There are other ways to combine fiction and science than what we commonly call science fiction. I just finished Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus. It’s a great novel about science and scientists, but most people wouldn’t call it science fiction. However, it’s a shame that more science fiction fans don’t read this kind of science fiction. I was late discovering this novel. Whenever I told one of my reading friends, that I was reading Lessons in Chemistry, all the women said they’d already read it. I didn’t discover it until it showed up as a series on Apple TV+. It’s a very popular novel, and quite a page turner.

Lessons in Chemistry is set in the 1950s and early 1960s and is about Elizabeth Zott’s quest to become a chemist. She’s a brilliant young woman, but in the 1950s men don’t want women in science labs. Elizabeth Zott is emotionally like Sheldon Cooper and can’t understand why everyone isn’t logical like herself. She forges ahead but often gets knocked down, however, she never gives up, taking an alternative path to her goal. Lessons in Chemistry would be completely hilarious if it weren’t for all the tragedies. Lessons in Chemistry is something Flannery O’Conner and Kurt Vonnegut could have written if they could have read Betty Freidan’s The Feminine Mystique ten years before it was published.

Elizabeth Zott reminds me of Alma Whittaker in The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert. Alma is a 19th century woman who wants to be a scientist and Gilbert gives her a fictional life that parallels Charles Darwin’s discoveries. The Signature of All Things is a gorgeous novel about the love of science too.

While thinking about novels about scientists I also recall two novels by Richard Powers. Bewilderment is about astrobiologist Theo Byrne and his hard to manage nine-year-old son Robin, who is diagnosed with the then called Asperger syndrome. And The Overstory, which follows several characters, including scientists who love trees. And now that I think about it, Powers wrote one of my very favorite books about artificial intelligence, Galatea 2.2.

I mention all these books on a blog about science fiction because these novels are better written than 99% of the traditional science fiction I’ve read. Science fiction as we know it, is usually about the future. These novels are about the present or the past. Now sometimes science fiction is about the present or past, but their stories aren’t handled in the same way. I doubt many people will call the four novels pictured above science fiction.

When I was a kid I rationalized my love of science fiction by claiming reading SF gave me a love of science even though older folks were telling me that science fiction was no better than comic books. I remember reading memoirs by science fiction writers back in the 1960s where those writers made the same claims to their parents in the 1930s. I’ve also read many claims by scientists who said reading science fiction got them to become scientists. But let’s be honest, science fiction seldom deals with science or real scientists. Even these literary works that combine fiction and science have very little science in them. But they do offer more science than traditional science fiction. And I think more inspiration.

Science fiction has never been realistic about science. Science fiction has mostly been the far out stuff that science hinted at and us gullible readers hoped would come true. I think the difference between these two types of science fiction novels is traditional science fiction caters to our desire to escape reality and literary science fiction is about the reality where we have to stay and live.

I am reminded by a famous talk given by C. P. Snow called “The Two Cultures.” Snow claims there is an intellectual divide between those who understand science and intellectuals from the humanities. Growing up, I thought science fiction bridged those two cultures, but I no longer believe that. We live in an Age of Unreason. I think the four books pictured above do try to cross the divide of Snow’s two cultures. That’s why they are worth reading. I think most of traditional science fiction only contributes to our Age of Unreason.

That doesn’t mean I’m giving up on reading old fashion science fiction. Even though I know better, I can’t give up on those old dreams and desires. My reality is I wanted to be a scientist but could only become a science fiction fan.

James Wallace Harris, 11/2/23