In Are Friends Electric?, 2019 Ockham NZ Book Award for Poetry winner Helen Heath explores the merger of human beings with technology, and asks questions about the potential of a digital afterlife to assuage human desires and griefs. She talks with Royal Society Science Book Prize and the Prime Minister’s Science Communication Prize winner Rebecca Priestley about her memoir of science on the icy continent, Fifteen Million Years in Antarctica. This deeply personal tour of the place Priestley had longed to visit since childhood also explores her anxieties, both for herself, and for the threatened place she loves.