While some have been arguing that books will ultimately disappear, this will clearly not be the case for science. Whether published electronically or as hard copy there is, I think, a substantial market for readable, interesting and comprehensive treatments of serious, science-based issues. While TV nature spectaculars like those presented by Richard Attenborough can be very successful at getting visual messages about science across, there’s still no substitute for a book that allows us to go back over the discussion at any place and time.

Good, well-researched books that look at particular issues in depth, and anthologies of science writing, are more and more important. The great thing about a book is that it endures and, even if it is long out of print, can turn up in second-hand bookstores, on a side table in a rented beach house, or be found by a young person browsing the shelves at home or in a library. 

One other thing we clearly need is more good science stories and science-based fiction for children and adolescents. I wish I had a talent for fiction, and would suggest to any young scientist who can write that this is a very worthwhile goal. 

The scientific literature is vast, but where (excluding science fiction) is the contemporary, imaginative literature of science? Setting aside the ‘end of the world as we know it’ stuff, the various mystery writers who have a forensic pathologist as a central character, Allegra Goodman’s Intuition (about a biomedical research lab) and the terminally despicable Nobel Prize-winning physicist in Ian MacEwan’s Solar, intelligent fiction that features real science and scientists who are believable human beings seems to have declined since the days of Sinclair Lewis, Aldous Huxley and C.P. Snow. There was Michael Crichton, but he made a living out of being hostile to contemporary science. Great science is a fundamentally honourable activity that transforms our reality and is about curiosity, innovation, discovery and insight.

Are scientists themselves uninteresting? 

While some can come across as pitiless bores when put in front of a broader audience, others are wonderful communicators and intriguing people to boot. In the United States, at least, there is a continuing fascination with the flamboyant personality of the late Richard Feynman, the Nobel physicist who was in every way more appealing than MacEwan’s imagined monster. 

A few of the leading science journals, such as Neurology and Nature, now run short fiction pieces, a bit like one or two of the more fanciful pieces included here. Maybe we need annual prizes for the best science-based short story and novel. Vignettes can be fascinating, whether nonfiction or fiction, and collecting those pieces of writing in an anthology is a good place to start.

This is an edited extract from Peter C. Doherty’s Foreword to The Best Australian Science Writing 2011, published by NewSouth.