Basic Books LIVING IN DATA by Jer Thorp (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2020) MOVE: The New Science of Body Movement and How it Can Set Your Mind Free by Caroline Williams (Profile, 2021) – US rights sold on to Hanover Square Press THE POWER OF RITUAL: How Rituals Soothe, Excite, Divide and Unite Us by Dimitris Xygalatas (Profile, 2020)
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SCIENCE FACTORY FOREIGN LANGUAGE CO-AGENTS JAPAN Hamish Macaskill: hamish@eaj.co.jp Tsutomu Yawata: tsutomu_yawata@eaj.co.jp The English Agency (Japan) Sakuragi Building 3F 6-7-3 Minami Aoyama Minato-ku Tokyo 107-0062 JAPAN tel: +81 3 3406 5385 fax: +81 3 3406 5387
KOREA Duran Kim: duran@durankim.com Duran Kim Agency 203 Century II 56 Banpodaero 18-gil, Seocho-gu Seoul 06651 KOREA tel: +822 583 5724 fax: +822 584 5724
REST OF THE WORLD Louisa Pritchard: louisa@louisapritchard.co.uk Louisa Pritchard Associates Flat 5 81 Battersea Church Road London SW11 3LY UNITED KINGDOM Skype: + 44 (0)20 7193 7145 mobile: +44 (0)7714 721
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