Welcome to Science & Fiction
Accessible scientific results and exciting fictional stories in one. This is a space for people who like to a) learn about science and b) read science fiction at the same time. New stories are published monthly on the 13th of each month.
Each contribution below includes the following:
- a fictional short story, poem or other literary work;
- a scientific publication related to the story;
- an easy-to-understand summary of the publication and explanation of its connection to the story;
- content warnings (CWs) to highlight sensitive topics;
- and tags to search for story themes.
Disclaimer: Please be aware that while this project connects science fiction with science communication about real scientific results, the short stories are purely fictional and sometimes only vaguely related to the scientific results, for example in terms of the theme or underlying phenomenon. The stories therefore do not attempt to mirror the scientific research or precisely describe its results, they are rather a gateway to make you interested to know more about the science behind it. Please always have a look at the original publication if you want to know more about the respective studies. If I missed a content warning, you can’t access a certain publication or anything is unclear, please write to Helena Hartmann at scicommandfiction@gmail.com.
Guest Contributions
I started this project in January 2023 with writing all stories myself. Since this project is now also accepting guest contributions, you can see the author of each story in the corresponding image and on the story page. If you want to contribute yourself, you have multiple options:
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Are you interested in sending me a story idea or paper you’d like me to write a story around? Submit your ideas here.
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Do you want to write your own short story and share it with the world? I am happy to publish your work here as part of Science & Fiction as a guest contribution. Read about the submission guidelines and submit your work here.
Socials
The project is listed as a science communication project on the NaWik. Follow this project on Twitter or Mastodon for regular story updates. Here you can listen to a 15 min epsiode about the project in the podcast Clarified.
Credit
All artwork is created using the free version of Canva. To cite a story, please refer to it as follows: Author (month year). Title. Science & Fiction short stories. URL: https://… (e.g. Hartmann, H. (January 2023). Emotion to go. Science & Fiction. URL: https://helenahartmann.com/stories/1_emotion-to-go/).
Short Stories
Browse through the stories below or use the tags to search for specific topics (e.g. romance or utopia).
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