ABSTRACT
C. P. Snow countered that No young scientist of any talent would feel that he isn’t wanted or that his work is ridiculous, as did the hero of Lucky Jim, and, in fact, some of the disgruntlement of Amis and his associates is the disgruntlement of the under-employed arts graduate. Fred Hoyle’s Ossian’s Ride is a scientific romance marked by the rosiest Utopianism. Note how Vulliamy attacks scientists by employing a conventionally hostile stereotype of university humanists as ‘cloistered’ and ‘abstracted’; instead of challenging the dominant discourse he turns it against a pariah group, and thus reinforces it. Paul Wainwright, professor of English in a minor redbrick, constantly trumpets ‘the selfish stupidity of scientists’. British scientists tend, C. P. Snow tells us, to be irreligious, to be politically radical, and to be moving up the social scale. Oxbridge scientists have an extraordinary propensity to die violently, or to make others die violently.
