When done well, science-related fiction can help to expose the public to the scientific process, humanize researchers and inspire readers to learn about topics they might otherwise ignore. Such nuanced depictions of science in fiction are relatively rare. LabLit.com has catalogued about 200 examples of novels, such as Barbara Kingsolver's Flight Behavior (HarperCollins, 2012) and Ian McEwan's Solar (Random House, 2010), that feature realistic scientists as characters. Stories about scientists are well outnumbered by those about, for example, doctors or artists. Even science fiction tends to lack portrayals of the actual scientific process, says Alastair Reynolds, a science-fiction author near Cardiff, UK, who left a career in astronomy to write full-time.
The shortage of works with accurate depictions of science means that researchers who write fiction have a good opportunity to be original — a task that would challenge an aspiring crime or romance writer. “It's sort of untrampled ground,” says Rohn. Many researchers are familiar with fieldwork sites and unusual settings that other writers might not have at their fingertips. In her novel The Falling Sky (Freight Books, 2013), Pippa Goldschmidt, an astronomer turned fiction writer in Edinburgh, UK, writes about a young astronomer who wanders into a telescope dome on a Chilean mountaintop and is nearly injured when the operator moves the instrument.
Sources of plot inspiration abound in science. Reynolds reads research news and papers voraciously for intriguing elements that can be parlayed into fiction. One time, he found a study about huge flocks of starlings in which the authors used high-tech equipment to track individual birds. He incorporated the idea into a science-fiction story, but made the fictional technology so advanced that it could track the birds' eye movements.
Scientists also can draw ideas from the past. Goldschmidt was inspired by an anecdote about physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer: during an unhappy period in the 1920s while studying abroad, Oppenheimer left a poisoned apple for his tutor. The details are sketchy, but Goldschmidt wanted to imagine what might have transpired. “No historical figure is ever completely understood,” she says. “There's always gaps in their lives, and fiction can inhabit those gaps.” The result was a short story entitled 'The Equation for an Apple', a fictionalized account of Oppenheimer's life leading up to the act.
For researchers who delve into fiction writing, the act of creating a world, characters and stories can be intensely rewarding. When the writing is flowing, says Rohn, “it's like being caught up in the best book you've ever read”.
