Life of a Lab Rat

In a far, dark corner of the world wide waste there's a little oasis of light and intelligent discussion. This is LabLit.com, the culture of science in fiction & fact. It seems to attract, if the fora are anything to go by, mostly practising scientists. Go on, make the joke about needing to get better at it if it makes you feel any better. The odd occasional and regular arts graduates turn up and get a warm welcome, but I do wonder if they sometimes feel like a fish in a bowl with us all looking at them. And if any of them are reading this then let me state quite unequivocally that the thought of experimenting on you had never occurred to me, dear me no.

But I did not come here to talk about that. There was a topic in the forum Science in novels and plays earlier this year in which it was posited that the reason science gets such a poor and inaccurate portrayal on the telly and in books is because real, day-to-day science is, actually pretty humdrum and tedious.

Don't get me wrong, I love what I do, but it doesn't not make for an exciting novel or TV series. As a result you get things like CSI where the science is pants because, and here's the interesting thing, either the science is driving the story or it is irrelevant.

Now you see I know this is wrong, and not because of the reason you might think. All good books are not driven by the setting but by the human imperative — love, hate, conflict, hope, despair — all those things that are arise from human intercourse. I do not deny that you can have very good books that have a single character, and therefore you might argue that I am wrong and the setting is driving, but a little thought shows that it is the human side that makes the story. It is how the person in the book, or play, or whatever responds to those external forces that grip us and keep us entertained.

That's probably why most science text books and papers are so bloody dull, actually.

If indeed CSI and the like do not fail to entertain a discerning audience then the disturbing corollary is not that the writers do not know their trade; rather that the writers simply do not know or care about science. Which is a somewhat sad state of affairs.

But we theorized that it is possible to write an entertaining and exciting story set in a 'real-life' lab. Now this turns into an interesting hypothesis:

It is not possible to write a good story and depict the scientific method accurately and without compromise

Okay, we did not state it so formally, but like good little scientists we set about disproving the hypothesis.
We thought it would be more fun if we didn't have a a single person or individuals separately trying to write a novel on their own, but rather we should try our hand at collaborative fiction, or a 'web story'. Someone (okay, me) had an idea for a plot and we took it from there.

The experiment is underway, and has been for nearly two months. There is some discussion of the experiment, and it is actually progressing pretty well. We are drawing part 1 to a close, and I am ready to give the story a wider readership. I am also hoping that the second part will be based more around the science have some real science in it. Remember that none of us are professional writers of fiction (although to hear the reviewers of my last paper you might think otherwise), but if you get chance to read it let me know what you think, either here or over there.