Rika-Kei no Bungaku-Shi

Rika-Kei no Bungaku-Shi (理科系の文学誌)
Hiroshi Aramata
ISBN 978-4875020653

I don't know if there is an English translation of the book.
One tentative English title of the book could be "A Bibliography for Science Students."
But, in Japanese, the word "Rika-Kei" is often used to describe people with sense of natural science. Or in other word, science minded ones.
Thus, more literally it could be "A Bibliography for People with Sense of Science" not "Science Student."

The author, Hiroshi Aramata, is famous for Sci-Fi novels in Japan. For example, "Teito Monogatari" series. Among his wide range works, this book is categorized into critics, and that treats mainly science fiction and fantasy works.

It's more than 15 years ago when I knew this book, and now I greatly regret that I didn't read the book in those days.

Aramata mentions very wide range of topics in the book, but he essentially emphasizes that natural science and literature were not so separated in old days. In other word, literature was one of the most important part of human activities and had power to describe the world since ancient days.

In the book, he begins his discussion from mainly fantasy and Sci-Fi works and gives us very deep insights on various topics. For example, theory of space and time, sociology, linguistics, cryptography, psychology and theory of evolution...

Among his thoughts, the most amazing thing for me is that he pointed out that there is a possibility of horizontal inheritance intermediated by viruses not only conventional vertical inheritance by genes about 30 years ago. Furthermore, he got the idea purely through his speculations around literature and natural science. It's really amazing...