Speaking of science explanations in SF, or at least science explained by SF authors, there’s a very nice history of dark matter at SFNovelists.com by Mark Brotherton (via Tobias Buckell):
The story of dark matter starts back in the 1930s with Fritz Zwicky, a brilliant but difficult Caltech astronomer, who was studying galaxy clustering. Galaxies group together, apparently under the force of gravity, and between Newton and Einstein, humans seem to have a pretty good idea of how gravity works. There’s a very general relationship between gravity, speed, and size, that governs everything from the orbit of the moon around Earth to how galaxies fly around through the dark voids of the universe. What Zwicky soon realized was this: galaxies in the Coma Cluster were flying around so quickly that the gravity associated with the galaxies he could see with his telescopes was by far insufficient to keep the whole mess from flying apart. So he proposed that there was matter there, dark matter, that he wasn’t seeing. The concept of dark matter, along with many of Zwicky’s other ground-breaking ideas, might have been explored more seriously and more quickly if he didn’t have the bad habit of calling everyone “bastards.”
Given the context, I was hoping for a discussion of dark matter in SF, or maybe some recommendations of SF works dealing with dark matter. But it’s an excellent historical essay, so I can’t really complain. And people can always talk about dark-matter SF in the comments…