The Technologists: a Historical Thriller Set at MIT

The Technologists, Matthew Pearl's new historical thriller, is set at MIT during the Institute's founding era. The book feels authentic—Pearl spent long hours in the MIT archives—and he has created engaging fictional portrayals of MIT founder William Barton Rogers, early faculty, and students including Ellen Swallow Richards. It's also a page turner that makes MIT history feel personal, even against a backdrop of mayhem and mystery.

Inexplicable disasters—Boston Harbor is in flames after ships collide when their instruments simultaneously fail and a terrifying incident when glass windows melt out of State Street buildings—mean the police need help. First they turn to Professor Agassiz at Harvard, but eventually the upstart Institute for Technology takes a role. A secret group of students, who are about to become the Institute's first graduating class,  step in to apply new-fangled scientific methods to untangle the mystery.

Students also illustrate the struggle between privilege and merit. The protagonist, Marcus Mansfield, is a Civil War veteran, former machinist, and charity scholar. His powerful character and insights illuminate the path to the solution. Technology itself is a topic—viewed with suspicion by the established university up river and labor unions who fear it will take their jobs.

Want more? Random House, the publisher, even offers a prequel. For 99 cents, you can buy or download a short story titled The Professor's Assassin. Set in 1840, Rogers is still a science professor at the University of Virginia when a colleague is brutally slain and he becomes a man of both words and deeds to capture the killer. History and murder, oh my!