Roslynn D. Haynes, From Faust to Strangelove, Representations of the Scientist in Western Literature , Baltimore and London. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994, Pp.417, paperback £16.50, (Hardback £45.50). ISBN 0-89263-314-X. Roslynn Haynes, who is Associate Professor of English at the University of New South Wales, has written a scholarly tour de force ; a detailed study of the way in which scientists have been represented in Western literature from the late fourteenth to the late twentieth centuries. Though Chaucer’s deceitful alchemist, the Canon of the Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale , was probably the earliest scientist to appear in Western literature, she settles upon the Faust story, in its several manifestations, as archetypical: the scientist seen as one whose arrogant search for knowledge, usually by arcane means, destroys his humanity, encroaches on matters forbidden by God, and ultimately brings terrible retribution. Dr Faustus, Victor Frankenstein and Dr Strangelove provide her with temporal landmarks in a wide-ranging exploration of the fluctuating literary images of scientists down the centuries, extending into film and pulp science fiction. Amoral, arrogant, bumbling, clumsy, deceptive, devious, forgetful, insensitive, irreligious, power-obsessed, at best grossly misguided, the scientist has usually been anathema to the holistic, religious, naturalistic, aesthetic writer over the centuries. It is almost a relief to come across periods when the benefits of advancing technology briefly overrode fear and loathing of science, and scientists were depicted more positively, as in the mid nineteenth century, (e.g. the upright, reforming Dr Lydgate of George Eliot’s Middlemarch ), or the early twentieth century (e.g. Holsten, who salvages civilization in H.G. Wells’s The World Set Free ). I wish she had included William Cooper’s subtle corrective to C.P. Snow, The Struggles of Albert Woods (1952), an accurate and amusing account of the scientist as a Perfectly Ordinary Person, which was seminal among other post-war British writers such as Kinglsey Amis. However, Roslynn Haynes’s report on her area of literature is generally comprehensive and well indexed, and the notes fill out the text admirably, often with fascinating snippets, such as the origin of the name ‘Bovril’ for a proprietary meat extract, or the titles of the nineteen Frankenstein spin-off films.