As Umberto Eco has declared, “there is something artistic in a scientific discovery and there is something scientific in that which the naive call ‘brilliant intuitions of the artist.’ what they share is the felicity of Abduction” (Eco, The Limits of Interpretation, p. 159). No Italian novelist and thinker in recent years has contributed more to the crossing and redrawing of disciplinary boundaries than Eco, whose work strategically engages with transformative moments in the history and philosophy of science. Examples from Eco's writings – journalistic, literary, and academic – amply demonstrate his observation. Science, as both object of study and method of inquiry, plays an important role in his fiction, particularly in his first three novels – The Name of the Rose; Foucault's Pendulum; and The Island of the Day Before. while not as engaged with science as Eco's previous novels, Baudolino and The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana nonetheless touch on scientific themes. In Baudolino a series of machines – a pump (to create a vacuum), mirrors of Archimedes (to set fire to attacking forces), a Dionysius ear (to overhear conversations) – are implicated in the mystery of the Grasal and the death of the emperor Frederick; in The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, yambo (a.k.a. Giambattista Bodoni), the novel's protagonist, suffers from a scientifically challenging event – a stroke that has left him without autobiographical memory. Thus, science serves as a focal point for all of Eco's fiction, just as his theoretical works take account of the state of scientific work on a number of topics.