best fiction about scientists

A list to start off, weighted as best I could towards non-science fiction:

* Cantor's Dilemma by Carl Djerassi
* Intuition: a novel by Allegra Goodman
* Life: a novel by Gwyneth Jones
* Forty Signs of Rain by Kim Stanley Robinson
* The Clewiston Test by Kate Wilhelm

Great idea for a group (I'm gonna go make a list now), and helpful list there--I would never have even thought about fiction about scientists, but it makes sense that it'd be out there, and now thanks to your list I'm gonna check some of those books out since my family's full of scientists and they like fiction.

thanks! there's others but i was tired & just wanted to get started.

Night thoughts of a classical physicist is a beautiful novel about a scientist who clings to the wrong paradigm.

i love this thread -- please keep the suggestions coming!

I own but have not yet read:

Kepler by John Banville - historical fiction about the astronomer-mathematician

As She Climbed Across the Table by Jonathan Lethem - about a physicist who falls in love with a quantum singularity that is basically a miniscule black hole and the effect this has on her relationship with her husband

The stories in Karl Iagnemma's collection On the Nature of Human Romantic Interaction are about scienctists (and mathematicians). I highly recommend it!

Jekyll and Hyde by R L Stevenson must be somewhere there at the top, obviously. Also Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. Additionally:

Journey to the Centre of the Earth, Jules Verne

The Man Who Counted by Malba Tahan

Another early classic science thriller would be The andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton.

Contact a radio astronomer discovers non-random data being beamed from a nearby star.

forbidden sequence a geneticist discovers how badly public relations can go wrong.

Doctor Copernicus by John Banville

Doctor Mirabilis by James Blish

Blish is best known for his sf, but this is a novel about Roger Bacon. Recommended!

Many of the stories by Andrea Barrett, including especially "Servants of the Map" in the collection by the same name (Servants of the Map).

Good Benito and Einstein's dreams by Alan Lightman are two of my favourite and only books I have read about sceintists.

The Goldbug Variations by Richard Powers. This terrific book is the story of two geneticists, a computer programmer and a reference librarian(!) I also like The Mind-Body Problem by Rebecca Goldstein, a funny, touching novel about a psychology grad student married to a mathematician.

Just in case anybody is still interested - I've got a database of female scientists in fiction (mostly science fiction I confess) over at: http://www.ivec.org/womeninscience/

There's a few on this list I've missed that I will have to chase up!

Oh, lovely!

Some more:

This Thing of Darkness, Harry Thompson, published as To the Edge of the World in the US. Charles Darwin.

The Baroque Cycle- Neal Stephenson

A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines, Janna Levin. Alan Turing and Kurt Godel.

The Indian Clerk, David Leavitt. Mathematicians in early 20th century.

The Invention of Everything Else, Samantha Hunt. Nikola Tesla.

The Mapmaker's Wife,Robert Whitaker about the measuring of the equator in Equador features encounters with headhunters.

Just about anything by Connie Willis, but especially The Doomsday Book and Passage.

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