Solar System for iPad is one of the few unqualified successes in the nascent, hybrid area of books-as-apps (or is it enhanced ebooks? New media texts?). Author Marcus Chown graciously and candidly answered a few questions about how such a unique property came about. Chown is cosmology consultant of New Scientist. His books include We Need To Talk About Kelvin, shortlisted for the 2010 Royal Society Book Prize. In the US, the book is published by FSG as The Matchbox That Ate a Forty-Ton Truck. -Ryan Chapman Chapman: How did the app come about? Marcus Chown: My editor at Faber—a UK publisher with strong connection with FSG, incidentally—said: "Would you be interested in doing an iPad app based on one of your popular science books?" It was early 2010. The iPad had yet to be launched but there was "buzz" surrounding Apple's device. I had never had an illustrated version of one of my books such as Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You (The Quantum Zoo in the US) so was keen to do one. It therefore me took less than ten seconds to say to Henry, as coolly as I could: "Yes, I'm interested." A few weeks' later Henry phoned to say, by Googling, he had found a company called Touchpress, which had expertise in developing iPad apps. Touchpress was founded by Max Whitby, a former producer of Nova/Horizon; his friend from Oxford University days, Stephen Wolfram, multimillionaire creator of the computer language "Mathematica"; and American science writer Theo Gray. Gray had written the text for a stunningly beautiful, glossy book on the chemical elements called, unsurprisingly, The Elements.

Scandinavia House, The Nordic Center in America, 2013 Dear friends, I’d like to introduce a dear friend of mine, Sjón. I met him first when I was sixteen. With others he had started the first and only surrealist movement in Iceland, a group of six or so members called Medúsa. I was in a punk band at the time. Medúsa wrote poetry, did scandalous food performances around the city, ran a gallery (which was actually kind of a shed), had exhibitions of paintings, drawings, and sculpture, and played music. They were all around twenty years old, which, at that age, was a lot older than me. I guess I became sort of the only female unofficial member.

Authors in Conversation A heartfelt introduction by Björk is a hard act to follow. But when Sjón and Hari Kunzru took the stage at Scandinavia House, The Nordic Center in America, they pulled out all the stops: David Bowie, the Sex Pistols, and the relationship between punk rock and surrealism; the moment the great god Pan stepped into our world at the beginning of the 21st century (not to mention Poseidon); the enviable lives of the "hidden people" of Iceland, who look just like us except they only have one nostril; the joy of the trickster; the value in translation; and, most pressingly, the danger of the furry trout ("The furry trout looks exactly like a normal trout, but it’s got fur.") Which is a long way of saying, read on, we dare you. Hari: Sjón is a pen name. I read in various places that it means vision or sight. Is that a family name? Sjón: Sjón is the name that I took when I was fifteen. I published my first book the summer I turned sixteen. I had discovered Icelandic modernist poetry the winter before. Even though I had seen Modernist surrealist poetry in translation before, it was when I saw it written in Icelandic and written by Icelanders that I realized that you were actually allowed to do those amazing things with words, in Icelandic.