Recommendations for academic fiction/horror?

Hello, I would love recommendations for fictional stories built on an academic foundation (even if that’s fictional as well) and populated with characters from all sorts of fields of study. Intelligent, leading-in-their-field scholars that make a genuine effort to understand what the plot throws at them and make informed and satisfyingly reflected and intelligent decisions (or, even more fascinating: perfectly logical, horrible mistakes).

An example would be Lovecraft’s stories, especially The Call of Cthulhu. This story was what awoke a deep interest and fascination with the sciences when my working-class parents painted everything to do with science and research as unachievable and ultimately meaningless. I listened to the audiobook by Garrick Hagon relentlessly and the added reverb in his voice made me imagine him speaking to me directly in a grand gothic lecture hall like I’d seen in movies. I loved the mystery but what grabbed me the most was the inherently academic nature of the story. Characters were just as intrigued as I was and each tried their absolute best in their respective fields to get to the bottom of a mystery that I knew on repeated listening they could never understand. As someone who was never exposed to such a delicate approach to a story I was immediately fascinated not just with what was said but with what intricate prose it is told, an interest that’s stuck with me since. As a non-native English speaker I loved going through the story and filling my notebook with everything I didn’t understand like “emeritus”, “bas-relief”, “semitic” or “non-euclidean”, the list went on for pages.

Another example would be Jurassic Park. While Crichtons biogenetic jargon was impressive and fascinating to me at the time, I can now tell how most of it was pulled directly out of his behind (The Lost World is unreadable to me, when rambling takes priority over the plot it reads more like an opinionated essay on the ethics of genetics wrapped in a jurassic park binder than a real story.)

Can anyone recommend me more books like this? I’m in my first year of electrical engineering and starting to lose that spark that brought me here in the first place. Thanks!

by tonebnk