Not a new concept. We have Charles Lutwidge Dodgson and his Alice books, Isaac Asimov and his Foundation trilogy (and other short stories and novels).
MIT Press, which normally only do really hard-core stuff, has produced two "science" fiction books. One by Dan Llyod (Radiant Cool) and another by Christos H. Papadimitriou (Turing). Former one on phenomenology and consciousness, and the other on computation, AI and wiring of the flesh to the virtual world not unlike Gibson's Neuromancer where virtual sensations (the "sim-stim")could be physically felt.
Yesterday, I saw two books on Amazon called "Gold Bug Variations" and "Galatea 2.2" by Richard Powers. He's written more like "Prisoner's Dilemma". I saw mixed reviews on it so I wonder if anyone else reading this entry has read any of them, or any of his works?
Today, while crawling the net in-between work (I'm faced with a lot of job-related delays today, which is a different story so will not go into it), I found a rather interested site with some articles by a physicist from the University of Washington in Seattle. His name is John Cramer and apparently he writes novels as well as science communication articles (he does the latter really well, I have to say). So I suggest checking it out at http://www.npl.washington.edu/AV/av_index_sub.html
It did make some of the different debates clearer to me (as well as clarify some stuff which I've seen as disparate figures but could now link together). I've only read two articles so far "Quantum Telephones to Other Universes, to Times Past" and "Quantum Time Travel". He has written some novels as well.
Hmmm...I suppose these novels I've just mentioned will fall under the category of novel of ideas rather than science fiction. So what is the literary merit of a piece of work that is heavy on the ideas but not necessarily heavy on the plot and characterisation? Should a person claiming to study literary works be studying these works at all? Or would that be more under the province of cultural studies and communication science? And in the age of the uncanonical, what determines the literary merit of a work being studied anyway? I am sure lots of debate has been going on on this (I've seen it around trade journals of English studies) because it also affects the way you structure the programme for college level studies. I should find out how the literary studies programme is structured for the national literature of my country.
what bout subtle science fiction and novel of ideas? One that comes off the top of my head is Borges.
Anyway, I am making a long list of them for now, as I go along.
NB. I was really excited to see two books on mathematical fiction I had read as a teenager, "Fantasia Mathematica" and "Imaginary Numbers : An Anthology of Marvelous Mathematical Stories, Diversions, Poems, and Musings", on Amazon. If you have never read them, check them out here
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