The pages of recent 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...

Read the rest of the article by poet Maurice Riordan.