There is a complex and fascinating relationship between humans and the ocean, how people and cultures across the world know and understand the sea, whether through myths and legends, through trade or fishing, exploration or entertainment.  This episode

How do we use fiction in food? What does a character's choice of food reveal about them? Do you simply have to go and make a dish when it's described beautifully in a book? On this very special episode, a collaboration with the wonderful Spice Bags podca

The forest is a place we have very mixed feelings about. Forests can be calm and peaceful, full of ancient and natural beauty.   Until they’re not.  The forest, in so many ways, is a place we fear. They are dark and dense and overgrown, all too easy t

How do we imagine and portray the desert? And what does it say about us and our relationship to each other and, crucially, to the planet we live on? In this, the second in a loosely connected series on places in fiction and popular culture, I chat to Dr

 In 1905 in Paris, the publisher Pierre Laffite had an idea. His new journal Je Sais Tout had just launched and he was looking for an author who could do for his magazine, what Arthur Conan Doyle’s phenomenally popular Sherlock Holmes had done for The Str

Robots as high-tech labour-saving devices, and as usurpers of human jobs. Robots as distinctly Other and as dangerously indistinguishable from humans. Robots as a means of questioning what it is to be human, and highlighting the ethics behind the creation

A quick update episode on the new HeadStuff membership platform, HeadStuff+ Have a listen to find out more about what's on it and how you can join (although the joining bit is very straightforward - just click here).  I'm really excited to be a part of

 The continent of Antarctica was only discovered two centuries ago, even if it had long been theorized. It's a place shrouded in mystery with no human history and no permanent residents. It’s a land of superlatives: the coldest, the windiest, the driest c

In one sense alternate history is a very specific kind of story - sometimes seen as a subgenre of science fiction, more often as a genre onto itself. But in a broader sense alternate history is something we are all interested in. We all think about what m

In a way it’s maybe strange that the western is such a prominent genre. It's seemingly connected to a very specific time and place: the mid-to-late 19th century American west. And yet we are all so familiar with the many tropes of the western: cowboys and