Origins

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 also a German version of all stories (https://scienceandfiction.net/de/). Since April 2025, privacy-friendly, GDPR-compliant website analytics are collected using Clicky.

Support

Support the project financially on Ko-Fi through a one-time or monthly donations from 1 Euro onwards! Your support will help fund the domain and other running costs.

Disclaimers

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 (CW), you can’t access a certain publication or anything is unclear, please write me at scicommandfiction@gmail.com.

Credit attribution

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/).

Social media

Follow this project on LinkedIn or BlueSky for regular story updates. From 2022 until February 2025 the project also had an active account on Twitter/X.

Web appearances

• In the scicomm format database from Wissenschaftskommunikation.de under the format Science Fiction Short Stories (in German).
• On the website of the National Institute for Science Communication (NaWik) as a scicomm project (in German).
• In the Clarified podcast about Science & Fiction - with Clara Marx and Helena Hartmann.
• In the Metaphorigins podcast about storytelling science using fictional stories - with Kevin Mercurio and Helena Hartmann.
• In the Research Insider podcast about science communication and science storytelling - with Waywen Loh and Helena Hartmann.