I’d been mulling over the concept of ‘lab lit’ fiction since I coined the term as a thought experiment back in 2001: fiction about science as a profession, featuring scientists who ply their trade as part of a realistic plot. (You can read more about that journey in a piece I wrote for Nature.) The genre remains vanishingly rare, which has always struck me as odd given how central science is to our daily lives, and given how many millions of people practice it worldwide.

But of course there are obstacles to lab lit that could explain its rareness: the general lack of understanding of what it is we actually do as scientists; the potential complexity of the contextual subject matter; and of course, the fear and distaste many people feel about science – which would include authors and potential readers as well as the literary agents, editors and marketeers who gatekeep what gets published.

So I launched the website in 2005 to try to illuminate both the real-life world of scientists and the fiction that attempts to illustrate it – both existing works, alongside new fiction submitted to the site. As part of this, our Lab Lit List was, and remains, a living, curated database of all such books ever published – alongside other forms of fiction such as plays, television and movies. (The latter categories we freely admit are full of holes, as it’s not our main focus. If you see any missing, do let us know!) It’s been updated today with 30 new works, and by popular demand, alphabetized by author surname – do check it out.

None of this would have been possible without the hard work of our deputy editor, Richard, who keeps the site running smoothly, aids in editing, and also contributes content to the site. Also key are those who have stood by the website for many years – of this wonderful group of people, the Labliterati, more here.

When we launched, the List contained only about a hundred novels; with our latest update published today, that number stands at a whopping 495. This increase is due to two main factors. First, it’s thanks to the kind assistance I’ve had from many readers who have nominated their favorite older works, alongside the tireless sleuthing of our chief “Lab Lit Sniffer”, Dom (read his personal musings on this unusual role here). Dom spends most of his free time scouring published book reviews and nosing around bookshops looking for lab lit novels. In fact, at a recent Fiction Lab pub session, Dom attempted to buy a round of drinks, only to discover that he’d spent all his beer money on books.

But the second reason for the increase is far more exciting. And that is that the number of lab lit novels being written is definitely on the rise. Back in 2010, I published a piece in Nature with a graph suggesting an uptick in the late 1980s – see the image above. But as the numbers might have been plateauing as of 2010, it was really difficult to predict if this trend would continue.

So for this anniversary issue, we decided to revisit the experiment (thanks again to Dom for his hard work compiling the data from 2010 to 2022). As you can see from the above updated graph, the year-on-year increase in lab lit novels is absolutely real. (A big shout out to 2016, which saw the release of a whopping 28 books!) From a norm of no annual publications to perhaps one to two, we have been averaging a steady 16 for the past decade. And the trend very much looks like we can expect a continuing rise in the future.

Much has changed since 2005. The site itself was revamped in 2019, migrating to a fresh new look that worked better on portable devices, and leaving behind the original site as an unconnected archive. (If you want to search pre-2019 content, click on the archive button and you will be taken to the last issue of the old site, where the normal search bar can be used. Searches on the new site will only recover pieces from the post-migration period.) Long-time readers will have noticed that our updates and articles have become far less frequent than in the old days – a reflection of the fact that, in returning to academic research and eventually becoming a professor, my time is increasingly commandeered by teaching, writing papers and grants, travelling to give talks, and just generally trying to survive in the cutthroat profession that lab lit novels seek to convey.

Despite this, I remain fiercely proud of the website, and hope that you all will stay with us for many more years to come. If you’d like to contribute a piece for get involved in any other way, just drop us a note on editorial@lablit.com.

Of course I said yes. Our first meeting took place in June 2008, where a small group of about a dozen people discussed Philip Ball’s The Sun and Moon Corrupted. The author kindly came along too, which was a bonus. 

In the intervening 17 years, we have met every month nearly without fail, discussing the good, the bad and the ugly. (As most book group attendees will know, the bad books are always more fun to discuss than the good ones, though we are always surprised by how polarized the views are: the book might score a full ten points from one member, and negative numbers from another. Once a book was even tossed across the room in exasperation.)

After our Ri session, we’d decamp to the nearby King’s Head for more chat, drinks and signature cheesy chips. For Fiction Lab’s tenth anniversary in 2010, the Ri kindly hosted a gala event in their storied Library, the very same room where we’d met for the first time. But in reality, we met all over the building over those years, wherever there was a room free – a few times even in the basement, or in the famous prop room where all the stuff from the Christmas Lectures is stored. We often had authors come along to chat – never to sit in on the regular group, as we didn’t want to dampen anyone’s true opinions, but they’d come in afterwards for a (polite!) Q&A session. These exchanges were always fascinating, no matter how people had felt about the actual book.

We kept meeting even when the Pandemic drove us online in 2019. Once the lockdowns were over, we resumed as a hybrid group, having realised the benefits of allowing far-flung members to join in. But unexpectedly, the Royal Institution turfed us out in September 2023, having decided that they could no longer afford setting aside periodic space for us when there were clients who could pay. So even though we’d offered an enthusiastic but unremunerated public engagement event for so many years, promoting the Ri’s cause, our time there was sadly at an end. Homeless but undaunted, we kept the name, went back online and have been there ever since – which still works, although we all miss the cheesy chips. 

One of the most remarkable things about the group is how many longstanding members we still have: those who first came in June 2008, alongside regulars who started later, but still have been coming for many years. While others have come and gone, this steadfast bunch – who I call the LabLiterati – have remained loyal. They came from all walks of life and were all attracted to the group for different reasons. Some are scientists, others are decidedly not. Some are members of “normal” book groups too, in parallel, and others who have left London have seeded their own lab lit book groups in their new locations, but still meet up online each month with us.  They – we – have become friends who socialize outside of literary meet-ups, and who keep up a robust literary chatter on the dedicated WhatsApp. 

This dedicated group of people has become the world’s experts on lab lit novels – the constraints, the challenges, the triumphs and failures of authors trying to get across a world that is sometimes difficult to pin down and whose fundamental concepts can be prohibitively abstract. Did the scientist character come across as realistic, or were they freighted with disappointing stereotypes and cliché? Did the writer manage to avoid falling into the trap of using of informative dialogue and infodumps to explain the science to an unsuspecting non-scientist character? Was the science woven in seamlessly in a way that was clear but not annoying to those who might know the subject?

The LabLiterati, especially Dom, have also been instrumental in helping to keep the Lab Lit List stocked up with the latest books, and many have contributed to the website over the years, including original stories. I can’t imagine LabLit.com having lasted as long as it did without the support and friendship of this remarkable group of people.

Below, in celebration of our 20^th anniversary, I’m highlighting some of the LabLiterati , and their literary picks, in their own words. If you’d like to join the group, please email us at editorial@lablit.com!

Name: Simon
Year joined: 2014 
Favorite lab lit novel:
The only book I’ve so far given 10/10 was The Red Arrow by William Brewer – a mind-bending journey through one man’s struggle with, and recovery from, depression, incorporating interpretations of quantum mechanics and space-time with humour, playful writing, and great insight into the human condition. I loved it!
A good lab lit novel must be (three words): 
Engaging, Accurate, Innovative
What do you value about the group?
I’ve made great friends, and have read lots of interesting books that I wouldn’t have otherwise read. Even the bad books are fun to talk about!

***

Name: Simon (no relation to the first Simon!)
Year joined: 2024
Favorite lab lit novel:
Orbital by Samantha Harvey. I really liked the flow of the book. It conveyed complexity with clarity and simple language in a quite special way.
A good lab lit novel must be (three words): 
Distinctive, Relatable, Enriching
What do you value about the group?
It is enough of an addition to my general life that my colleagues at work will ask what I am reading for book club this month, knowing that it will prompt at the very least an entertainingly acerbic response but often an introduction to something that they might wish to read. In general, it has connected me with interesting and informed people through the excellent conversions and has directed me towards books that I might never have picked up.

***

Name: Catherine 
Year joined: Founding member: I was at the first meeting in 2008!
Favorite lab lit novel:
The Housekeeper and The Professor by Yoko Ogawa. We read this ages ago but it’s the one novel out of all the many we’ve read which sticks in my mind for good reasons. On checking it out now on Amazon I see that Publishers Weekly called it ‘a poignant tale of beauty, heart and sorrow’ – which I’d go along with. 
A good lab lit novel must be (three words):
Accurate, Sympathetic, Illuminating
What do you value about the group? It’s a place where curiosity and dissent are valued and celebrated, within a supportive and respectful group of amazing individuals. 

***

Name: Mariana
Year joined: 2022
Favorite lab lit novel:
The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion. Light, funny, with an original plot and a bit of science. But I haven’t read many lab lit books yet and still hoping to find more good ones.
A good lab lit novel must be (three words):
I couldn’t narrow it down so here are two answers:
(1) Good fictional plot. (2) No real scientists! (Editor’s note: there is a hardcore faction of the group who really hate when novelists attempt to write about real historical figures and put words in their mouths…which is very common in the genre.)
What do you value about the group?
A great opportunity to meet new friends with similar interests, read books that I might not read otherwise, have nice discussions, and learn new science stuff from other areas.

***

Name: Philip
Year joined: Day one! (2008)
Favorite lab lit novel:
Cannery Row by John Steinbeck: Beautifully drawn, engaging characters run riot through an intriguing, unpredictable plot in which the crucial marine science thread is seamlessly woven into the story rather than shoehorned in as an awkward add on. You are inextricably pulled into this book – wanting to know what comes next but also hoping it never ends.
A good lab lit novel must be (three words):
Plot, Characterisation, Creativity
What do you value about the group?
This book club has been a marvellous opportunity to make great friends – we are a close-knit group, even enjoying off-piste adventures such as visiting behind the scenes at Charles Darwin’s Down House. The book club is a relaxed, free and open space where everyone is encouraged to give their opinions on the books we read. We have the added bonus that some of the members are senior medical researchers or science communicators, so they can often offer a unique perspective on the content of the lab lit books. Plus having the authors occasionally visit the club is an invaluable and illuminating experience. Many of the authors have said that they enjoy the probing and expert questioning about their work.

***

Name: Tricia
Year joined: 2015
Favorite lab lit novel:
Cannery Row by John Steinbeck. So much warmth in describing such a variety of people. So quirky. So well written. I also really enjoyed The Bloodless Boy by Robert J. Lloyd, as it ticks boxes for sorts of fiction I enjoy: historical, and murder mystery.
A good lab lit novel must be (three words):
Plot, Characters, Facts
What do you value about the group?
Intelligent discussion about books I would probably never have otherwise read. Fiction Lab has become a group of very good friends, who may have different opinions about the books we read but otherwise find a lot to agree about – like good food and drink and interesting places to visit.

***

Name: Dom
Year joined: 2015
Favorite lab lit novel:
Very hard to say that one book stands out as I do not remember much fiction for long, except in very broad terms. Possibly C.P. Snow’s The Affair, or Wang Xiaobo’s Golden Age, but don’t ask me why now! There are comparatively few that are based in actual laboratories, but one I recall liking in that setting was Austin Duffy’s This Living and Immortal Thing. I love stories set in very cold places like Antarctica (a subgenre I like to refer to as ‘Ice lab lit’ – there are surprisingly a lot of these on the List…alongside ‘Wolf lab lit’). I also like literary lab lit; often books no one else likes; and novels where the author has not felt a need to tie up loose ends in a neat package – knowing what not to say is as important as what one does say.
A good lab lit novel must be (three words):
Story, Science, Snow
What do you value about the group?
I miss when we met in person and drank beer. I value the frank exchange of views (and I like to argue!). I am interested in what other people find curious in what we read, but some people are never satisfied….

***

Name: Becky
Year joined: 2012
Favorite lab lit novel:
Flight Behaviour by Barbara Kingsolver. It’s engaging, accurate, and gives pertinent insights related to both nature conservation and social inequalities.
What do you value about the group?
Friendship. This is particularly relevant as we mark five years since the first Covid-19 lockdown – at a difficult time, Fiction Lab friends kept me feeling connected.

***

Name: Richard (no relation to our Deputy Editor!)
Year joined: 2008
Favorite lab lit novel:
Litmus, a collection of short stories rooted in science by well-known authors. The quality is quite varied but the best are truly excellent. In fact, reading Litmus inspired the group to embark on our own science-in-fiction short story project (published on Lablit.com under the series title The League of Imaginary Cats), and several of us, to continue writing.
A good lab lit novel must be (three words):
Beware the infodump!
What do you value about the group?
Discovering novels and short stories I’d otherwise never have come across, and becoming friends with a fantastic and diverse group of interesting people. Despite not attending regularly since the Pandemic, I still feel a part of the group and maintain the friendships made there.

***

Name: Joe
Year joined: 2018-ish
Favorite lab lit novel:
Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis. As a work of literature it’s merely good, but as lab lit it’s superlative. A novel that truly captures the highs and the many, many frustrations of a life in research. I felt a strong sense of recognition on every page, which isn’t bad for a hundred-year-old novel.
A good lab lit novel must be (three words):
Enlightening, engaging, thought-provoking
What do you value about the group?
Lovely people; interesting, intelligent discussions; a reason to read things I might otherwise have missed; the (rare) thrill of discovering an overlooked masterpiece; and the chance to let off steam about the many that aren’t.

We are pleased to present the latest update of the Lab Lit List, our iconic database of fiction about scientists. This time around we have 26 regular novels, three plays and three novels in the ‘crossover’ category (i.e., hard science fiction with particularly good renderings of scientists) to add. As always, thanks to Dom for helping to find most of these – you can read more about his process in this companion article.

By popular demand we have also – finally – re-ordered the main list of novels alphabetically by surname. Sorry that it has taken so long.

This update coincides with our 20th anniversary edition. Elsewhere in these pages you can find our updated graph of lab lit, which charts the seemingly unstoppable rise of the genre from a trickle to a modest…flood is too strong a word, but over the past decade it’s averaged 16 books per year, whereas before the 1980s, it was one or two per year, and usually nothing at all. So this is another milestone to celebrate!

Something missing? If you know about a book that you think should be on the master list, please do let us know at editoral@lablit.com.

In the meantime, happy reading! All the new works are listed below.

NOVELS

The Only Woman in the Room

by Marie Benedict
Historical Drama: A fictionalized account of Hedy Lamarr, an actress who was also a scientist.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Her Hidden Genius

by Marie Benedict
Historical Drama: A fictionalized account of scientist Rosalind Franklin, in which she is obscured by her male colleagues and rivals.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Magnus

by Mark Carew
Thriller: Students and a professor clash while doing fieldwork on a small Norwegian island.
Links: Amazon (UK)

You Can’t Hurt Me

by Emma Cook
Thriller: Anna is working on the biography of charismatic neuroscientist Nate, but ends up uncovering his toxic secrets.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Small Museum

by Jody Cooksley
Thriller: Newly married to a naturalist in the Victorian era, Madelaine is framed for a crime she did not commit.
Links: Amazon (UK)

A Guide to the Birds of East Africa

by Nicholas Drayson
Comedy/Lab lit lite: Two rivals for the affection of the East African Ornithological Society’s bird-walk leader agree on a competitive bird-watching contest.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Bonding

by Mariel Franklin
Thriller: Mary meets a brilliant young chemist working on an experimental drug claiming to cure the anxieties of modern life, but she soon discovers there are side-effects.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Speak

by Louisa Hall
Historical drama: An exploration of the creation of Artificial Intelligence, though five disparate characters over many years, including Alan Turing.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Not in Love

by Ali Hazelwood
Romance: A biotech engineer at a food science start-up falls for the man who is leading a hostile take-over of the business.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Great Divide

by Christina Henriquez
Historical drama: An exploration of the construction of the Panama canal through the lives several people, including a scientist dedicated to eliminating malaria.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Alternatives

by Caolinn Hughes
Drama: When a geologist disappears, her sisters track her down to a remote bungalow in rural Ireland, where they confront old wounds and diagnose new ills.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Stars Turned Inside Out

by Nova Jacobs
Thriller/Lab lit lite: When a young physicist is discovered dead at CERN, an investigator uncovers petty rivalries and wonders what physics secrets are worth killing for.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Health of Strangers (2017)

by Lesley Kelly
Thriller/lab lit lite: After a plague, a small Health Enforcement Team in Edinburgh has to keep the lid on a new influenza virus and track down some missing girls. (First of a series).
Links: Amazon (UK)

Daniel

by Henning Mankell
Historical Lab lit lite: In 1875, a young Swedish entomologist in the Kalahari ‘rescues’ a boy whose family was killed, but when he takes him back to Sweden, the boy faces all the prejudices of the age. Translated from Swedish.
Links: Amazon (UK)

A Sign of Her Own

by Sarah Marsh
Historical drama: Alexander Graham Bell betrays a deaf woman involved in the invention of the telephone.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Naturalist

by Andrew Mayne
Thriller: A computational biologist uses science to investigate what he thinks is the murder of one of his students. (First of a series).
Links: Amazon (UK)

Whale Fall

by Elizabeth O’Connor
Historical Drama/Lab lit lite: When a dead whale washes up on a Welsh island, a young woman is drawn to two ethnographers studying island life.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Shear

by Tim Parks
Drama: An English geologist working on a Mediterranean island becomes entangled in a nightmare web of deceit, corruption, lust and tragedy.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Enlightenment

by Sarah Perry
Drama: Two men share an obsession with the vanished nineteenth-century female astronomer Maria Veduva.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Playground

by Richard Powers
Drama: In Polynesia, plans for floating cities bring four people together, including a marine biologist and an AI researcher.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Mr Einstein’s Secretary

by Matthew Reilly
Historical/Lab lit lite: Hanna Fischer wanted to study physics under Einstein, but her life is disrupted by the Second World War.
Links: Amazon (UK)

There Are Rivers in the Sky

by Elif Shafak
Historical Drama/Lab lit lite: A split timeline links different people in the past, from Ashurbanipal in Assyria to Victorian London, a Yazidi girl in ISIS-controlled Iraq, and a hydrologist in the present.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Weeds

by Katy Simpson Smith
Historical Drama: Two women separated by time, but linked but their botanical work.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Pathways

by Katie Ward
Drama: A neuroscientist and her partner’s daughter struggle to form a relationship when the partner disappears.
Links: Amazon (UK)

One Perfect Couple

by Ruth Ware
Drama: Post-doc researcher Lyla joins a reality TV show, and things go horribly wrong.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Distant Dead

by Heather Young
Thriller/Lab lit lite: When the body of a former mathematics professor is found burnt to death in a desert, social studies teacher Nora Wheaton investigates what happened.
Links: Amazon (UK)

CROSSOVER NOVELS

Venomous Lumpsucker

by Ned Beauman
Drama: In the 2030s, biobanks of lost organisms are cyber-attacked, wiping out the last traces of the perished species.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Ascension

by Nicholas Binge
Drama: When a mountain appears in the Pacific Ocean and a group of scientists is sent to investigate, explorer Harry Tunmore agrees to join the secret mission, for reasons beyond scientific curiosity.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Feed Them Silence

by Lee Mandelo
Drama: Using a neurological interface to translate her animal subject’s perception through her own mind, Dr. Sean Kell-Luddon realises a lifelong dream of being a wolf.
Links: Amazon (UK)

PLAYS

Dr Semmelweis

by Stephen Brown
Play: Drama about the real-life doctor who promoted hand washing to stop the spread of diseases.
Links: National Theatre

Farm Hall 

by Katherine Moar
Play: German nuclear scientists deal with life in British captivity in 1945.
Links: Guardian

Test Room Eight

by Lester Powell
Radio play: Philip Odell and his assistant investigate suspected sabotage at a pharmaceutical plant.
Links: Internet Archive

In fact, it’s too soon to reveal the results, but we, the LabLiterati, are currently in the process of analyzing the data needed to update the graph I published in Nature back in 2010 in the piece More Lab In the Library – which gave a tantalizing hint that the inflection point seen in the late 1980s might just well herald a meteoric rise (kicking in around the late 2000s). We’ll know more after we’ve crunched the numbers, but I’m feeling pretty confident that the slope is still heading upwards. It will be a nice way to get in the mood for our twenty-year anniversary in March 2025!

So what sort of books are in the upgrade? As always, it’s an astonishingly varied bunch. Historical fiction continues its reign in the genre, with multiple tales of fictional lady scientists in the Victorian era, and the usual clutch of stories populated by real scientific figures, from the well-known (Rosalind Franklin, Charles Darwin, Charles Audubon, Carl Linnaeus) to the less celebrated (John von Neumann, Guillaume le Gentil, Dorothy Horstmann  and Mileva Marić). Environmental peril, as ever, continues to feature, with tales of rewilding, scientists working clandestinely to evade governmental suppression of global warming, and even the incursion of a climate denialist into an Antarctic research station. So too do intrepid scientific detectives, solving murders. There are stories of missing persons, deadly outbreaks, struggling Ph.D students, family dramas – and a continuing enthusiasm for modern-day chick-lit-esque lab erotica. The most cutting-edged theme we identified, in a satiric novel, was a professor who’d been the victim of cancel culture.

The oldest book in the upgrade is The Insect Man, a semi-biographical children’s book published by Eleanor Doorly in 1936 (yet another historical drama, this time about the real-life entomologist Jean Henri Fabre). On the other end of the timeline, a whopping 22 titles were published in 2023 alone (with two already this year), bringing the total to 463.

None of this intel would be possible without the help of the LabLiterati, but in particular Dom, our ‘lab lit sniffer”, who scours bookshops and broadsheets and single-handedly found the vast majority of more obscure specimens. We also rely on our readers to nominate books we have missed. So do keep those great suggestions coming!

If you want to take a look at the latest entries in the Novels category, they appear after Andrea Rothman’s The DNA of You and Me. (You’d better hurry, though, because due to popular demand, we are about to rearrange the list into alphabetical order by author surname). We added six Crossover titles too, but as always, this category, alongside Television/Streaming and Films, is sadly neglected. If you think anything is missing, we’d love to hear from you about those as well.

We hope you enjoy all the new titles, and we expect our next upgrade to happen in the autumn. Until then, happy reading!

The variety of our latest additions is compelling – there really is something for everyone. We’ve got taut thrillers, historical dramas based on real-life events, romantic beach reads, soul-searching meditations, whodunnits, and what some might call ‘literary fiction’ (a category I confess I don’t quite see as very different from many other novels not so graced by critical opinion). We have examples from both debut and established authors, from under-represented voices, and translations from Chinese, Russian, Norwegian, French and Danish writers.

We are very grateful as always to Dom Stiles, our intrepid “lab lit whisperer”, who sourced the majority of these gems. But thanks are also due to reader nominations and efforts by the rest of the LabLiterati (members of our wonderful monthly Fiction Lab book group at London’s Royal Institution, where many of our titles get a thorough grilling). We would love to hear your suggestions too, if there’s anything we’ve missed.

If you haven’t visited the List for a while, head on over and take a look. (We add new additions onto the bottom of each category.) We hope you enjoy it!

Fifteen years later, I am looking back in amazement at how far we have come. We are just a few dozen shy of a thousand articles, submitted by scientists, writers, artists and every shade in between from all ages and corners of the globe. The list of fiction has nearly quadrupled in size to several hundred examples. The word I coined, “lab lit”, is now in common parlance, with a Wikipedia page, articles about it in the international press and, recently out, a wonderful anthology dedicated to the genre.

Edited by Dixie State University academic Olga Pilkington and her late husband Ace Pilkington, and published by Lexington Books, Lab Lit: Exploring Literary and Cultural Representations of Science is packed full of literary criticism and analysis about this ever-engaging and multi-faceted form of storytelling. I was very pleased to have been asked to contribute a reflective essay and a case study: “Latent”, an original story inspired in setting by one the institutes where I’ve done research, and in topic by the real-life XMRV affair – in which a disease without a cause is highjacked by wishful thinking and vested interests. In it, I expose a less attractive side of the research ecosystem, which most scientists will be familiar with but which may not be so well known to everyone else. And this is one of the powers of the genre: shedding light on science and how it ticks – the good, the bad and the ugly.

Of course lab lit fiction existed long before the website was launched, and was on many people’s radars (under other names such as “hard science fiction” or “science in fiction”), but I do believe we played an important part in enhancing awareness of how science has been neglected by mainstream writers, and by inspiring writers to use scientists and science themes in their fiction. Certainly some writers who debuted with fiction in our pages have gone on to be published authors. In parallel, over the past fifteen years, the number of lab lit novels published keeps increasing year on year. Fiction Lab, the lab lit book club that I’ve run at the Royal institution since 2008 (itself coming up on its 12th birthday in June), no longer has to struggle to find books to discuss each month. And that’s a wonderful thing.

The website is becoming increasingly difficult for me to tend, which is why the frequency of updates is not as brisk as in previous years. This is because being a member of faculty with a number of teaching and university administrative responsibilities alongside running my own research team in London, as well as being a mother with a small son and a long daily commute, makes it sometimes difficult to tend to my other labor of love. So if there’s anyone out there interested in volunteering to help out, please do get in touch. But LabLit.com is still in brisk good health, so I’m looking forward to many more decades of science culture here on the site.

To all the people out there who read and enjoy LabLit.com, submit and publish articles, and nominate fiction for the list: a big thank you from all of us at LabLit.com!

She went on to explain that the class had read Frankenstein during their prior fiction unit. As a follow-up, the students were challenged to apply the narrative writing skills that they had acquired over their last two years of middle school to a collaborative narrative task. Students took the time to understand the lab lit genre, aided in part by studying LabLit.com; they sought to identify connections to the art and media they have seen, and to create unique stories centered around real-world issues. “Our goal,” she said, was “to pursue this genre with fidelity.”

As if this weren’t wonderful enough, Ms Apuli then asked me if there might be an opportunity for her students to contribute their stories to the website. I thought it was a great idea, as we have never received fiction written by non-adult authors in our 11+ years of existence. I agreed to consider all of the stories, with a view towards publishing the best ones. The students, across three classes, then met in collaborative pairs to write their short fiction, which were eventually sent to me for scrutiny. Because of the special nature of this project, we allowed for some genre-blurring into science fiction, but to make the cut, the stories had to feature realistic scientists and relatively plausible scenarios.

Of 23 stories submitted, we chose the six best to feature in a series on the website – the first of which appears today. (To comply with school regulations, all of the students will be bylined with their first name and last initial only.)

For me, one of the most fascinating aspects of this exercise was gaining an insight into what issues are currently central in the minds of our young generation. Fiction always holds up a mirror to the hopes, worries and dreams of current society, and in this crop of writing, the general tone is one of grave concern. The themes tended towards the dystopian, and particularly dystopias dealing with the environment: climate change, loss of biodiversity, deforestation and mass extinction. There were also stories about the fall of civilization, the potential dangers inherent in gene editing technologies and the perils of runaway Artificial Intelligence.

In some cases, the narratives also contained hope: that science could get us out of the messes that we, as a species, have landed ourselves into. (That not all of them had happy endings told a story in itself.)

Ms Apuli’s fantastic class has since graduated from middle school and just last week, started off their next exciting phase in high school. We wish them all well, and hope that they will continue to explore science narratives. We’ve even got our fingers crossed that some of them will become famous lab lit authors in the future!

Index

• Voices of the next generation
  Our Young Author series launches
• From the Collins Industries Archives
• The dangers of Yellowstone
• The special ones
• The Magnafan
• Life Reimagined
• The Journey to Mars