In honor of Copernicus’s 545th birthday, I thought I would read T. Koon’s best seller, The Copernican Revolutionary. Imagine my surprise when I found folded inside the back cover the following certificate: This certifies that Miss Etta Clara Hoyt is a regularly approved member of the International Society of the Daughters of the Copernican Revolution […]
Given Ted Porter’s interest numbers and statistics, I would not be surprised if he wrote murder mysteries about gambling and money. The three wives was just icing on the murderous cake.
What if Shapin and Schaffer’s classic, Leviathan and the Air-Pump were one in a series about the adventures of Rob Boyle, deep-sea explorer and treasure-hunter?
Alexandre Kroyé almost certainly would write science fiction, sort of a Logan’s Run dystopian escape adventure.
Rachel Carson would have to write a murder mystery, I suspect, about involved a young socialite who knew too much and a sinister Dr. D.D. Thornton.
When Carolyn Merchant tires of writing careful, scholarly works about ecology and the scientific revolution, perhaps she will try something a little edgier, like murder mysteries.
Thomas Kuhn, writing under a pretty lame nom de plume, tried his hand at historical pulp fiction. The story of a Revolutionary War-era woman who refused to live by society’s patriarchal norms. Ok, there’s no way Thomas Kuhn could have written such a book. But it’s fun to pretend.
In a conversation recently, a student commented something like, “At first I couldn’t recall the title of Biagioli’s book. All I could think of was Galileo Courtesan.”[1] His remark prompted me to wonder what would scholarship look like if written as mid–20th-century pulp fiction. Maybe something like this: I would give anything to stumble across […]