Not so long ago I found myself at a party in London standing next to a Very Famous Scientist. I’d love to name-drop, but I won’t.
Oh all right then, it was Steve Jones, population geneticist, broadcaster, columnist and peerless author of non-fiction books such as In The Blood and Almost Like A Whale. He’d just released The Single Helix, a collection of his journalism, and, having read it, I warned Professor Jones that I’d just written a rather rude review of it, which I’m pleased to say he took in his stride.
However, I did say that whereas I enjoyed his sage opinions on science, I enjoyed his discourses on scientists and their lives very much more. Somehow, his excursions into gossip about colleagues, the late-night toil over experiments, grant proposals and so on, seemed so much more fun than didactic exegeses on Facts We All Should Know. As Mozart said in the film of Peter Shaffer’s play Amadeus, social gossip is what people really want to hear about: if we are honest, who wouldn’t really rather chat with their hairdresser than Hercules?
So that’s when I suggested to Professor Jones that instead of ploughing the non-fiction furrow, he write a campus novel, because he could (I thought) run rings around Malcolm Bradbury or David Lodge (I carefully didn’t mention Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons, for fear of lowering the tone). ‘Funny you should say that’, quoth Jones, ‘my agent said the very same thing.’ Sadly, however, the sparkling, shrewdly observed fiction of Professor Steve Jones will go unread, because unwritten: he confessed to me that fiction just seemed too complicated. This surprised me, because, one would have thought, scything through complexity to discern hidden truths is what science – and fiction – is all about.
Just before you think I’m having a go at Jones tout seul_, I’m not. Not long afterwards I was at the kitchen sink, washing up, with the radio on, tuned to a science show. The interviewer was quizzing Roger Highfield, the distinguished science editor of the "_Daily Telegraph":http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ (a well-known London newspaper), and author of such contemporary masterworks as The Science of Harry Potter, on this very thing, and asked him the same question I had Jones. Highfield, too, audibly blanched at the thought of writing fiction, and his answer was a reasonable one. Although scientists like to voyage into the unknown, they will do it in such a way as to control as many free parameters as possible. And fiction introduces just too many imponderables at once – plot, character, dialogue, action, motivation, nuance, mood and so on.
Whereas I’d argue that many of these things can be found in the best non-fiction, I could see Highfield’s point. That didn’t stop me waving a suds-laden dishcloth at the radio and yelling, ‘Roger, why don’t you just have a go_?’ For at the time, I was in the middle of writing a novel (it’s called The Sigilsigil.html, and as I hope you’ll never tire of my telling you, available online for free), and having the most fun I’d ever had with my clothes on, a feeling only rivalled by rocking out on a smokin’ Hammond organ at a blues bar packed with roaring fans.
But I digress.
After getting on for twenty years as a writer of non-fiction, just like Highfield and Jones (though less exalted), I realized that I could hardly consider myself a writer if I forever closed myself from fiction, and never tried dialogue, action, interpersonal relationships and so on.
It is true that scientists rarely venture into mainstream fiction. The situation is happily quite different in science fiction, a genre unjustly marginalized by those literati who consider themselves the arbiters of the Things We Ought To Read, but which has, nonetheless, aspired to great literature, in places.
Of SF writers who started life as scientists, the names are legion. One thinks immediately of Michael Crichton who paid his way through medical school writing SF thrillers; of biochemist Isaac Asimov, and of physicist Arthur C. Clarke, who invented the communications satellite before enjoying a stellar career in fiction. Among more contemporary voices there is Gregory Benford, author and serving physics professor at UC Irvine, and Joan Slonczewski, author and working microbiologist at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio. Among the new wave of British SF hot shots, Paul McAuley started as a botanist before turning to authorship, and Alastair Reynolds, one of the hottest SF authors writing today, was an astronomer for many years. And these are just a few examples of many.
It is a shame that more of today’s prominent scientists and science writers – those who, like Jones and Highfield, have the public ear and who are actively involved in promoting the public understanding of science — don’t try their hand at fiction. There are, of course, some honorable exceptions: Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart, respectively a biologist and a mathematician, write non-fiction, fiction, and delectable combinations of both: and the late Carl Sagan, whose sole novel, Contact, is a gem (but avoid the film version, which is terrible).
Didacticism is all very well, but popular science tends to preach to the converted, to a subset of the population which the majority will class as geeks or nerds: the same majority that tends to view didacticism with suspicion. In the modern age of science-fuelled scare-stories about avian influenza, BSE, GM foods and so on, people today tend not to take the words of scientists on trust. People might achieve a better understanding of science if they realized that scientists are real human beings, facing the same problems — just like them. Science fiction is full of scientists as characters, who do all the usual things like fall in love, worry about their finances and (bank balance notwithstanding) go shopping. In other words, scientists living their lives.
To be sure, the roots of fiction and non-fiction are the same. As author Bruno Maddox pointed out to me (at a different party, at which I, like Jones or Highfield, felt the same incipient terror when confronted with the very idea of writing fiction), any kind of writing is motivated by an inspiration, the Big Idea.
But part of the art of writing fiction, as opposed to non-fiction, is to be unafraid of learning a new kind of discipline in which one can nevertheless let oneself loose as one sees one’s characters come alive on a page – surfing, as it were, a wave of criticality, forever in danger of falling off and yet marvelling as one nevertheless continues, page following page, to a breathless climax.
Drawing attention once more to my own novel (no brazen scam yet untried) it’s full of science, to be sure – but it’s really all about things that affect everyone: the nature of humanity, the meaning of love, and the importance of spirituality.
And the characters have sex a lot.
If that won’t prompt you to read it, nothing will – and why not? I have it on good authority that scientists do have sex from time to time. It’s nature’s way of getting scientists to produce more scientists. And if the efforts of those charged with persuading young people to choose careers as scientists by other means are anything to go by, it’ll need all the help it can get.
I edit a modest little website, LabLit.com (in the continued spirit of shameless plugging) that deals with, among other things, how scientists are portrayed in fiction and in pop culture, with a strong focus towards exploring and promoting the lab lit genre – literary fiction about scientists plying their trade in the real world (as opposed to science fiction). Inadvertently in the process, I’ve become the unofficial underground ‘lab lit’ guru, and my editorial inbox is flooded with manuscripts and pleas from desperate scientists from all over the world, trying to work out how to convince science-averse agents and editors to take a chance on their scientifically-themed novels. A lot of these manuscripts are very good indeed, better than stuff you see on sale, yet most of these authors end up resorting to print-on-demand vanity publishing after years of unsuccessful attempts to secure book deals. So it’s all very well to encourage scientists to write novels
– and I applaud this effort, Henry -but we also need to try to break the current stranglehold that the literary establishment has on the gateway to publication. Most agents and editors (people like Sara Abdulla and Peter Tallack excluded, naturally!) are arts/humanities graduates and as such, may dislike science and have purposefully avoided it their entire life. Yet these are the folks who decide what we get to read. Perhaps the web and POD are the answer, but will these books get as much attention as traditionally published and marketed novels? I’m not so sure.As no self-respecting comment to one of Henry’s posts would have fewer than two shameless plugs, if you’re interested in novels with scientists in them, please check out the list of lab lit fiction that we’re curating over on LabLit – and do let me know if your favorite is missing!
Thanks Jennifer — I am aware of LabLit (though I should look at it more often). I think there are two problems here. First, it is extremely difficult for anyone, irrespective of background, to get a first novel published, no matter how good it is. And it’s getting harder. Possibly even harder than for a rich camel to get to Heaven through the eye of a needle, or even — gasp — harder than getting a paper published in Nature.
Second, even if you have a reputation as a science writer, I learn (from one SF agent in particular) that authors of non-fiction rarely make the transition to fiction successfully.
The reasons for this are various — it could be that non-fiction writers find it hard to write fiction well. I suspect that that’s part of the trouble, though, as you say, there are lots of scientists who write good fiction that remains unpublished.
The second is that agents and publishers find it hard to ‘place’ a work in one genre from an author who is established in another.
However, when all is said and done, scientists find a more receptive outlet in SF than mainstream fiction. This could be because mainstream publishers know or care little about science, as you say.
… oh, and I almost forgot, Jennifer. Do read my novel. Word on the street says that publication on the internet, if it generates a lot of hits, is the kind of ‘word of mouth’ to which publishers listen. So I’d encourage people to post their stuff online and tell everyone about it. Did I mention my novel.?
Henry, I’ve put your novel on my list of things to read! Looking forward to digging in.
Anyone interested in supporting this sort of grass-roots endeavor should also check out Nick Evans’ free physics novel here. He’s a theoretical physicist at the University of Southampton and the book is called ‘The Newtonian Legacy’.
My suspicion, from my own experience, is that the brain function required to write fiction is almost wholly unrelated to that needed to write non-fiction. So the chances that someone good at non-fiction would happen to have what it takes to be a good novelist is probably no more than random for any given individual.
Jenny — you have proposed a testable hypothesis!If the brain function related to writing fiction is unrelated to that of writing nonfiction, then a fiction writer should be able to be as good a non-fiction writer in one out of four cases, or vice-versa…
Ah, but then we run afoul of the readout in this experiment. Who’s to judge what’s good and what’s rubbish? Billions of people thought The Da Vinci Code was a well-written novel…
There is an arbitrary test one can apply. If the author’s imagination was sufficiently rich that the act of writing the novel created an entangled-pair consciousness wavefront in the fabric of space-time, then it’s a good novel. If it didn’t, then it isn’t (see Simmons, Dan, ‘Madame Bovary _C’Est Moi_’, Nature 407, 137, 2000). Judging the quality of nonfiction might be harder. Just whether it makes sense, I suppose.