There's some fine science-type literature out there. nerdling is currently enamoured with:


Kurt Vonnegut: Breakfast of Champions,Timequake, The Sirens of Titan
Italo Calvino: If On a Winter's Night a Traveler, Cosmicomics
Ray Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451
E. E. Cummings: A Selection of Poems*
Douglas Adams: The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy
William Gibson: Neuromancer
Tom Stoppard: Rozencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
Primo Levi: The Periodic Table
Anthony Burgess: A Clockwork Orange
Don Marquis: Archy and Mehitabel†
Dr Seuss: Oh! The Places You'll Go!
Edwin A. Abbott: Flatland


* not really scientific literature, as a matter of fact he has a healthy contempt for science, but his poems are weird and beautiful enough that we forgive him
† not scientific literature at all, but it does involve an interview between a cockroach and the planet mars at one stage



For science non-fiction, nerdling heartily recommends:

Erwin Schrödinger: Science and Humanism & What is Life?
Michio Kaku: Visions, Hyperspace
Richard Feynman: Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman!, The Meaning of it All
Eve Curie: Madame Curie
Oliver Sacks: The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, Uncle Tungsten, & An Anthropologist on Mars
Margaret Wertheim: Pythagoras' Trousers
Freeman Dyson: Infinite in All Directions
R. Buckminster Fuller: Utopia or Oblivion



The following books make very powerful statements about the potential for science to be misused:

Arundhati Roy: The Cost of Living
Michihiko Hachiya: Hiroshima Diary



For straight-down-the-line sci-fi, nrrrdling lerrrvs:

Joe Haldeman: The Forever War
Samuel R. Delaney: Babel-17
Isaac Asimov: Fantastic Voyage II, and pretty much anything else
Arthur C. Clarke: Rendezvous with Rama
Stanislaw Lem: The Futurological Congress
H.G. Wells: The Time Machine