Book acceptance
2026-09-09
From Science Festivals to a Book Contract
Last week I got the news I’d been chasing, quietly, for over a decade: a publisher has accepted my book on neurotechnology and brain-computer interfaces for the general public. I can’t say yet which publisher, since the contract isn’t signed, but I can tell the story of how it happened, because it’s been a long and, in hindsight, quite beautiful road.
It goes back more than ten years, to a conversation with the then-managing director of the Italian edition of a well-known science magazine, Claudia Di Giorgio, about a short piece on microchips in the brain. That piece never quite found its home there and it was published on the October issue of Mente e Cervello. It led, through a chain of contacts initiated by Claudia, to an invitation to speak at Festa di Scienza e Filosofia in Foligno, a science and philosophy festival now in its fifteenth edition, built by a genuinely visionary organizer, Pierluigi Mingarelli. Beyond the festival itself, he also created a hands-on experimental lab where school pupils and teachers from all over Italy come to work with microscopes, electronics, and real scientific tools, often for the first time. It’s a suprisingly advanced real answer to the fact that not every school in Italy has a properly equipped labs.
I went back to Foligno many times over the following years, talking about neuroprosthetics and the interfacing of brain tissue with artificial devices. I did the same in schools in Trieste, Milan, and Modena, and, while I was at SISSA in Trieste, through an outreach program bringing students into the institute’s neuroscience, math, and physics labs.
Every time, I was struck by the same thing: most people had no idea that there are already paralyzed patients with chips implanted in their brains, reading their intended movements well enough to move a cursor or a robotic arm. That reaction, again and again, over years, planted the seed for the book.
Why now?
The real trigger came more recently, with Elon Musk’s bold public claims around Neuralink: that neuroscience was essentially solved, that it was now just an engineering problem, and that major neurological disorders were on the verge of being cured. Many people in the field, some far more prominent than me, including Miguel Nicolelis, pushed back hard on those claims at the time. I felt, in my own small way, a responsibility to do the same, using everything I’d learned from years of talking to non-specialists: how to explain something as technical as a motor program or spike sorting without dumbing it down into nonsense.
The book is aimed at the general public, but a fairly specific slice of it: high schoolers deciding what to study next, university students, curious and cultivated readers. Not, as I told a friend jokingly, a book you’d pick up at a highway service station next to the crime paperbacks.
Getting here wasn’t smooth. I pitched several publishers and most simply never replied, understandably, since I had no track record as a popular science author, whatever my academic credentials. One publisher did get back to me, and invited me to an informal call I was honestly not fully prepared for.
That publisher has a long, reputable history in science publishing, including, years ago, the Italian edition of a classic science communication book by a Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist, David Hubel, on the eye and the brain. I read that book as a young engineering student, and it stayed with me. On the call, when I described who I imagined reading my book, they told me that was exactly their audience. It felt like a genuinely serendipitous match: a book that’s technical in spirit but not academic, not competing with the very polished science communicators who dominate social media today.
The summer draft
After that call, I spent the summer turning a partial draft into something real, over several weekends spent in a house near the sea on the Ligurian coast, with my dog for company, too hot outside to want to do anything but write. I shared the draft with friends and colleagues for feedback, the same instinct you develop in academia of always testing ideas against people you trust.
One piece of feedback mattered more than I expected. Out of about sixty first-year students in my course here in Modena, I informally asked if anyone would be willing to read a draft, no obligation at all. Exactly one student did. It turned out this student had studied science communication at SISSA, and gave me feedback that was both technically sharp and genuinely encouraging. Talking with this student afterward, I realized I’d stumbled onto someone truly exceptional, and that feedback meant a great deal to my motivation going into the final stretch.
That also reminded me of something else worth saying: over the years I was occasionally invited to speak to students in SISSA’s own master’s program in science communication, in Trieste, not to teach them the craft, since I have no formal training in it myself, but to share what I’d learned from the field. If anything, I’m something of an impostor when it comes to science communication. Whatever skill I have came entirely from practice: from festivals, from schools, from elderly visitors in Foligno asking me, half-seriously, whether Bill Gates could truly read their thoughts with nanoparticles in vaccines, near the 5G antennas. All of that taught me, slowly, that attention spans are short, technical patience is limited, and not everyone needs to share my enthusiasm for the material to deserve a clear explanation of it.
Where things stand
A few weeks ago, that summer draft became an actual, close-to-final manuscript, and last week the publisher confirmed they want to publish it. The only catch is timing: their production schedule for this year is already full, so it will likely be next year before it’s out. That’s a small price for the kind of news I’d been hoping for since a conversation ten years ago about a magazine piece that never ran.