Volume 64, Issue 2 - Special Issue: Aspects of the Science Novel / Issue Editor: Norbert Schaffeld

Science and its predecessor, alchemy, have been topics of fiction in the West for over five centuries but until late last century novelists, with few exceptions, condemned science and scientists on social and moral grounds. However, since the 1990s, science has acquired a more benign and humane image, associated with combatting deadly viruses, saving endangered species and communicating the urgency of dealing with climate change. Novelists, too, are increasingly intent on authenticity in presenting scientific research and the motives and moral dilemmas of scientists. Such science novels risk being overloaded with scientific facts and explanations, so the craft of the writer involves integrating the necessary scientific information without damaging the artistic integrity of the work. This paper explores, through interviews with authors and in-depth reading of texts, how the following writers accommodated the science component within the life-world of their narrative and took steps to avoid an ‘information dump’: Rebecca Goldstein ( The Mind-Body Problem and Properties of Light ), William Boyd ( Brazzaville Beach ), Simon Mawer ( Mendel’s Dwarf ), Susan Gaines ( Carbon Dreams ), Clare Dudman ( Wegener’s Jigsaw ), Richard Powers ( The Echo Maker ), Barbara Kingsolver ( Flight Behavior ), and Pippa Goldschmidt ( The Falling Sky ).

Our contribution examines the construction and the functions of complex and multi-dimensional scientist characters in contemporary fiction. Our analysis of three very different novels from different branches of Anglophone literature – Ian McEwan’s Solar , Allegra Goodman’s Intuition , and Jaspreet Singh’s Helium – seeks to demonstrate that this phenomenon may be recent but is widespread in contemporary fiction. It can take a variety of forms and can be linked to a range of different types of science and scientific problems, i.e. physics and climate change, cancer research and scientific competition, and rheology/chemistry and the strain of globalising forces symbolised by the Bhopal disaster. In each case, we address the different functions to which the complexities associated with these scientist characters are put in the texts as a whole. Ultimately, in these novels, character functions to provide an opportunity for a mise en discours of a wide range of aspects and factors that are central to the practise of science, as well as for opening up multiple new perspectives on the tensions between science and society.

This paper offers an analysis of three historical science novels, John Banville’s Kepler (1981), Tracy Chevalier’s Remarkable Creatures (2009), and Clare Dudman’s Wegener’s Jigsaw (2003), to address a number of interrelated questions that cover, for example, specific features of the genre, the narrative mode employed as well as its epistemic advantage, and the fictional integration of an emergent scientific discourse. While Banville’s Kepler establishes a close affinity between the mathematical, the aesthetic and the narrative form, Chevalier’s neo-Romantic novel Remarkable Creatures makes full use of alternating first-person narratives to highlight the exceptional friendship of the historical fossil hunters Mary Anning and Elizabeth Philpot at a time when palaeontology was about to become a scientific discipline. The third novel, Clare Dudman’s imagined autofiction Wegener’s Jigsaw , uses an autodiegetic narrator and a device that I refer to as ‘mentor-mentee constellation’ to facilitate a narrative transmission which guarantees that Alfred Wegener and his continental drift theory will find favour with the readership when he falls victim to oppressive scientific discourse.

This paper introduces the concept of scientific metafiction, developing it in relation to historiographic metafiction, which questions the truth of historical knowledge and highlights similarities with fiction. Scientific metafiction accordingly is marked by a refusal of the view that only science has a truth claim and by comparing science and fiction as discourses. Thomas Pynchon’s novels are exemplary historiographic metafictions, and I argue that the growing importance of science and scientific metafiction is crucial to the development of the ontological dominant that, according to Brian McHale, characterises postmodernist fiction. Focusing on three novels from the 1970s to the twenty-first century, I demonstrate that the concept of scientific metafiction and its negotiation of concerns also discussed in science studies are central to Pynchon’s work and crucial to its move beyond the epistemological questioning of historiographic metafiction and towards raising ontological concerns.

Anthropogenic climate change constitutes one of the major global risks of our time. In spite of widespread scientific consensus, however, climate change discourse is still characterized by controversy. This controversy reflects both a variety of conflicting interests that frame the perception of climate change and a fundamental trend in our age of reflexive modernity: an increased awareness of scientific uncertainty and a loss of trust in scientific authority. It also defines our current cultural moment as paradoxical: societies worldwide are simultaneously characterized by such increased awareness of scientific uncertainty and by reliance on scientific knowledge to a historically unprecedented degree. According to Ulrich Beck, this paradox in part defines what he conceived of as a new manifestation of modern society, the ‘world risk society.’ This essay addresses the fictional contribution to the risk discourse of global climate change. After introducing the role of science in the world risk society and the climate change novel as a fictional risk narrative, it discusses how Susan M. Gaines’ Carbon Dreams (2001) and Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior (2012) engage with this paradox, how they explore the complex socioeconomic, political, and cultural significance of climate science and the role and experience of climate scientists.