Super late response (sorry!), but yeah, history of science is great stuff. And your point about TESCREALS engaging with science fiction over science is entirely spot-on. (Which was me as a teenager. There but for the grace of god go I...)
Btw, if you want to read a FANTASTIC book dealing with people grappling with plate tectonics, John McPhee's Pulitzer-winning Annals of the Ancient World spans literal decades of interviews with geologists, and you get to start with geologists being deeply skeptical of this newfangled plate tectonics (not dismissive, but not convinced of the breadth of its explanatory power), and work to it being fully accepted science over the course of the book.
I have listened to the entirety of John McPhee's geological books as audiobooks, which is more entertaining than it sounds.
I think the concept of geological Deep Time is very humbling, and it kind of grounds the human condition in a weird way.
John McPhee's so goddamn good, one of the best nonfiction writers out there. The absolute master of nonfiction narrative structure, imho.
And yeah, Deep Time is... a hell of a trip.
Oh I love McPhee and I've never read this one, I am absolutely looking it up. The Control of Nature changed me, absolutely complicated the way I think about the world.
Fuck yeah The Control of Nature is great.
Basin and Range is the first book in the geology series.
Another fav of min is "Waiting for a Ship", about the merchant marine.