they blinded me with science!

 Who is YOUR favorite scientist in fiction, real or imaginged?  

The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion

Meet Don Tillman, a brilliant yet socially challenged professor of genetics, who’s decided it’s time he found a wife. And so, in the orderly, evidence-based manner with which Don approaches all things, he designs the Wife Project to find his perfect partner: a sixteen-page, scientifically valid survey to filter out the drinkers, the smokers, the late arrivers. Rosie Jarman is all these things. She also is strangely beguiling, fiery, and intelligent. And while Don quickly disqualifies her as a candidate for the Wife Project, as a DNA expert Don is particularly suited to help Rosie on her own quest: identifying her biological father. When an unlikely relationship develops as they collaborate on the Father Project, Don is forced to confront the spontaneous whirlwind that is Rosie—and the realization that, despite your best scientific efforts, you don’t find love, it finds you.

Natural History by Andrea Barrett (not yet released, publishing September 13, 2022)

In these stories, “Barrett transforms deep knowledge of history, science, and human nature into gorgeously vital and insightful stories in which every element is richly brewed, mulled, and redolent.”

Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus

Chemist Elizabeth Zott is not your average woman. In fact, Elizabeth Zott would be the first to point out that there is no such thing as an average woman. But it’s the early 1960s and her all-male team at Hastings Research Institute takes a very unscientific view of equality. Except for one: Calvin Evans; the lonely, brilliant, Nobel–prize nominated grudge-holder who falls in love with—of all things—her mind. True chemistry results. But like science, life is unpredictable. Which is why a few years later Elizabeth Zott finds herself not only a single mother, but the reluctant star of America’s most beloved cooking show Supper at Six.

Bewilderment by Richard Powers

Widowed astrobiologist Theo enrolls his sensitive young son, Robin, in an experimental therapy, involving decoded neurofeedback, leading to fresh insights into the living world, science, popular culture, and politics.

Real Life by Brandon Taylor

Almost everything about Wallace is at odds with the Midwestern university town where he is working uneasily toward a biochem degree. An introverted young man from Alabama, black and queer, he has left behind his family without escaping the long shadows of his childhood. For reasons of self-preservation, Wallace has enforced a wary distance even within his own circle of friends—some dating each other, some dating women, some feigning straightness. But over the course of a late-summer weekend, a series of confrontations with colleagues, and an unexpected encounter with an ostensibly straight, white classmate, conspire to fracture his defenses while exposing long-hidden currents of hostility and desire within their community.  

The Half Life of Valery K by Natasha Pulley

Dr. Valery Kolkhanov, a biochemist and radiation expert carefully concealing his queerness while incarcerated in a Siberian prison labor camp, is abruptly taken to Kyshtym, a top-secret Soviet plutonium-producing site where a 1957 nuclear waster explosion released more radiation than the Chernobyl disaster.

State of Wonder by Ann Patchett

As Dr. Marina Singh embarks upon an uncertain odyssey into the insect-infested Amazon, she's forced to surrender herself to the lush but forbidding world that awaits within the jungle. Charged with finding her former mentor Dr. Annick Swenson, a researcher who has disappeared while working on a valuable new drug, she will have to confront her own memories of tragedy and sacrifice as she journeys into the unforgiving heart of darkness.

The Hungry Tide by Amitav Ghosh

Man-eating tigers, river dolphins, mangrove forest, and the great cosmic metronome of sweeping tides all shape Sundarbans in the Bay of Bengal, Where cetologist Piya Roy conducts arduous research.

Nobody’s Baby But Mine by Susan Elizabeth Phillips

Genius physics professor Dr. Jane Darlington desperately wants a baby. But finding a father won't be easy. Jane's super-intelligence made her feel like a freak when she was growing up, and she's determined to spare her own child that suffering. Which means she must find someone very special to father her child. Someone very . . . well . . .not intelligent. Cal Bonner, the Chicago Stars legendary quarterback, seems like the perfect choice. But his champion good looks and down-home ways are deceiving. Dr. Jane learns too late that this good ol' boy is a lot smarter than he lets on—and he's not about to be used and abandoned by a brainy schemer.

The Intangible by C. J. Washington

Amanda’s rare condition, pseudocyesis, is the perfect case study for Patrick, a renowned scientist specializing in the little-understood psychological disorders.

The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak

A fig tree brought from Cyprus to England is the heart of Shafak’s politically and psychologically complex novel about the troubled marriage between Kostas, a prominent Greek botanist and ecologist, and Defne, a Turkish forensic archaeologist.

Little Gods by Meng Jin

Kiya’s birth during the Tiananmen Square Massacre marks her father’s disappearance and the reversal of her mother Su Lan’s promising trajectory as a gifted physicist.

The Other Einstein by Marie Benedict

In the tradition of Beatriz Williams and Paula McClain, Marie Benedict's The Other Einstein offers us a window into a brilliant, fascinating woman whose light was lost in Einstein's enormous shadow. This novel resurrects Einstein's wife, a brilliant physicist in her own right, whose contribution to the special theory of relativity is hotly debated. Was she simply Einstein's sounding board, an assistant performing complex mathematical equations? Or did she contribute something more?

The Lost Book of Adana Moreau by Michael Zapata

Orphaned Maxwell Moreau, whose mother was a brilliant Dominican writer, becomes a famous theoretical physicist who receives a mysterious old manuscript in Zapata’s keenly enchanting blend of history, science, and fairy tale.

Once There Were Wolves by Charlotte McConaghy

Inti Flynn, who has mirror-touch synesthesia, is a wolf biologist in charge of a controversial effort to reintroduce wolves to the Scottish Highlands.

A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth by Daniel Mason

The Characters in Mason’s mind-stretching historical short stories include a mother seeking a remedy for sickness caused by London’s poisonous fogs; a cruel, scientifically inclined Egyptian pharaoh; and the brilliant, long-suffering naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace.

Unsheltered by Barbara Kingsolver

In the present, unemployed editor Willa Knox inherits a wreck of a house with a history tied to Thatcher Greenwood, a nineteenth-century high school science teacher whose job is imperiled by his teaching Darwin’s theory of natural selection, and his neighbor, Mary Treat, a renowned naturalist and popular-science writer who corresponds with Darwin.

Washington Black by Esi Edugyan

Young George Washington (“Wash”) Black is enslaved on a sugar plantation in Barbados when he is chosen to assist with scientific experiments, leading to a journey to the Arctic and Nova Scotia, where he meets the daughter of an eminent zoologist.

The World to Come by Jim Shepard

Shepard writes remarkably intimate historical short stories with a scientific bent, here dramatizing the doomed Arctic Franklin Expedition and telling stories of hot-air balloonists and  a submarine crew.

(some titles gathered from an article on the topic in Booklist magazine, August 2022, pg 32)