The Science of Fiction

November is National Novel Writing Month, or as it’s known by many on the internet, #NaNoWriMo. Founded in 1999, NaNoWriMo is a month-long creative writing campaign designed to encourage willing participants to write 50,000 word novels, creative pieces, and fiction of any sort during the 30 days of November. Regardless of if you are participating in NaNoWriMo or not, we thought we’d take this opportunity to share with our audience a selection of physicists and scientists who are also novelists themselves. Often, these novels tend to be influenced by the real-life works of the scientists who write them.

Norbert Wiener, mathematician and the “father of cybernetics”, also wrote short stories and authored a 1959 novel The Tempter , a tale about business interests and the sciences colliding. Fred Hoyle of the Institute of Astronomy wrote science fiction novels, children’s books, plays, and a television series. Gravitational wave detection researcher and physicist Robert Forward’s work sometimes bordered on science fiction , which is perhaps what inspired him to write roughly a dozen science fiction novels. Carl Sagan, although known for his non-fiction, also wrote a hugely successful novel Contact which was made into a Hollywood movie in the 1990’s. University of California, Irvine professor of physics Gregory Benford also writes science fiction, including his award-winning Galactic Center Saga series about biological and artificial life forms. Lastly, Timothy Zahn, author of dozens of fantasy and sci-fi novels and short stories including a series of Star Wars expanded universe books, studied physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

We hope you find some time to write this November or, at the very least, read some physics-inspired or authored novels!

*Editor’s note: since the writing of this post, the official website and nonprofit of NaNoWriMo are gone, but there is still a strong community spirit among several organizations for writing in the month of November. This Kate Meadows Writing post explains more about the change.