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. The stories are written by different authors and therefore deal with a wide variety of topics - there is something for everyone! New stories are published monthly around the middle of each month. If you want to participate, have a look here.
Each contribution below includes the following:
Browse through all stories or use the tags to search for specific topics (e.g. romance or utopia). There are not only short stories to read, but also comics! The CW stands for content warnings that you might want to know before you start reading.
*This project is accepting guest contributions, and you can see the respective author of each story in the corresponding cover image and on the respective story page. If you want to contribute ideas or stories yourself, you have two options:
Are you interested in sending me a story idea or paper you’d like me to write a story around? Submit your ideas here.
Do you want to write your own story, practice your science communication, and share it with the world at the same time? I am happy to publish your work here as part of Science & Fiction as a guest contribution. Submit your work here.
Science & Fiction is a science communication project launched in January 2023. It was created by Dr. Helena Hartmann. Helena is a neuroscientist, psychologist and science communicator from Germany. She currently works at the University Hospital Essen (DE) as a postdoctoral researcher. Before, she completed her PhD at the University of Vienna (AT). During this time, she was a visiting researcher at the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience (NL). The project started featuring guest contributions from June 2023 onwards. Since February 2023, the project has its own domain (www.scienceandfiction.net) and there is a German version where many stories were translated from English (www.scienceandfiction.net/de).
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 inspired by the scientific results, for example in terms of the theme or underlying phenomenon. The stories therefore do not attempt to exactly 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 also have a look at the original publication if you want to know more about the respective studies.
The German version also contains stories that were originally written in English and translated to German either by the authors or by Helena (the latter using support from DeepL). This can be checked at the end of each story.
If I missed a content warning, you can’t access a certain publication or anything is unclear, please write me at scicommandfiction@gmail.com.
All artwork is created by the authors themselves or using the free version of Canva. To cite a story, please refer to it as follows: Author (month year). Title. Science & Fiction. URL: https://… (e.g. Hartmann, H. (January 2023). Emotion to go. Science & Fiction. URL: https://scienceandfiction.net/stories/1_emotion-to-go/).
The project is listed as a science communication project on the NaWik. Follow this project on X/Twitter or BlueSky for regular story updates.