Chemists: Strangers to fiction

That Mars habitat?

"The basement corridor is dim, I can hear pumps chugging, hoods noisily venting, and the solid-state physicist down the hall swearing. 'Welcome to Mars!' says the cheery sign outside my colleague’s door. Perhaps it is the pile of grading on my desk or the endless round of meetings on my calendar that is fuelling my escapist fantasy, but every time I pass Selby’s office, I imagine the door is a portal and if I were to walk through, I’d  find myself in a habitat on Mars, its pumps working hard to compress the thin atmosphere." from "Strangers to Fiction" in Nature Chemistry, 8, 636-637 (2016).

I've been a sci-fi fan for going on five decades, imagining myself in labs on Mars, mining comets, and exploring strange new worlds. I don't read it for the chemistry, which is a good thing, because there isn't much fiction in which chemistry plays a key role.

My latest Nature Chemistry Thesis column looks at chemistry and fiction, suggesting that there are good reasons to both read SF, particularly for young chemists, and for chemists to encourage the writing of chemistry-inflected science fiction.  And if you have the talent for it (which I do not!) perhaps even give the writing of it a fly.

You can read the whole thing here.  My list of fictional chemistry is here.