March Artist of the Month – Adam Connors

Our March ‘Artist of the Month’ is scientist and author Adam Connors.

About Adam Connors

Adam spent most of his PhD deep underground, building part of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, before he decided to try his hand at teaching physics in central Sudan.

After that, his career choices got better, and he’s now an AI Researcher at Google DeepMind based in London, where he weaves science into his books and storytelling into his science in equal measure.

His first book, The Girl Who Broke The Sea, was described by the Guardian as an “atmospheric, satisfying YA sci-fi thriller” and by the New Scientist as “ominous and evocative”. It was shortlisted for the Cheshire, Redbridge, and Oxford Libraries book awards and nominated for the Yoto Carnegie medal for writing.

His second book, Find Me After, was released in July 2024 and described as “haunting and brilliant” by Yoto Carnegie winning Tia Fisher; “gripping and imaginative” by Lauren James, author of The Loneliest Girl in the Universe and story consultant on Netflix’s HeartStopper; and as “an engaging tale that will keep readers wanting more” by the Scotsman.

Alongside writing, Adam has worked at Google since it first opened its London office in 2006. He’s built and led teams on many well-known Google products, including: Google Search, Photos, Docs, Maps, and Android. He moved to DeepMind Health in 2019 with the goal of using artificial intelligence to improve human health, and is now a researcher in Foundational Research, working as part of the “Path to Artificial General Intelligence” team.

He lives with his partner, two teenage boys and a dog.

What a visit from Adam entails

Adam’s talks reflect his background as an engineer, scientist, and technical communicator. They are participatory, light-hearted, rooted in STEM knowledge, and packed with technical facts that will inspire children and teenagers to learn more about neuroscience, the deep ocean, writing, and science in general.

When talking about Find Me After, Adam uses fun and surprising cognitive illusions to introduce students to mind-blowing new research into consciousness and our perception of reality. He also talks about the power of personal stories to inspire the writing process and how his own epilepsy shaped the world of the Stillness and the book’s main character.

When talking about The Girl Who Broke The Sea, he introduces students to life on the Abyssal Plains, vast undersea deserts that cover 50% of the Earth’s surface and are some of the most unexplored and untouched habitats on the planet.

Throughout, he draws parallels between science and story-telling, and story-telling and everything else. Stories are how people learn and understand, how we connect with each other.

Adam is comfortable talking to both small groups and assemblies (has previously given talks up to 230 students)

Talks can be adapted to between 45 mins and 1 hour including Q&A.

You can read more about Adam and his school visits he r e

Testimonials from previous visits.

"Just to say how much we enjoyed Adam Connors' visit yesterday. He was great to deal with throughout the process of arranging the talk, and all the students enjoyed it. There were loads of questions afterwards, which is always a good sign. The level of interactivity was perfect, and his illusions were mind-blowing! We hope to welcome him again in future."
Colfe’s School

Interview with Adam Connors

What inspired you to start writing?

Reading wasn’t much of a thing when I was growing up, but I remember going into the library when I was about twelve or thirteen, and picking up Robert Heinlein’s The Cat Who Walks Through Walls.

I lived in a drab mining town in the Midlands, the world was small and boring, and then I was reading a book about a crack squad of time-cops travelling back in time to save a decommissioned sentient computer! I’ve loved Sci-Fi ever since, I love all the possibilities, I love the way it makes me see and think about the world in new ways.

You work as a scientist, what are you involved with in your day job?

I work for Google DeepMind, Google’s AI research lab.

AI is really having its moment right now, it’s very exciting. I focus on how we interact with AI systems like ChatGPT: how do we tell it what we want, what internal understanding does it form based on our words? Chatting to AI feels very natural, but it’s actually kind of primitive. There’s a long way to go before we can control and understand AI systems like ChatGPT well enough to really get the most out of them.

How have you used your knowledge of STEM when creating your books?

My first book is set on board a deep-sea mining rig, so I did a lot of research into the deep-sea to make the technology feel plausible. The same is true for my second book, which is all about neuroscience and our perception of reality. Being grounded in real science helps me avoid clichés and makes the world more feel real — which I think makes the story more engaging.

More broadly, science isn’t about specific subjects, it’s a way of looking at the world. I describe it as skeptical optimism: scientists are always excited to learn something new, but they’re conditioned to be rigorous about what they think they know, to dig deeper, to ask the right questions. It’s a mindset that’s threaded through my books, and one that’s particularly important in current times.

STEM, quite rightly, is given a lot of recognition in schools and by the government. Why are creative subjects and the arts also important in their own right?

I think it’s a mistake (of the government) to think of them as different things. I make this point in my school visits: science starts with careful observation and measurement of the natural world, but drawing those observations together into something humans can reason and communicate about is an act of story-telling. Think of our biggest scientific ideas: evolution, quantum mechanics, relativity … They aren’t just columns of numbers, they’re stories grounded in observation.

To put it another way: stories are how humans reason and communicate. One doesn’t exist without the other, and it’s a great pity that students are often forced down one path or the other by an overly rigid system.

Do you enjoy making up (currently) impossible things in your stories or does the scientist within stop you exaggerating too much?

No, I love it. You have to be rigorous about those observations in science, even if they’re not what you want to see. Often, I get excited about a line of research, only to find that some of my assumptions were wrong and I have to rethink.

Fiction lets you play fast and loose with those observations, and that makes it a lot of fun. Fictional worlds need to be self-consistent, or the reader will lose faith in them, but outside of that you can do anything you like! That’s a really great release and a wonderful balance to my day job.

Do you believe science fiction in the media has sometimes predicted future scientific discoveries?

I’m with Arthur C. Clarke who said that trying to predict the future is a “discouraging and hazardous occupation.” If you predict something that sounds reasonable, science is probably already working on it, and a year or two from now it will seem uninteresting and conservative. If you predict something further out, the errors compound and it’s really just imaginative guesswork.

I do think Science Fiction can inspire science though. Lots of scientists like reading Science Fiction for the same reason I love writing it: it gives you the buzz of a good idea without the constraints of reality — and that lets you explore directions that you might otherwise have discarded too soon.

What can a school look forward to if they book you for a visit?

I talk about my own journey as both a scientist and a novelist, and encourage the students to think about what they’re most passionate about rather than being constrained to think in terms of school subjects.

Then I give them a taste of some of the science behind my books. I tell them about the Abyssal Plains, vast undersea flatlands that most people have never heard of but which cover about 50% of the planet’s surface and are some of the most unexplored and untouched habitats on the planet. Then I introduce them to recent developments in neuroscience, the idea that our conscious experience of reality is just a controlled hallucination generated by our brains.

Don’t worry, it’s not heavy: there’s discussion, videos, a little bit of rock music, and optical illusions… suitable for years 7, 8, and 9.

What are you hoping to achieve when you visit schools?

For the most part I hope to give the students a fun and engaging hour away from their desks. I also hope I can show them something they haven’t seen before, so that they come away wondering what other things are out there that they haven’t discovered yet.

What has been a memorable moment from a school or library visit?

The most memorable moment is now incorporated into my talk: I show the students a picture of a Fangtooth. It’s a terrifying looking fish made almost entirely of teeth, and I ask the students to guess its name. I used to do it just to make fun of how obvious the name is, and the students usually guess the sorts of things you’d expect: vampire fish, scary fish, big mouth fish… They quite often get it right.

Then one time, a girl put up her hand and said: “Is it called the blue-eyed fish?”

I realised that although I’d looked at that picture a hundred times, I’d only ever seen the teeth, never its beautiful blue eyes… and clearly, neither had the marine biologist who named it. So now the slide has taken on a new meaning, and I talk about how easy it is to jump to conclusions, how important it is to ask the non-obvious questions, and how much more interesting things become once you know a bit more about them.

Do you believe everyone has a story within them?

Yes, many stories. But a good portion of the population has no interest in writing them down, which is completely fine. I used to think that because I liked making up stories, everybody secretly wanted to do it as well, but I’ve come to realise that’s not true. It’s an important realisation because it behooves writers to not just get excited about the stories inside their own heads, but to listen to and understand what stories excite other people. I love it when I’m with friends, and one of them starts telling me about an idea for a story they’re excited about; even if it’s a long way from something I could imagine working in a book, there’s usually a nub of a really cool idea in there.

How do you encourage reluctant readers and writers to pick up a book or a pen?

My sons are reluctant readers so I have a lot of experience in this. I find that getting them started is the hardest part, once I can cajole, enable, and force them past a certain point, the story lights up inside their head and they can’t stop.

I’ve tried lots of things: I often read the first few pages or chapters to them to get them started, I lock down their phones, and we have a set window at bedtime where they know they’re not allowed to do anything other than read.

I really like serials, since once they get into a book they’ll often run through an entire series, which is great for keeping their momentum. Patrik Ness’ Knife of Never Letting Go, and Neal Shusterman’s Scythe are the two stand-out trilogies for me. My son also loves the Gone series, and Hunger Games.

What stories did you enjoy growing up?

I was always a Sci-Fi kid. Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Philip K. Dick…

I also really loved Stephen King, Terry Pratchett, and Douglas Adams, which are less Sci-Fi than the others, but have the same big ideas and imaginative worlds.

Which branch of science is currently piquing your interest the most?

So many things!

AI is having its moment, of course. Not just the ChatGPT chatbot experience most people have seen, but its application in everything from protein folding, DNA modelling, materials science, advanced mathematics… Pretty much every field of science is benefitting from the application of AI right now, and that’s going to lead to a whole raft of scientific milestones that were unimaginable a few years ago.

Beyond that: Net-positive fusion power is coming very soon, and from there it’s a short hop to industrially viable fusion power — clean, unlimited energy will change everything.

Then there’s quantum computing, which is getting close to practical applications.

The biggest mistake I made when I was younger was to think that nothing ever changes — it’s not true, just look at computers in the 1980s to see how quickly things change and how easily we fail to see those changes as they’re happening.

What made you choose YA as your audience for your books?

Mainly because my sons are in that age-group, and I see how vivid and ever-changing their worlds and understandings are — to write a book that lives even briefly in heads like that is a great privilege. Grown-ups are boring in comparison.

If you could discover or invent anything, what would it be?

Better healthcare, better medicine. I’d personally like to live longer because I’m greedy, but I know there are lots of pros and cons to humans sticking around for too long. Regardless, I’d like our ends to be cleaner, less painful, less uncertain, and fairer. Too many young people get sick and die, that’s rubbish and something we should just fix.

What is your next career goal?

I’ve changed around a lot in my career: physics, telecommunications, Google search, maps, healthcare, and now AI. Right now, I kind of want to stay in one place for a while and get to understand it more deeply. If I see out my career doing what I’m doing now I think I’ll be happy. But that might change.

Where is a memorable place your work has taken you to?

In 2015 there was a sharp rise in refugees heading north for Europe from Syria and other places. This caused a crisis, with many people stuck in refugee camps in Greece while European governments wringed their hands and (some) transit visas were arranged. I joined an NGO called NetHope which provided free WiFi to those refugee camps.

Against the background of this global human catastrophe, what struck me most were the moments of peculiar normalcy: I once watched a family row themselves to the shore at Leros having just made the perilous journey across the sea from Turkey. The father dragged the dinghy with his family onto the pebbled beach; they were jubilant, they’d survived a crossing that had killed many of their friends and extended family; and to celebrate, they took out their phones and started taking selfies of themselves and the boat that had delivered them.

What do you do to relax?

I watch bad Sci-Fi shows on television, and I build remote control airplanes and robots with my sons.

Quick Fire

Starter or dessert?

Dessert.

Would you rather be able to echo-locate like a bat or camouflage like a chameleon?

Camouflage like a chameleon — clearly that’s a writer’s super-power, great for eavesdropping and going places you’re not really supposed to be.

Would you rather be able to explore the deep ocean or deep space?

Deep space. Yes, I know I wrote a book about the deep-sea but I’m really, really scared of being underwater. I tried Scuba diving once and never, ever again.

Board games or computer games?

I played a lot of computer games when I was younger, and my kids play squads in a shooter game — I love listening to them devising plans for how to out flank a sniper.

But I can’t really get into computer games anymore, I think I’m too old and too slow. We play epic games of Risk and Catan as a family though, which are really, really cool and probably my favourite thing.

Comedy or action films?

Both. There’s nothing I like more than a good dramedy. You get the thrill of the action, and then a gentle quip to release the tension and remind you that the film isn’t taking itself too seriously. Stand-out scene: The opening scene of Age of Ultron, where they’re attacking Hydra’s base, and it’s all explosions and high-speed chases, and then Captain America tells Iron Man off for using bad language — cinematic genius!

If you were Prime Minister for the day, what law would you introduce?

National Duvet Day — everyone gets to spend the day in bed watching movies and reading books.