On Question #1:
That type of fiction is my cup of tea; it provides reading pleasure and vicarious experience even as it profusely adds to one’s fund of knowledge. In fact, for the past two months or so now, every time I get the rare chance to curl down to read a printed book, I’ve been reading in turns two terrific history-science-theology-cosmic fiction novels by Iain Pears: An Instance of the Fingerpost and The Dream of Scipio.
The first, An Instance of the Fingerpost, is about momentous events in England in the year 1663 as told in parallel accounts by a gentleman-unlicensed medical practitioner from Venice; a disenfranchised landowner’s son who has turned murderer; a philosopher who served as chief cryptographer during the time of Oliver Cromwell as Lord Protector of England, Scotland, and Ireland; and a historian and gossip who makes a critique and summing up of the tangled, widely differing accounts of the same set of events by the first three narrators. Here you’ll find a fascinating but terrifying fictional account of how the blood transfusion process was developed by trial and error (the concept of blood type was unknown then, so the experimental transfusions would be done between animal and human, and between humans with just any other human, with all their horrible consequences to the human body!); of how Robert Boyle, one of the founders of modern chemistry, came to be solely credited as the formulator of Boyle’s Law (“The volume of a gas varies inversely to the pressure of the gas”); and of how some of these characters disparagingly viewed the work of Isaac Newton, who at the time was still in the long, tedious process of formulating and validating the physical laws that were to become Newton’s Laws of Motion and Gravitation. The story has so many more intriguing disquisitions about religion, mathematics, astrology, and astronomy; about the deadly strife between the Anglicans and the Papists over essentially the same Christian belief; and about art and ancient history—but I will stop this précis now so as not to preempt your enjoyment of this highly exciting but—I warn you—protracted reading. (As of this moment, I’m still in the midst of the account by the third narrator, so I still don’t know what truths will eventually emerge from the tangled stories.)
The second novel, The Dream of Scipio, likewise consists of parallel accounts, this time of the circumstances around a murder mystery that had its beginnings in Provence in France in the year 486 A.D. during the final days of the Roman Empire. Along the way, it tells of the impact on the story’s major characters of, among so many watersheds in European history, the scourge of the Black Death and of Pope Clement V’s decision to move the seat of the Roman Catholic Church to Avignon in France because of civil strife in Rome. I’ve just finished Part 1 of the three-part book but this early, I can tell you that the book is worth curling up to if you can find time to spare.
On Question #2:
Do you need a Master’s degree attached to your name when you publish a book? If the book is about a professional discipline like philosophy, psychology, education, and management, definitely yes, for it announces to prospective readers that you’ve gone through all the toil and tears and sweat to get a really good grounding on the subject you are talking about. They would then be more inclined to listen to you and to believe in what you say. One happy consequence of this is, of course, that you can sell more copies of your book—assuming that it’s really a well-written, highly instructive work in the first place. Be forewarned, though, that books written by PhDs would likely join your book on the shelves before long. Thus, even assuming that your book is better-written and more instructive than theirs, a textbook or reference book written by a PhD can give your book a run for its money simply on the presumed superior authority of PhDs. This, of course, is why many people with Master’s degrees are eventually constrained to also get PhDs—their ability and talent notwithstanding, they want to remain competitive in the market for knowledge and ideas.
In contrast, a writer of history-science-theology-cosmic fiction in English need not depend so much on academic degrees. He or she needs only to be great storyteller with superb mastery of English—one with a great knack for aggregating and weaving fact and fancy into highly readable and riveting stories that would appeal to sizable reading audiences. In this case, I might add that attaching a Master’s or PhD to the author’s name would be a mistake—it could even spell disaster for the sales of the book. For indeed, all things being equal, people want to read fiction stories by authors who can create the illusion of having lived through the intrigue and dirt and grime of the tales they are purveying, not cut-and-dried and sterile stories by PhDs comfortably ensconced in their academic ivory towers. (And based on what I’ve read so far of his two books, I can tell you that Iain Pears belongs to the former category, so I suggest you read him if you want to successfully replicate what he’s doing in the genre.)
