Editor's note: This list will be a continual work-in-progress – we would like it to be comprehensive. If you think we’ve missed something, nominate your favorite work here. Please note that 'lab lit' is not 'science fiction’; briefly, lab lit fiction depicts realistic scientists as central characters and portrays fairly realistic scientific practice or concepts, typically taking place in a realistic – as opposed to speculative or future – world. The action does not have to take place in a laboratory per se, just anywhere where scientists are doing what they do, such as a field station. Although some science fiction does indeed have elements of ‘lab lit’, and the boundaries can be fuzzy, this list is meant to feature real scientists in the real world. Those that deviate slightly from this definition, or are cross-over works, are annotated as such. In the interest of promoting scientists in fiction, this list also includes novels in which the scientist character(s) are not wholly central ('lab lit lite'). Very soon, we will be featuring more high-quality self-published lab lit novels as well.

Read about our experiment to boost the lab lit genre in Nature (download for free here).


Jump to: Novels • Crossover novels • Films • Plays • TV

Novels

Paper

by John McCabe
Black comedy/thriller: A disgruntled biochemist is threatened by boredom, boss and vial of phenol.
Links: our author interview • Amazon (UK)

Carbon Dreams

by Susan M. Gaines
Drama: A female geologist struggles with career and love in California.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Arrowsmith

by Sinclair Lewis
Drama: A scientist/medic leans the hard way that pure research is more noble – and cures plague in the process.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Mendel's Dwarf

by Simon Mawer
Black comedy: A megalomaniac achondroplasiac geneticist studies his own disease.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Brazzaville Beach

by William Boyd
Drama/Thriller: Mathematics meets malign chimps – Jane Goodall with a twist.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Gold Bug Variations

by Richard Powers
Drama: Love, music, art, literature, DNA coding and computers in one heady intellectual mix.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Galatea 2.2

by Richard Powers
Drama: In this haunting story, a writer-in-residence recovers from personal tragedy by helping colorful, well-drawn neurologists build a sentient AI program.
Links: Amazon (UK)

As She Climbed Across the Table

by Jonathan Lethem
Drama: A particle physicist falls in love with a black hole of her own creation.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Zodiac

by Neal Stephenson
Comedy/thriller: A fun-loving ecoterrorist chemist stumbles onto something more alarming than the usual toxic sludge in Boston Harbor.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Boric Acid Murder

by Camille Minichino
Mystery: A retired physicist gets caught up in a library murder.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Passage

by Connie Willis
Drama: Near-death experiences under the microscope – is Heaven the Titanic? A scientist attempts to work out the brain physiology behind that long glowing tunnel...
Links: Amazon (UK)

Bellwether

by Connie Willis
Humor: The queen of science fiction sets her favorite genre aside to pen an entirely mainstream tale; capers, chaos theory and a flock of sheep feature in this rom-com set in a research institute.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Triplet Code

by B. B. Jordan
Mystery: A scientist can't help noticing when her colleagues start dropping dead.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Gut Symmetries

by Jeanette Winterson
Drama: Physicists becoming One with each other and the universe.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Periodic Table

by Primo Levi
Semi-autobiographical fiction: A chemist survives Auschwitz.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Cantor's Dilemma

by Carl Djerassi
Drama: What would you do to win a Nobel?
Links: our author profile • Amazon (UK)

The Bourbaki Gambit

by Carl Djerassi
Drama: A secret group of researchers make a key discovery: their egos don't like being buried.
Links: our review • our author profile • Amazon (UK)

Menachem's Seed

by Carl Djerassi
Drama: Sperm-snatching on the academic conference circuit.
Links: our author profile • Amazon (UK)

NO

by Carl Djerassi
Drama: Scientists study penile erection and things get a bit personal.
Links: our author profile • Amazon (UK)

The Struggles of Albert Woods

by William Cooper
Humor: One minor scientist's battle to become not-quite-so-minor.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Pharmacology Is Murder

by Dirk Wyle
Mystery: A graduate student goes undercover.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Biotechnology Is Murder

by Dirk Wyle
Mystery: Wyle's intrepid hero is back, this time sniffing out dodgy dealings in cancer biotech.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Medical School Is Murder

by Dirk Wyle
Mystery: More action, this time when the hero inherits a lab from a dead man.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Thinks

by David Lodge
Humor: The Humanities vs. the Arts: a cognitive scientist and a novelist attempt to speak the same language.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Einstein's Dreams

by Alan Lightman
Drama: A poetical, fictionalized account of Einstein's discovery process, most of which happens while he is asleep.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Long For This World

by Michael Byers
Drama: A geneticist medic discovers a mutation in his patients that could lead to an ethically dubious cure for aging.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Unnatural Exposure

by Patricia Cornwell
Mystery: Virigina Medical Examiner Kay Scarpetta on the trail of a serial killer, with a hefty dose of forensic science (and many others in this series).
Links: Amazon (UK)

Seaside Pleasures

by Ann Lingard
Drama: A tale of shells and snails, science and religion, love and death.
Links: our author interview • Littoralis Press

Figure in a Landscape

by Ann Lingard
Drama: A seal zoologist clashes with a guilt-ridden recluse.
Links: our author interview • Author's website

Floating Stones

by Ann Lingard
Drama: A geologist toys with the irrational as he considers leaving family and career for a potter he meets while doing fieldwork.
Links: our author interview • Online Originals

Strong Medicine

by Arthur Hailey
Thriller: A women discovers the sins and secrets of the pharmaceutical industry.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Inspired Sleep

by Robert Cohen
Drama: A disgrunted PhD student tries to find solace in the dreams of a sleep research project.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture

by Apostolos Doxiadis
Humor/Drama: The black sheep of a family struggles to solve an age-old mathematical theorem.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Cloud Chamber

by Clare George
Historical drama: A tale of nuclear physicists at the dawn of atomic science.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Speed of Dark

by Elizabeth Moon
Drama: In considering an experimental new cure, a bioinformaticist must choose between love and the autism that facilitates his talents.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Die Vermessung der Welt (The Measurement of the World)

by Daniel Kehlmann
Historical drama: A fictionalized account of an intense meeting between mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss and natural scientist Alexander von Humbold in Berlin in 1828 (in German).
Links: Amazon (UK)

Properties of Light

by Rebecca Goldstein
Drama: Burning love and murderous professional envy consume three physicists obsessed with understanding the quantum physics underpinning light.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Leaky Establishment

by David Langford
Humor: A caustic and humorous send-up of the nuclear research industry in Britain written by a former weapons physicist.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Crow Lake

by Mary Lawson
Drama: An invertebrate zoologist returns home after many years of estrangement from her family.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Quite a Year for Plums

by Bailey White
Drama: A plant pathologist learns how science should be used to understand nature rather than to conquer and master it.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Prodigal Summer

by Barbara Kingsolver
Drama: A lone wildlife biologist lives in the woods and studies coyotes while attempting to sort out her personal life.
Links: Amazon (UK)

This Thing of Darkness

by Harry Thompson
Historical Fiction: Darwin and the voyage of the Beagle viewed through the eyes of Captain Fitzroy.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Darwin Conspiracy

by John Darnton
Historical Fiction: Darwin again, this time seen through the eyes of two modern-day, lovelorn scholars – Possession for the evolutionarily minded.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Intuition

by Allegra Goodman
Drama: Secrets, lies and scientific fraud threaten to tear apart a close-knit cancer laboratory.
Links: Random House • Nature review by LabLit's editor

Enigma

by Robert Harris
Historical fiction: A brilliant mathematician struggles to crack German codes in the second world war.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Cryptonomicon

by Neal Stephenson
Historical fiction: Alan Turing as a troubled mathematical soul in this brilliant blend of fact and fancy.
Links: Amazon (UK)

A Whistling Woman

by A.S. Byatt
Drama: Snail scientists almost completely diluted by an exhaustive cast of characters in this 'novel of ideas' (preceded by three other books in a series).
Links: Amazon (UK)

A Whiff of Death

by Isaac Asimov
Mystery: Petty politics and murder in this still-timely 1958 tale of an assistant professor in a chemistry department, penned when Azimov was a chemistry professor himself.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Scorpion's Tail

by Sylvia Torti
Drama: Written by a biology PhD and set in Chiapas during the 1994 Zapatista rebellion, this novel features two field ecologists who get caught up in something they never expected.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Wegener's Jigsaw (One Day On the Ice Will Reveal All Its Dead)

by Clare Dudman
Historical fiction: A fictionalized autobiography of the scientific revolutionary Alfred Wegener, the main proponent of continental drift.
Links: the author writes in LabLit • Amazon (UK)

98 Reasons For Being

by Clare Dudman
Historical fiction: A biographical novel about another scientific revolutionary, the experimental psychiatrist Dr. Heinrich Hoffmann.
Links: the author writes in LabLit • Amazon (UK)

Antarctica

by Kim Stanley Robinson
Thriller: A rich scientific, political and cultural environment and dangerous ecoterrorists feature in this exciting tale.
Links: our author interview • Amazon (UK)

Forty Signs of Rain

by Kim Stanley Robinson
Drama: Scientists and policy wonks struggle to cope with the impending threat of global warming - with great insights into the culture of scientific funding (first of trilogy entitled 'Science in the Capitol').
Links: our author interview • Amazon (UK)

Fifty Degrees Below

by Kim Stanley Robinson
Drama: The trilogy continues as the Gulf Stream stalls and a mini-Ice Age descends on D.C. - genetically engineered lichen to the rescue? (Part 2 of trilogy).
Links: our author interview • Amazon (UK)

Sixty Days and Counting

by Kim Stanley Robinson
Drama: An eco-friendly president is elected, but will it be too late? (part 3 of trilogy).
Links: our author interview • our review • Amazon (UK)

The Search

by C. P. Snow
Drama: From the scientist father of 'the two cultures' idea, an x-ray crystallographer participates in a few scientific cover-ups.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Small Back Room

by Nigel Balchin
Drama: Classic lab lit from the 1940s about wartime boffins, by someone who was there.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Talk Nerdy to Me

by Vicki Lewis Thompson
Humor: An electrical engineer hero and a sexy, brainy heroine build a working bio-fuelled hovercraft in her garage (part of 'The Nerd Series').
Links: Amazon (UK)

Saving St. Germ

by Carol Muske-Dukes
Drama: A brilliant, creative organic chemist tries to manage a complicated life without descending into madness while developing her breakthrough theory.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Cannery Row

by John Steinbeck
Humor: A marine biologist presides over a bohemian field station with a colorful cast of whores, gamblers, bums, drunks and artists (based loosely on the life of Ed Ricketts).
Links: Amazon (UK)

A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines

by Janna Levin
Historical Fiction: A poetic account of the lives of Alan Turing and Kurt Gödel, just on the border between fiction and non-fiction.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Life

by Gwyneth Jones
Drama: A young geneticist makes her way through her life as a scientist, wife and mother.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Lust

by Geoff Ryman
Black Comedy: A thirty-something government scientist with an overactive imagination grapples with his urges.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Radiance

by Carter Scholz
Drama: Young physicists become drawn into weapons work at the Lawrence Livermore lab.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Luminous Fish

by Lynn Margulis
Drama: A tale of atmospheric scientists from the founder of the endosymbiosis theory, via an ultimately unsatisfying symbiosis of fiction and autobiography.
Links: Scientist review by LabLit's editor • Amazon (UK)

The Oxford Murders

by Guillermo Martinez
Drama: A math graduate student and a logician try to find out who killed an old woman who was involved in Enigma.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Salmon Fishing in the Yemen

by Paul Torday
Comedy/Drama: A fisheries scientist struggles to create a salmon habitat in the desert.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Gift

by Jon Kalb
Drama: Greed and sabotage in the hominid fossil-hunting world, written by an archaeologist who should know.
Links: Nature review by LabLit's editor • Publisher's site

Lethal Genes

by Linda Grant
Mystery: Death and subterfuge in a Bay Area plant genetics lab.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Cold Dark Matter

by Alex Brett
Mystery: A suicide in a remote astronomical observatory opens up an even older, Cold War era mystery.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Dead Water Creek

by Alex Brett
Mystery: A researcher blows the whistle on a lab head siphoning off funds in a fisheries laboratory, but there's more to the crime than meets the eye.
Links: Amazon (UK)

A Hole in Texas

by Herman Wouk
Drama/Romance: An aging particle physicist runs afoul with Congress, the Chinese and the CIA in his quest for the Higgs Bosun.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Kepler

by John Banville
Historical fiction: The more human side of the famous astronomer is brought to life.
Links: our review • Amazon (UK)

Doctor Copernicus

by John Banville
Historical fiction: Copernicus attempts to reconcile theory with fact as he develops his theory of the heliocentric solar system.
Links: our review • Amazon (UK)

http://www.amazon.com/Doctor-Copernicus-John-Banville/dp/0679737995/ref=nosim?tag=lablicom-21

Final Theory

by Mark Alpert
Thriller: Terrorists and the FBI battle it out over Einstein's 'lost' unification theory.
Links: our review • Amazon (UK)

Sun and Moon Corrupted

by Philip Ball
Drama: A troubled journalist goes on the trail of a mysterious fringe scientist.
Links: our author interview • Amazon (UK)

Experimental Heart

by Jennifer L. Rohn
Thriller/Romance: A love-struck workaholic obsesses over a mysterious woman and her new vaccine in a London cancer research institute.
Links: CSHL Press • Amazon (UK)

Quicksilver

by Neal Stephenson (plus two others in the The Baroque Cycle)
Historical fiction: An alternative history in the 17th Century, complete with authentic scientists.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Quantum

by Tom Grace
Mystery: An invention yielding unlimited power could start a wonderful new industry or the end of the world.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Gravity’s chain

by Allan Goodwin
Drama: Life changes for a brilliant young scientist who unifies Relativity and Quantum Theory.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Tensleep

by Sarah Andrews
Mystery: Like a modern-day Sherlock Holmes, forensic geologist Emily Hansen uses geological clues to solve crimes while climbing the professional ladder.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Principal Investigation

by BB Jordan (and others in the same series)
Mystery: Can virologist Dr. Celeste Braun stop a former Harvard researcher from creating a virus and selling the only cure to it?
Links: Amazon (UK)

Sequence

by Lori Andrews
Mystery/Crime: Alexandra Blake, a geneticist with major commitment issues and a taste for old cars, takes on mysteries.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Los Alamos

by Joseph Kanon
Mystery: A group of scientists race the Nazis to finish the first atomic bomb.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Ship Fever

by Andrea Barrett
Historic fiction: Do swallows really sleep under water? A collection of short stories blending history, science and fiction.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Behaviour of Moths

by Poppy Adams
Drama: A moth expert compares the situation of moths to her own life than that of her family.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Embalmer’s Book of Recipes

Ann Lingard
Drama: The lives and loves of three women in Cumbria: a widowed sheep farmer, a taxidermist and a mathematician.
Links: our author interview • Amazon (UK)

Crossover Novels (science fiction or other genres with particularly realistic scientists)

Blood Music

by Greg Bear
Thriller: Genetically engineered cells take over (admittedly in an over-the-top way, but the lab scenes are extremely realistic, hence the book's inclusion here).
Links: Amazon (UK)

Jurassic Park

by Michael Crichton
Thriller: Ancient dinosaur DNA wreaks more havoc (also surprisingly plausibly; one could argue that dinosaurs could be cloned as Crichton describes, and the scientists are believable too).
Links: Amazon (UK)

Timescape

by Gregory Benford
Drama: A Californian scientist in the 60's find signatures of tachyons in a spin resonance experiment which turn out to comprise an urgent subatomic message.
Links: the author chats on LabLit's forums • Amazon (UK)

Cosm

by Gregory Benford
Drama: Amidst academic intrigue, a high-energy physicist creates an unusual object which she suspects could be a pocket universe.
Links: the author chats on LabLit's forums • Amazon (UK)

Twistor

by John Cramer
Drama: A physics postdoc and graduate student access a portal to the dark-matter universe.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Secret

by Eva Hoffman
Drama: A futuristic account of a cloned young woman which contains a substantial amount of credible detail by a non-scientist who has done her homework.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Survival

by Julie E. Czerneda
Drama: A biologist studying salmon gets captured by alien archeologists for her unique perspectives on migration, featuring startling accurate field biology culture (first part of a series, 'Species Imperative').
Links: Amazon (UK)

His Master's Voice

by Stanislaw Lem
Drama: A large team of scientists try to decode a message from space, featuring a great depiction of how scientific collaborations work.
Links: Amazon (UK)

The Swarm

by Frank Schatzing
Drama: Deep-sea intelligent life seeks revenge on man's careless environmental ways, with realistic scientist characters (and a cameo by a real one).
Links: Our piece by its translator • Amazon (UK)

Red Mars

by Kim Stanley Robinson
Drama: People arrive on Mars and debate the ethics of terraforming, featuring realistically drawn science and scientists (Part 1 of a trilogy).
Links: our author interview • Amazon (UK)

Green Mars

by Kim Stanley Robinson
Drama: The scientist settlers, now technically traitors, rebel against Earth (Part 2 of a trilogy).
Links: our author interview • Amazon (UK)

Blue Mars

by Kim Stanley Robinson
Drama: Mars looks beyond Earth to the future (Part 3 of a trilogy).
Links: our author interview • Amazon (UK)

The Gold Coast

by Kim Stanley Robinson
Drama: A near-future California becomes obsessed with technology and divided by a battle between weapons manufacturers and terrorists.
Links: our author interview • Amazon (UK)

Trouble with Lichen

by John Wyndham
Drama: Two scientists investigating a rare lichen make a remarkable discovery.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Master and Commander

by Patrick O'Brian (and others in the series)
Naval adventure: Chronicles the voyage of a ship with a science-friendly captain and his very scientific ship's naturalist
Links: our related essay • Amazon (UK)

Films

Creator

(Dir. Ivan Passer)
Romantic Comedy: A grieving scientist (Peter O'Toole) tries to clone his late wife; the most realistic molecular biology labs on film, in our opinion.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Outbreak

(Dir. Wolfgang Petersen)
Thriller: A military softie (Dustin Hoffman), a scientist (Rene Russo), a monkey and a brilliant supporting cast save the free world from viral catastrophe.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Contact

(Dir. Robert Zemeckis)
Thriller: An astronomer (Jodie Foster) risks her career by devoting herself to the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Dante's Peak

(Dir. Roger Donaldson)
Thriller: Volcanologist Harry Dalton (Pierce Brosnan) tries to convince a city council that the local mountain is about to blow, with realistic science as well as scientists.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Deep Impact

(Dir. Mimi Leder)
Thriller: Amateur and professional astronomers feature in this realistically realized tale of a comet on a collision course with Earth, starring Robert Duvall.
Links: Amazon (UK)

I Am Legend

(Dir. Francis Lawrence)
Thriller: One scientist (Will Smith) must find a cure for a gene therapy cure gone horribly wrong.
Links: our review • Official Site

Plays

Blinded by the Sun

by Stephen Poliakoff
Drama: Scientists squabble as cold fusion goes belly-up.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Copenhagen

by Michael Frayn
Historical drama: Mr. and Mrs. Niels Bohr reminisce with Werner Heisenberg over the uncertainty of memory and quantum mechanics.
Links: Amazon (UK)

Les Palmes de M. Schutz

by Jean-Noël Fenwick
Drama/Comedy: Marie and Pierre Curie discover something hot.
Links: IMBD

An Immaculate Misconception

by Carl Djerassi
Drama: A broody scientist finally gets her gloved hands on some sperm.
Links: our author profile • Amazon (UK)

Oxygen

by Carl Djerassi and Roald Hoffman
Drama: Scientists both past and present bicker about who discovered the humble gas.
Links: our author profile • Amazon (UK)

Calculus

by Carl Djerassi
Drama: More bickering (this time about mathematics and the dark side of Isaac Newton).
Links: our author profile • Amazon (UK)

Phallacy

by Carl Djerassi
Drama/Comedy: Art vs. science as a bronze statue catalyzes love and a museum spat.
Links: our review • our author profile • Playwright's website

Autodestruct: the ultimate cure for cancer

by Lizzie Burns
Drama: A man lives on through an immortal cell culture of himself.
Links: our playwright interview • Playwright's website

Safe Delivery

by Tom McGrath and Julie Webb
Drama: A story about gene therapy, lab politics and life.
Links: Edinburgh review

Arcadia

by Tom Stoppard
Comedy: Two cultures collide in this classic tale of order, chaos and landscape gardening.
Links: our review • Amazon (UK)

Galileo (Life of Galileo)

by Bertolt Brecht
Historical fiction: The Church battles it out against rationality in this insight-packed masterpiece.
Links: our review • Amazon (UK)

A Disappearing Number

by Simon Burney and Complicite
Historical fiction: A time-bending fantasy account based on the real life of the genius mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan.
Links: Complicite

Proof

by David Auburn
Drama: Catherine struggles to come to terms with the legacy of her mathematician father.
Links: Amazon (UK)

TV Programs

Numbers

USA TV series from CBS
Thriller: An FBI agent recruits his mathematical genius brother to help solve crimes.
Links: our article behind the show's consultants • Official CBS site

CSI (Crime Scene Investigation)

USA TV series from CBS
Thriller: Forensics detectives with refreshingly realistic scenes from labs, featuring scientists who talk (mostly) like real scientists!
Links: Official CBS site

Supernova

British series from the BBC
Comedy: An astonomer flees the weirdness of Britain for an even weirder experience at an observatory in the Australian outback.
Links: Official BBC site

Eleventh Hour

British series from ITV, US series from CBS (Stephen Gallagher)
Drama: A physicist helps the government deal with various scientific crises.
Links: the author chats on LabLit's forums • Screenwriter's Website

ReGenesis

Canadian series from The Movie Network/Movie Central/Shaftsbury Films
Thriller: A crack team of scientists polices the shadowy dealings of the world's biotech and big pharma.
Links: Official ReGenesis site

The Big Bang Theory

British series from the BBC
Comedy: A theoretical and an experimental physicist live across the hall from a blonde waitress.
Links: Offical CBS site

Lab Rats

British series from the BBC CBS
Comedy: Shenanigans at an inept university laboratory.
Links: Official BBC site