We are pleased to present the most recent update to our list of lab lit fiction. It’s a particularly big one this time: although we unearthed quite a few old gems, the bulk is fuelled by a clear increase in the number of relevant novels written in the past few years. Long gone are the days when we’d see a few science-in-fiction books published a year; Lab Lit, as a genre, seems to have become established, grown popular and is hopefully here to stay.
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!
