The scientific novel is a new genre of literature. It is like a historical novel in which fictional characters are put in an historical setting, but in this case fictional characters are put in a scientific setting, and many of the 'characters' may not be human.

A scientific novel tells a story about some aspect of the natural environment, including the human environment, set in a realistic setting at a realistic time in history up to the present.

A scientific novel differs from science fiction in that all the events and objects in it are based on current scientific knowledge, and do not require stretches of the imagination or extrapolations into the future. A scientific novel may be accompanied by a bibliography of references used in sourcing information for the novel.

• Natural phenomena are dealt with in a subjective manner enabling the reader to feel that they are a part of the natural world, and not observers. Humans are natural phenomena and are as much part of nature as any object of scientific study. There is a certain amount of myth to the concept of objective science.
• Readers should be able to understand or apply scientific ideas directly to their own lives. Scientific stories are our stories, and not stories that belong only to specially qualified people.
• Everything affects everything else and therefore every effect has multiple causes, rather than just one. Scientists have a tendency to give the impression that most effects can be attributed to one or two causes. With the use of description, a scientific novel is able to reflect the reality that multiple causes are responsible for any given effect.

The scientific novel may serve any of the following roles:

• Entertain: Provide a story that is engaging, entertaining and easy to read, with characterization, description, suspense, and all the things that make up a good novel. The great scientific discoveries (eg Newton and Darwin) were made through observation, description, deduction and throwing oneself headlong into life and the natural world. They were not the result of laborious controlled experiments or scientific method.
• Inform: Bring together knowledge from any number of disparate fields of science to inform the reader and create a larger picture of the natural world. Scientists tend not to be good at relating their knowledge to the general public, and because of specialization each individual scientist tends to be confident in only a narrow range of subject matter.
• Challenge: Shed fresh light on current assumptions and perceptions of the natural world and build a new picture of natural phenomena and the world around us. In the information age knowledge is freely available and challenges to scientific doctrine need not come only from inside the scientific community.

• All human stories (including scientific theories) are essentially myths in that they require a certain amount of belief, or are based on certain assumptions. Whether we perceive our existence to be the result of evolution of species, or the result of sexual union of the earth and sky, reflects on how we see ourselves as people and what we are capable of doing with our lives. Neither is essentially any more 'correct' than the other. The main advantage of the myth of evolution of species is that it has enabled greater detail in the story, greater corroboration with other stories (scientific theories) and reflects the greater detail manifested in modern technological civilization. Modern civilization is only possible because of the complexity and robustness of the scientific stories that support it.
• Scientific belief often involves the implicit assumption that everything can be explained through a 'reductionist' interpretation of the world. Reductionist science refers to the inclination to look for answers in the smallest possible entities, such as chemical and biological processes or genetics, which we might call the 'parts'. Reductionism does not take into account how different parts work together as 'wholes'. This novel is written from a holistic science belief that everything is interconnected and cause and effect having multiple strands. Holistic science involves applying the results of reductionist science to a three dimensional interconnected view of the world that we live in.