“There is undoubtedly a trend in which novelists are writing more about scientists and science,” says Lisa Jardine, who is chair of the judges for the Booker Prize for Fiction this year. “A S Byatt’s new novel A Whispering Woman is a good example,” says Jardine, “and The Deadly Space Between by Patricia Duncker has a wonderful hero/villain who is a scientist working in an unspecified lab at University College.” Both books represent important attempts at new ways of involving science in English-language fiction, says Jardine, but she adds that “there are some truly wondrous bad examples of scientists, or so-called scientists, in some recent novels”.
What are the reasons for this trend towards using science in fiction? “I think scientists occupy the place in our society once occupied by intellectual clergymen and armchair philosophers,” says Jardine, who is also professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary, University of London. “They offer the ‘meaning-of-life’ strand of thought in contemporary fiction.”
John Carey, principal book reviewer for the Sunday Times, agrees that there is a trend. “It is partly the result of the success of popular-science writing,” says Carey, who is also professor of English literature . “Novelists detect a public interest. It also reflects an awareness that science is now the dominant realm of knowledge, so novelists do not want to be, or seem to be, shut out of it.”
In the November issue of Physics World, Peter Rodgers discusses the interactions between science and literature