Literature with a hook for a science class?

July 19, 2015 8:05 AM

My cousin needs ideas for a joint class she'll be teaching for a college--she teaches literature, her teaching partner teaches science. (Which science, I don't know, but she says it's not relevant and he can touch on most scientific topics to the required degree.) They need suggestions of literature--poetry, short stories, novellas, or short novels--that she can have the class read, and then he can take them through the science of it.

At present, the parameters seem to be: "literature" (defensible as such to a moderately conservative college administration, so not too pop--for instance, she was ruling out Michael Crichton books), with some kind of science or strong science theme in it, and not the social sciences like psychology or sociology.

A couple of ones she seems to be settling on so far: Never Let Me Go (science guy will discuss cloning), The Island of Dr. Moreau (science guy will discuss genetics).

Apparently science guy vaguely suggested some of the hard science fiction authors, (without being specific), but on short acquaintance she hasn't found anything she likes (and has rejected some of it specifically for super-sexism). I'm wondering if she should consider the Heinlein short story "--And He Built a Crooked House--", so science guy could discuss dimensions.

Any other ideas? Thanks, Metafilter!

posted by theatro to Education (27 answers total)

Best answer: Famously, Copenhagen and Arcadia are both plays that center around scientific themes. I knew someone who taught a Physics and Theater class involving these plays.

I've considered teaching a class sort of like this and the first book that sprung to mind is The Windup Girl. There's great stuff in there on climate change, loss of genetic diversity, etc. However, maybe this may not be regarded as serious enough literature by the administration?
posted by Betelgeuse at 8:30 AM on July 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

Best answer: The short story The Cold Equations by Tom Godwin, for discussing hard physics. Definitely neither sexist nor too pop.

"A Sound of Thunder" by Ray Bradbury for chaos theory.
posted by holborne at 8:32 AM on July 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Some or all of Frankenstein?
posted by pairofshades at 8:42 AM on July 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

Best answer: I'd strongly recommend E.O. Wilson's Anthill. Wilson is a giant of the evolutionary & ecological biology world, and it shows---there's a lot of good science in there---but the guy is also a very, very good writer (though rough in places: you can sort of tell it's his first novel).

Hard science fiction is much better these days, both in literary quality and in not-being-horribly-sexist, than it used to be. Hal Clement is great and Poul Anderson holds a special place in my heart, but literary giants they are not. (Although some of Anderson's later work is, I think, of literary merit.) If you have contact with the scientist, you might suggest that he suggest some more modern stuff.

Kim Stanley Robinson is particularly good---his stuff runs the gamut from "literary fiction set in space" to some very, very hard SF, with plots built around geology/areology, climate science, biology, etc. Even the in the hardest SF, though, he retains an eye for theme and characterization and a good style that will probably endear him to your cousin.

The first book of the Mars Trilogy (Red Mars is the natural place to go, here---seriously, I can't recommend that book highly enough, and it works as a standalone novel---but at >400 pages it's not short.

I'm thinking an excerpt from 2312 would be a good bet. As I recall there's a good bit , maybe novella-length, a t the beginning investigating the cultural implications of Mercury's environment for the people who live there. There's a lot of science, from the planetary science of Mercury (rotation period, effects of the fact that it's as close to the sun as it is) to things like the thermal expansion of metals, but there's also a great deal of insight into how people and cultures work, and some interesting formal experimentation. (Acquaintance is doing her thesis in English in part on Robinson's work, I think in part due to that experimentation.)

You might also suggest Greg Egan's Incandescence. It's a short novel, decent qua novel, but it's also probably the best non-mathematical introduction to general relativity I've ever seen. Problem here is, the students will need someone to guide them through, well, learning GR, so the science guy really needs to be an astrophysicist. (I'm a physics grad student, not in astrophysics, and I think I could just barely pull it off with a great deal of prep work, because I've had a number of GR courses; a biologist or a chemist would have no hope.)
posted by golwengaud at 8:45 AM on July 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Seconding Arcadia. Great play, with hooks for some really cool science. (And mathematics!)
posted by golwengaud at 8:47 AM on July 19, 2015 [2 favorites]

Best answer: I teach Flatland in a math class; it's absolutely sexist (and classist, able-ist, etc.), but I think it's a good setup for discussions on satire and Victorian social norms, as well as extra dimensions.

A.S. Byatt is highly literary and also quite good at writing about what it's like to be a scientist. I'd consider the first novella from Angels & Insects.
posted by yarntheory at 9:52 AM on July 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

Best answer: The anthology Literature and Science in the Nineteenth Century, which is Anglo-American in focus, may be useful.
posted by thomas j wise at 9:57 AM on July 19, 2015

Best answer: Back in the day I read Arrowsmith for a similar unit.
posted by stowaway at 10:13 AM on July 19, 2015

Best answer: I took a physics/literature class and we read Borges's The Library of Babel, Flatland, and The Country of the Blind among others. Really one of the best classes I've ever taken, and I wish your cousin luck with finding great options!
posted by jetlagaddict at 10:14 AM on July 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

Best answer: hg wells? richard powers is a contemporary writer who includes science in many of his books and is probably literary enough.

(deleted an incorrect comment about films).
posted by andrewcooke at 10:48 AM on July 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

Best answer: margaret atwood might be acceptable, or stanislaw lem. they're wandering around somewhere in the uncertain region between literature and sci-fi. someone above mentions greg egan, who i guiltily enjoy, but i can't imagine he would pass muster as "literary". if he does then there's the whole of science fiction to go at...
posted by andrewcooke at 10:56 AM on July 19, 2015

Best answer: Is nonfiction allowed? If so, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks would be great.
posted by jaksemas at 11:10 AM on July 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Richard Powers is an excellent choice -- The Gold Bug Variations, about a lab in the early days of DNA research would be what I would go with, but Gain (the industrial history of a fictional Proctor & Gamble-like company, and the story of a woman with cancer in its home town) or Galatea 2.2 (an A.I. experiment with a lightly fictionalized "Richard Powers" brought in to serve as humanist in resident) would also work. Avoiding science fiction on Andrew Cooke's reasoning*, perhaps Ann Lingard? I've read only her The Embalmer's Book of Recipes, but she's a former lab scientist and I believe the bulk of her fiction is about scientists and science.

* Though, really, Lem's His Master's Voice would be fantastic. Also maybe Ted Chiang.
posted by snarkout at 11:42 AM on July 19, 2015

Best answer: The Documents in the Case by Dorothy L Sayers. This is not a Peter Wimsy story, though it is a mystery. The plot turns on advances in chemistry circa 1930, not all of which may be perfectly correct (which makes anotjer mystery). On the literary side, there are discussions about relativity in physics, and how Einstein's theories led to the possibility of relativity in other disciplines especially philosophy.
posted by SemiSalt at 12:37 PM on July 19, 2015

Best answer: Brave New World also gets you cloning (though with a healthy dose of sexism and most other -isms).

Any of the MaddAddam trilogy would also be great (genetic engineering).

Pretty much any Neil Stephenson book could work. Snow Crash is my favorite, but Cryptonomicon has engineering as well as code breaking, Seveneves has genetics and surviving in space, Anathem has a lot of math but is very slow to get going. But, they're all very long and may not quite be literary enough.

I, Robot is one of the (very slightly) less sexist and more engaging Asimov novels.

Jim Crace's Being Dead is great if the science prof is up for talking a lot about decomposition.

Bulgakov's A Country Doctor's Notebook if medical stories work (plus Heart of a Dog or the Fatal Eggs if going more sci-fi is ok).

Arcadia and Borges are both also great ideas that others have already mentioned!
posted by snaw at 1:21 PM on July 19, 2015

Best answer: Botany of Desire has a lot of science in it - and is a fun read. Margaret Atwood (Oryx & Crake will scare the bejeezes out of everyone!) would definitely work too for more sci fi.
posted by Toddles at 3:35 PM on July 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Oh and the Shell Collector was the reason I became a Biologist. And now I have a PhD, so very effective fictional short stories.
posted by Toddles at 3:37 PM on July 19, 2015

Best answer: Ship Fever by Andrea Barrett -- a collection of stories that are all sciencey. I recall one in particular about Gregor Mendel called "Behavior of the Hawkweeds."

Also, Joanna Scott has a collection called Various Antidotes.
posted by swheatie at 4:24 PM on July 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Some suggestions more under the "lit" umbrella than "sci-fi" (though the two of course can be one and the same!):
--The Volcano Lover by Susan Sontag. History, literature, and volcanoes. A chapter or two might suffice for reading purposes, particularly when the ambassador is collecting samples from Vesuvius.

--Albert Goldbarth, either his poetry (example 1, example 2; or his book Great Topics of the World

--Adrienne Rich's famous poem "Planetarium"

--Never Cry Wolf by Farley Mowat since it's a fictionalized account might fall under literature? Lots of biology at any rate

--Forrest Gander has some wonderful science poetry, particularly in his books Science & Steepleflower, and Core Samples from the World. (I particularly adore one in the first one about Pompeii.)
posted by barchan at 4:26 PM on July 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Barbara Kingsolver has a lot of biology in her books, particularly Animal Dreams and Prodigal Summer.
posted by geek anachronism at 4:34 PM on July 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Pretty shocked Ted Chiang hasn't come up yet. I'd definitely slot "Story of Your Life" in there--it has some cool stuff about light refraction and math/science. When I've taught it, the students would have loved to have a real science person around to walk them through that bit.
posted by Joseph Gurl at 1:23 AM on July 20, 2015

Best answer: A couple of great short stories:
Arthur C Clarke's "Nine Billion Names of God" - could lead to a lesson on astrophysics, or computational mathematics.
Ray Bradbury's "All Summer In A Day" - planetary orbits, and meteorology
posted by robotot at 3:33 AM on July 20, 2015 [2 favorites]

Best answer: Seconding the Andrea Barrett recommendation - the above mentioned Ship Fever shares a world with another collection of short stories, Servants of the Map and a novel, Voyage of the Narwhal. They're all very good, in a literary short story kind of way, and most of the stories involve science or scientists. They're more about the concept of Science than about specific science topics, though.

You probably couldn't use it because it's out of print, but I remember Knowledge of Angels by Jill Paton Walsh making a huge impression on me when I was a young literary-minded scientist - a sort of fable about science and faith and stuff.

Oh and Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow is good too. Faster-than-light travel, evolution, exobiology.
posted by mskyle at 6:49 AM on July 20, 2015

Response by poster: These ideas are FANTASTIC, and have an excellent diversity of length, genre, and author's gender. Thank you so much! I'm passing them along to her, and I hope she takes advantage of the richness of selection here. (Hell, you've made me want to read them all, so thanks on my behalf as well!)
posted by theatro at 7:11 AM on July 20, 2015

if diversity is important, and you can edge towards the sci-fi side of things, ursula k le guin may be worth including too. the science connection would be through environmentalism i guess.
posted by andrewcooke at 7:22 AM on July 20, 2015

Andy Weir's The Martian
posted by at at 8:08 PM on July 20, 2015

I'll give a qualified recommendation to Enigma, by Robert Harris, because I have seen the film, but I haven't read the novel. It's about codebreakers at Bletchley Park.
posted by Multicellular Exothermic at 6:55 AM on September 15, 2015