Fantasy and creative process
I read almost only fantasy books, mostly medieval fantasy or heroic fantasy ones. I do read a lot of them (several per months) and I started reading them when I was a child.
I do not feel like the fantasy literature influenced my choice of career, but I am conviced that it helps a lot the creative process that underlies any research project. Fantasy if about the “what if…. ?” question, fantasy authors build complete worlds with a given set of rules, laws, politics sometimes, and then they write about what happens under these constraints. It parallels resaearch activities somehow. Fantasy authors are testing hypotheses with their brain, we are testing them with a scientific method. Fantasy authors know that their hypotheses were true when their readers feel like the world they built is coherent, scientists know that their hypotheses were true when statistics and peers agree with them.
The relationship between literature and science is intricate. Both are creative processes and science implies a lot of reading and writing.
Yes, indeed. Fascinating way of perceiving the relationship between literature and science as sharing in the act of conducting thought experiments. And of course, fantasy more than any other literary form (apart perhaps from science fiction) shares in the speculative element of scientific experiments.
There has always been a strong link between ecology and literature. Books like A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold or even Silent Spring by Rachel Carson overlap the boundary between science and literature. In my case I have found a strong aesthetic parallel in the sparse, disciplined style of Hemingway and JM Coetzee, and the discipline and rigour needed in collecting ecological data, which seems as messy and complex as human existence to extract information from. Nevertheless what I find most interesting is that ecologists, after trying to be like physicists for so many years, seem to be allowing the influences of human society on ecological systems to become part of their analysis, and more importantly, embracing the methods used by social scientists to inform the complex systems which they study. How is this related to literature? I consider the exercise of making literature, experiencing literature, to be a different path to truth than science, and I think if scientists can recognise different ways to truth then it can enhance their assessment of their results which is a large part of doing science. Reading literature has been essential in informing my wider understanding of how I do science and how I assess my findings.