The pages of novels are peopled by disturbing new progeny: Zadie Smith’s FutureMouse, Anne Haverty’s Missy the Sheep, David Mitchell’s Sonmi 471, Margaret Atwood’s Crakers and Pigoons – all descendants, you could say, of a letter published some fifty years ago in Nature, when Watson and Crick coolly announced they wished ‘to suggest a structure for the salt of deoxyribose nucleic acid’. Here we see one indicator that contemporary writers have an appetite for science and have an imaginative engagement with it. Margaret Atwood tells us the main topic at her ‘annual family Christmas dinner is likely to be intestinal parasites or sex hormones in mice, or, when that makes the non-scientists too queasy, the nature of the Universe.’

Not every writer has science round the dinner table, but they have ready access to it nowadays on the bookshelves and the internet. It has become a resource for the novelist – especially for those who, taking their cue from the stories of Ian McEwan and Peter Carey in the 1970s, incorporate elements of fantasy and science fiction such as we find in Mitchell’s 2004 novel Cloud Atlas. The exotic features of modern science are exciting material for writers, a good source for those ‘brave notions’ that fuel the speculative inventiveness of much contemporary fiction.

There is also a less apparent way in which science influences writers. Science gives explicit expression to the harmony and elegance of the world. It thereby offers an aesthetic model for the work of imagination. Calvino’s Invisible Cities, for instance, finds inspiration for its beautiful symmetries in maths. Likewise, in Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia the exquisite comedy depends as much on mathematical ideas of balance and change as it does on plot and character.

Poets are especially susceptible to this aesthetic aspect of science. Poems use repetitions, patterns, precise hierarchical arrangements, and such mathematical concepts as the Fibonacci series and the Mandelbrot set corroborate the formal devices of poetry. But the affinity may go deeper than that, as Michael Donaghy suggests (quoting the American formalist Paul Lake): ‘The regular meter of formal poems is not a dull mechanical ticking, like a clock's; it coalesces out of the rhythms of randomly jotted phrases through a process of "phase-locking"-a natural process that occurs "when many individual oscillators shift from a state of collective chaos to beating together or resonating in harmony" … the way the randomly flickering lights of fireflies become synchronous throughout a whole tree.’ It sounds rather grandiose perhaps to imply that science gives poets a sanction for their art. But it’s worth recalling Dante’s obsession with numbers and that he used the ‘science’ of his day to give structure and orderliness to his grand design.

Modern science involves not only hypothesis but experiment. Its success requires repetitious mental activity and observation free from subjective interference. Typically it is the very opposite of the writer’s work. But this isn’t always so: as a mode of understanding science only approaches and clears those paradigm hurdles, so crucial to its development, through feats of imagination that resemble the experience of poets in their excitement and uncanny inspiration. We owe ‘Kubla Khan’ to a dream: likewise, the structure of the benzene molecule and the Periodic Table. At least at moments of great insight, the writer and the scientist approximate each other. And it is also perhaps arguable that Hamlet, The Principia, The Principles of Geology, The Origin of Species, The Interpretation of Dreams all belong to the same set – one that would not include many laureates, dramatists, and novelists.

But the interaction of literature and science isn’t necessarily cosy. Neither Darwin nor Newton took poetry seriously. And many writers in turn are essentially ‘flat Earth-ists’. With Tennyson, they say ‘I think we are not wholly brain, / Magnetic mockeries…’ This tension between science and imaginative writing should neither be denied nor deplored. The war on post-Newtonian materialism fired the imagination of Blake and later Romantics. Indeed the conflict goes back to classical times: the Latin poet Lucretius expounded the atomic theory of Democritus in his De rerum natura (The Way Things Are), and it is the greatest work of materialist imagination in our tradition. Its brilliance is somewhat occluded because his follower, Virgil, recoiled from its atheism and refuted it by seeing the numinous everywhere in nature. And it is the Virgilian vision that predominates in English poetry.

Even so, Lucretius has had his comebacks – notably in the late 1600s. And the combination of post-Einstein physics and neo-Darwinism has, in recent decades, invigorated the materialist imagination. Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene – is it literature or science? – displays something close to Lucretius’ intoxicated secularism and brings a similar boyish excitement to the exposition of natural processes. Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials also has a didactic intention and might be regarded as a materialist fantasy for the quantum age. We find a more ambiguous and troubled exploration of scientific rationalism in Ian McEwan’s novel Enduring Love, where the irrational is treated as pathological but it nonetheless undermines the rational viewpoint.

Today this age-old conflict coexists with something new. The pressure of environmental change and the acceleration of bio-technology have given writers and scientists a common purpose. I had experience of this recently when, as a contribution to the anthology Wild Reckoning, I asked poets to work with scientists in writing poems to mark the fortieth anniversary of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. Scientists brought to the collaboration their expertise, know-how, scepticism, all the ingenuity of rationalism – whereas the poets could but mourn and praise, hector and seduce. But in that they have perhaps the ability to change hearts and minds. It was an effort in the right direction at a time when we need some general shift in perception, one that will provide the moral incentive that might actually enable our survival.

One fascinating perspective is suggested by James Lovelock’s ‘Gaia Hypothesis’. This has the curious quality that though it is formulated as a scientific theory, it has something of the appeal of religious myth. It accords us humans a confined and precarious spot within the order of nature, while giving the earth itself, or the sum of life on it, a pre-eminence that can be interpreted as effectively quasi-religious. As such, perhaps it offers the basis for a moral imperative with respect to non-human life, something lacking so far in the religious traditions of the developed world. We have no Mosaic-Christian injunction telling us to ‘Honour the beasts of the field, the flowers of the forest.’ And, as our brave new century gathers pace, there seems little to restrain either its ongoing ruination of the natural world or its rampant industrialization of biology. Novels such as J.M Coetzee’s The Lives of the Animals and Atwood’s Oryx and Crake already alert us the dangers of the present and awaken us to the likely nightmare of the near-future. We need too the imagination to restore our humility and wonder at our great good fortune as partakers in the life of the planet.