Abstract

The articles in this Focus section are devoted to fictional works that take episodes in the history of science as their topic and to the use of fictional techniques in popular histories of science. Along with specifying the obvious defects of many such texts as works of history, the authors are looking to identify literary techniques that might usefully be adopted by historians. Careful reading of some of the best works of fiction can yield a further benefit, since they may raise fundamental issues about the certainty with which we can know the past and the means by which we can represent it in historical writing