Just rereading “The Martian” and it occurs to me that, aside from all the info about Mars and celestial mechanics, there’s a great deal about botany. I’m wondering if dopers would give the name of a SF story (novel, movie, short, whatever) and indicate what particular science, aside from the usual suspects, figures prominently in it.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is Robotics Fiction.
And so is most of Asimov, I guess.
Stochastic Man, by Silverberg, is about statistical probability analysis.
Oh, and James White’s Sector General stories/novels are all about medicine.
Blindsight has a great deal to do with neurology, and specifically what the difference is between intelligence and sentience.
It’s fantasy, not scifi, but underlying pretty much everything in Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen series (and its offshoots) are archaeology and anthropology, which just happen to be Erikson’s day job.
“The Ugly Chickens” by Howard Waldrop is probably the only science fiction story where the science is ornithology.
Tau Zero by Poul Anderson is about relativity.
Robert J Sawyer’s WWW trilogy (Wake, Watch, Wonder) covers the interweb and AI pretty well.
There are a few (such as Babel-17 by Samuel Delany, Embassytown by China Mieville,Native Tounge by Suzette Haden Elgin, and Stories of Your Life by Ted Chiang) [URL=“http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/33918.China_Mi_ville”] that center around linguistics
For that matter, linguistics is also the most rigorous science in Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet, the first book in his Space Trilogy. All of the physics etc. is at an indistinguishable-from-magic level, but the main character is a linguist, and it does actually give some detail on his process of learning the aliens’ language.
On a related note, the plot of Girl Genius a while back involved a prison for mad scientists. Most of them were the sort who made the predictable giant robots and death rays, or maybe Frankensteinian biological constructs, but one of the characters in the prison was a mad sociologist.
Would agronomy be a better match?
Stretching the bounds of “science” a bit, Rudy Rucker’s White Light is about the mathematics of infinity.
Heinlein’s “Tunnel in the Sky” has some nice bits on political science, such as defining a “lack of confidence motion.” For a lot of us, this was our first introduction to some of these ideas. There are also some poli-sci ideas in “Starship Troopers.” (And a few more in “Job: A Comedy of Justice.” Also some economics.)
Prostho Plus, from 1971, by Piers Anthony, is a humorous novel with a dentist for the main protagonist, and the misadventures he goes through doing dental work around the galaxy.
Speaking of Chiang, I just read his collected stories in Stories of Your Life, and noted that he had stories that fell into interesting scientifiction subgenres such as Old Testamtent Fiction, Kabbalah fiction, and Mathematics fiction as well.
“The Andromeda Strain,” (the novel) was heavily into (of course) microbiology.The part where one of the scientists is exposed to Andromeda and requests the injection of the serum that wipes out all antibodies in your system–and then you might die from diseases we “outgrew” thousands of years ago–kept me up nights as a teen. Plus, how would you incinerate a hovering helicopter so’s not to spread a disease?
I’ve never thought of that as an sf story. Good one, though.
SevenEves taught me more about orbital mechanics than I ever wanted to or will need to know. Also a lot about development of robotics and their potential applications.
Seveneves taught me that Neil Stephenson could randomly pound on his keyboard for a few hours and someone would publish it.
Asimov’s Robots of Dawn is more about politics than robotics. My favourite of the series.
Most of Lem’s works are brilliant philosophical observations about communicology and the science of evolution.
Miller’s Canticle for Leibowitz is about religion. Theology, if you want.
Dish’s Camp Concentration is about alchemy (not really, but it’s really prominent motive)
Clarke’s Dolphin Island: communication with animals, oceanography.