Scientists are people too 👩🏻‍🔬🪴🧠💕
So often scientist characters in fiction are hard to find, portrayed in a way that’s scientifically inaccurate, or prone to stereotypes.
Think evil mad scientists, characters with zero social awareness, or people who don’t have interests or hobbies outside of being obsessed with their work.
This list is for books with characters who feel like real people, and just happen to be scientists. Huge nerds with equally huge personalities.
(Will accept fantasy characters who are scientist coded)
created by mirrormaze
last updated April, 2026
Comments
Yessss this is great!! Another problem: When the scientist character is written perfectly fine as a character, but it is clear that the author has absolutely no idea what a scientist's daily life is like, or how scientists generally think. Like obviously we aren't a monolith, but sometimes you just read a scientist character and it's like...the inside of their brain is completely incompatible with scientific training. (Yes I do have a specific book in mind.)
Oooh if you’re willing to name names, now I’m curious.
I have definitely bailed on books based on their Libby previews alone because wow, that is not what doing research or working in a lab is like. I didn’t even read enough to feel like I could mark them as DNFs though, so I’m not remembering which the worst offenders were.
Omg I wanna know the book hahaha, I have a few of these too
Honey Girl by Morgan Rogers. The attempted portrayal of an astrophysicist was absolute dogwater.
I also did not enjoy that book!
Nice! If you’re open to recs, The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal and Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus both seem like they could potentially work here.
This is an excellent list, in fact I’ve read most of these!
