SF authors who are scientists wanted

We are seeking SF authors who have a science degree
for our on-going series of articles listing the scientists that
have inspired them.  You can help.

 

We at SF2 Concatenation have been running a series of short articles by SF authors (folk who have had at least two or more SF books commercially published) who have a degree in science, engineering, mathematics of medicine.  These identify the top ten scientists born in the 20th century that have inspired the scientist SF authors (and by implication perhaps part of their science fiction writing?).  The idea for this series came from one of our co-founding editors, Graham.

The articles are short – a dozen or so paragraphs long – and we do the additional legwork in providing additional links.  The articles are footnoted with a short promotional paragraph on the author themselves.

We restrict the inspirational scientists the authors select to those born in the 20th century so as to exclude the obvious ones such as Newton, Darwin, Galileo and so forth. (Anyone born after the 20th century will not have graduated from university yet.) We do occasionally allow authors an 11th inspirational scientist born earlier as an extra to their top ten born in the 20th century as these articles are meant to be a bit of fun (we don't want to be too restrictive if someone really wants an extra non-20th C.).

The aim is to get at least a score or so of SF authors with a science degree involved and to article post one a season.  If we get more, then great.  So eventually we may do a meta-analysis of scientist SF authors science heroes.

So far we have well over a dozen articles in this series and the contributors often tell us it what an enjoyable exercise it was to do. This is great as it is meant as a bit of fun for them as well as of interest to those of our regulars into science.  For these, reading these articles, occasionally these can illuminate some relatively unknown scientist of interest.

What we would like you – our readers – to do is to let any SF authors you know who have a science/maths etc, degree know of this series by sending them the link to this page and then they can get in touch with us.  And/or you can get in touch with us yourself and nominate a potential contributor to this series.

You can also spread the word on your social media linking to this article.

Potential scientist authors need not currently be working in science but must have a science degree.

To date the series contributors have actually found writing the article took little time; what took much more time was deciding who to include in their individual selections of top ten personally inspirational scientists. Indeed, one contributor took over a year to decide on their top ten but writing took an hour. That's fine with us; we are happy to wait. Indeed, if we get a number all at once we will pace their publicaiton.  What we'd like now is to have a number of SF authors signed up in principle at least to the series who will submit their piece as and when.

Articles so far (autumn 2022) in the series include:-

From this you can see that the mathematician SF authors are in the lead with bioscientists running up. No chemists (wel, one biochemist) and just one physicist SF authors as yet. Let's hope we get a good response and a greater diversity of science in the mix.  Also, what we can say is that we have had a female scientist SF author, but we really would like greater gender balance.

Articles should end with a post-article biographic paragraph about the author, their science background and a few of the key works they have had published, together with the URL for their website/blog/whatever. Hopefully, some of our regulars who may not have heard of them can then follow through.

See the above linked examples as to form and style.

Thank you so much for reading this and for anything you can do to get the word out.

Peter and Jonanthan

 

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