Spy/Doctor/Natural Philosopher Stephen Maturin’s nature explorations in the Aubrey-Maturin series by Patrick O’Brian are always fantastic.
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Yes to both! I agree. Thornton Burgess was my great-great uncle.
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I read mostly science fiction and that’s what is listed below.
Peter Watt’s Starfish trilogy is probably the most convincing “Biological Science Fiction” I’ve read. There’s also a fair bit of biology (xenobiology) in his “Blindsight” and especially “Echopraxia”. (Interestingly, the latter makes extensive use of Portia, the same spider genus that much of “Children of Time” revolves around).
Stephen Baxter’s “Evolution” is fiction telling the story of human evolution from scurrying rat-analogues to the modern day and onwards into the future. Quite fun. He has a lot of biology in his other science fiction - I particular enjoy various stories that talk about life and evolution in really bizarre environments with different physical laws.
Jeff Vandermeer’s “Annihilation” is set in a wildlife refuge with the main character a field biologist.
Some portions of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy deal heavily with ecosystems. I particularly recall one long section where a character is attempting to recreate an alpine meadow on not-entirely-terraformed Mars.
Pretty peripheral, but a character in Iain Banks’ “Player of Games” is a robot (“drone”) who is sometimes more interested in bird-watching than anything else.
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I’m rereading Capek’s War with the Newts currently! Definitely a book that was formative in my youth. As for Vonnegut, his work always seemed to me to teeter on that sci-fi edge. Brilliant stuff, all his novels. I’ll be sure to check out Kegel now too, thanks!
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(This follows an older, long closed topic: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/naturalists-who-love-to-read-fiction/3565).
Here is a series I’m enjoying. i’m not generally a murder, mystery fan, but these are written by an ecologist, who includes a lot of nature discussion in the course of the plot. The protagonist(s) are field ecologists, whose keen powers of observation (developed in the course of their field work), help them solve murder cases.
Nell Ward Murder mystery series from an ecologist’s perspective
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I re-opened the original topic and added your post to it. You can reach out to @forum_moderators to re-open a topic if you like.
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I read a ton, both non-fiction and fiction. Maybe an obvious answer on a naturalist form, but The Overstory by Richard Powers is absolutely fantastic. It changed the way I look at trees and got me involved in local environmental issues in my town. I’ve read it twice and it’s become one of my favorite books, I can’t recommend it enough and I always try to get friends and family to read it whenever someone asks me for book suggestions.
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Cool–these look great! I love detective fiction. T Kingsolver (Ursula Vernon) has a number of horror novels involving the natural world (or the unnatural as the case may be). Her main protagonist in a House With Good Bones is an Archaeoentomologist.
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Serious fiction fan here. Favorite authors include J.R.R. Tolkien (obviously), Ellis Peters, Ursula K. Le Guin, Lois McMaster Bujold, and David Weber.
Weber’s (technically young adult) series The Star Kingdom is about the ancestress of his military sci-fi heroine, Honor Harrington, and said forebearer’s discovery of a sentient species on the sparsely populated planet where her parents have emigrated. It’s a neat series beause it also focuses on the development of the forestry and ranger corps of said planet.
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Just re-read Moby Dick by Herman Melville. a complex and dark 19th century classic. The book provides a detailed and fascinating account of whales and the whaling industry at that time. Much of it is unsettling for modern readers. Interestingly the narrator Ishmael insists that whales are a type of fish, although Herman Mellville was apparently well aware that whales were mammals. Was Ishmael trying assuage his conscience?
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I’ve only read Digger from her writing but omg it is so good, and is one of the pieces of media that just sticks with me and i think about often.
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I really enjoyed Herbert Frank’s Dune for the role water plays throughout the whole book in many different ways (and more natural things that I won’t tell because it contains possible spoilers).
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Hoot by Carl Hiaasen.
It’s basically about a bunch of kids in Florida trying to save a Burrowing Owl nesting site from being turned into a restaurant. Really good book.
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Imagine - if we could return our water to the tribe.
Instead of cremation, embalming, burial.
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I’m glad you brought this up, as I’d not heard of it. I got it from the library today - it’s really engrossing (and so accessibly poetic)!
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Carl Haissen is on a class by himself - so sly, yet so educational!
I have honestly always loved those kids books by Clara Dillingham Pierson: among the pond people is a good one. They are way below my reading level but they are so cute!
Edit: I highly recommend these books if you have kids. All of my copies are ancient bc I have been reading them for so many years, and before that my mom had them, and they taught me how to identify so many species, the caddis flies being one of them.
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If interested in the sci-fi/horror genre, ‘Toadstones’ by Eric Williams (a geologist) has some delicious little stories dealing with natural “wonders”. Fungi, arthropods, prehistoric stuff and whatnot.
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