To capture a science thriller is to smoke a hydra from its swamp pit. Unlike its cousin the techno-thriller, this stalker of humanity doesn’t reside in glitzy secret government agencies or wear trench coats lined with high-tech gadgets. A science thriller camouflages itself in mild-mannered laboratories and among bleached stacks of NSA grants. This virulent creature may appear to be dead and buried in dusty archives of a university library. Don’t underestimate its malevolence from the innocence of its lair. A science thriller isn’t satisfied with merely controlling the world—this beast is hell bent on unraveling the laws of the universe.

To hunt a science thriller, dead or alive, you have to know its behavior, mating rituals, and sinkholes. A science thriller is not necessarily engaged in technology; it spends its time probing fundamental concepts in nature and charting precipices at the ethical frontiers of modern science. It lives in the intellectual high country where oxygen is sparse and guides are few. To track a science thriller is to leave everything you know about the universe at the door and enter a new paradigm where anything can be questioned, especially the core beliefs about who we are, where we live, and what we are becoming.

You don’t just go out and hunt a science thriller casually. It takes equipment, supplies, backup. No one person has the means to catch one single-handedly. They’re interdisciplinary beasts with tendrils in genomic engineering, robotics, archaeology, and abstract mathematics. They are chameleons that fill the universe and hide in a microbe. Fortunately, a century and a half of dedicated explorers from Jules Verne and H.G. Wells through Michael Crichton, Gregory Benford, Carl Sagan, Douglas Preston, and Lincoln Child have left behind field guides to these exotic creatures. Oh, they exist all right, despite myths to the contrary. You just have to know where to find them.

PREMISE

From downwind, the rank stench of a science thriller’s premise should point you in the right direction. The premise is the outer scaffolding that dominates the thriller’s characteristic appearance like an exoskeleton and may be the only clue a hunter has in excavating a buried science thriller. The premise must be surprising, profound, and tangible. Cool science perspires from its pores. A seasoned tracker will know that to procure an intact specimen, the only place to start is looking for a mind-bendingly original premise.

Cool science, the kind you see on the front page of Nature, is as hard to describe and easy to recognize as a Van Gogh. It changes foundational perspectives on topics with visceral, self-explanatory importance. It crosses established boundaries of academic departments like nuclear fallout. You may not know from where it spawned, although it is more likely to originate in nanotechnology or quantum physics than in dermatology or forestry. You just know it when it flares its nostrils and stares you down. And once you’ve spotted the premise, there are other clues to confirm your suspicions.

OCTANE

The first such clue is the shrapnel whizzing by your ear. Science thrillers are explosive, and the seeker is wise to approach cautiously from behind mounds of earth. Before you catch your prey, you can expect to climb out of lava-filled chasms, circumnavigate boiling oceans, and dodge everything from pernicious prions to approaching asteroids. It is not an occupation for the weak of stomach. This is a business where there is an assassin in every crowd and a frayed cable holding up every elevator.

PLAUSIBILITY

Hunting a science thriller cannot be a solitary pursuit. Plan on spending intense lunches with other geeks searching for clues. Beware that wherever these thrillers hide, they bring their clones.

Lots of clones. Specious imposters, like imitation DVD’s in a flea market outside a Shanghai karaoke bar. You can’t underestimate your chances of getting fooled, and you may not know until you wrassle it down and write it up. Then some astrophysicist at Berkley tells you this one can’t be real because he’s calculated the azimuth and your figures are way off; and some yahoo virologist at Cold Spring Harbor claims you could never express the sonic hedgehog gene with your enhancer because he’s tried it; and a graduate student in algebraic topology at Princeton has the nerve to call and ask would you please take her name off the acknowledgments next printing because she’s getting flak about your interpretation of Gödel’s theorem.

Rumor has it that in the old days none of this would have been a problem that a sage look and an “Isn’t that interesting,” and a wink to your editor couldn’t finesse. But passing off a cubic zirconium as real in today’s fiction market doesn’t stop there. They organize sardine bars on Amazon for the sharks that come to devour and spit out your alleged thriller which “hasn’t quite got the science right.” There are internet chat rooms where people spend obscene amounts of time to explain how you flubbed up. Soon come the demonstrations, and before you know it, you’ve started a war in Azerbaijan and your publisher cancels the next book.

It’s not a science thriller if your science has holes big enough for the high-tech vehicles your characters drive. Right down to the color of the pipette tips and the way you connect your BNC cables in your laboratory, details matter. The trick is not to catch a thriller that is so fat with technical details that it loses its lithe, muscled form. When each detail counts, your thriller can operate within constraints of real science, but feed on just enough technical calories to make it lean, fierce, and terrifying.

So put on your Kevlar vest, your night-vision goggles, and bring along your wireless handheld to check your facts. It’s going to be a wild ride, but when you’ve caught the scent of a live science thriller, don’t lose it no matter how wide the jaws of hell open to swallow you up. It’s the greatest rush of a lifetime, and worth every scar and parasite you acquire along the way.

© 2005 Jeffrey Anderson

Jeffrey Anderson received his MD and PhD degrees from Northwestern University. His research in neurobiology has appeared in Science, Nature Neuroscience, and Neuron, among other scientific journals. He is a resident physician at the University of Utah in neuroradiology, actively pursuing research in functional MRI of the brain. His first novel, Sleeper Cell, debuts with Berkley Publishing Group in April 2005.