I didn’t quite shove all the other reviewers out of the way to get to this, but it was a near thing. Schrödinger’s Wife (and Other Possibilities) is a short story collection by Pippa Goldschmidt, and the stories are all about science. They are not, many of them, speculative, and when they are it is a near-future sort of science fiction, and the futurity is mostly in the background. It is more accurate to say, perhaps, that this is a collection focused on people and science, frequently based on historical fact, and concerned with how the stories of science have overwritten—or, alternately, underwritten—personal histories.
The first tale of the collection, “Alternative Geometries,” is a case in point. It moves fluidly between the story of the physicist Lise Meitner (robbed of a Nobel prize for being both Jewish and female); the author’s grandmother Lisl (also Jewish, and also an escapee from Nazi Germany); Einstein’s wife Mileva, rumoured to have helped with his maths (and her dead little daughter Lieserl); and the author’s experience hosting the Russian cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova. If you’re waiting for the last to have a Lise-type name as well: she doesn’t.
Instead, the colliding and repeating histories of the women of this story echo through the rest of the collection. There’s a strong focus on women and science, which was part of the reason I was so excited to read the book in the first place; but women are not the only outsiders, and they are often isolated, like Meitner was, for reasons that aren’t exclusively related to their gender.
If “Alternative Geometries” highlights the often disappointing and frustrating history of women in science, then “The First and Last Expeditions to Antarctica” illustrates that isolation in science is often more broadly applied. My favourite piece in the collection, it begins with an all-women team of scientists arguing their way to a seasonal stay in Antarctica. The women on this team are used to being refused opportunities in research, but persistence and a little manipulation get them a chance that would otherwise be denied them.
All this comes despite the objections of the deciding committee, who describe a women-only team as a “gimmick” (p. 65) and raise all sorts of perceived obstacles to their presence on the continent. One of the women laments the “obsession with toilets” (p. 85) that is representative of this sort of obstruction, but she only does it once the team is alone at Neumayer base on Antarctica. There’s no need for performative gratitude there; the women know that failure, on some level, is expected of them, and become ever more irritated at the micromanagement of their very distant sponsors: “They probably think that their whole world is going to crumble apart now they’ve let women into their precious base” (p. 76).
Check-ins and basic communication with other Antarctic bases are standard, but there is one facility that the West German women are forbidden to contact: At Georg Forster base is a team of East German men, and the Cold War exists on the icy continent as it does everywhere else. But the year is 1989, and while both teams are isolated in Antarctica, the Berlin Wall falls. The men at Georg Forster don’t know what to do. Is their information from the outside world even reliable? If they respond in the wrong way, will their families at home be punished? What about the teenage daughter of the meteorologist, who rebels in attention-getting purple jeans? Is she safe? One of the men has spent years informing on his community—often filling his reports with “utter nonsense” (p. 80), like cheese preferences and breakfast foods, because if he didn’t do it someone else would, and he was trying to keep his family safe. How can he explain himself if he’s found out?
The men, too, have been forbidden to contact the West German base. Both teams, in the end, disobey, the desire to reach out simply too strong. They quietly build their own scientific bridges over radio waves. The men advise the women on how to fix frozen sewer pipes, and the women advise the men on how best to handle job interviews in the West, with interviewers who will see them as outsiders.
This, then, is a story of two politically isolated scientific groups finding ways to help each other, because science and human connection should be more important than politics. Lise—another Lise, here the leader of the women’s mission—points out that, upon finding out that they were an all-women group, the leader of the men “congratulated us! Who else has bothered to do that?” (p. 85). As outsiders in a changing world, they can support each other in ways that more established scientific communities might not think to adopt.
Science is inescapably impacted by politics. I am not just talking about the biases that exist (and will continue to exist) in the practice of science, but also the way that science is influenced, and often even censored, by political interference. We can see this in many examples of science history, and we can see it all too frequently today. Knowledge of this history, then, is not simply theoretical. The dynamic between science and politics is an ongoing interaction, and one that can, in extremis, be leveraged by scientists themselves. Lise Meitner and a number of other refugee scientists, for instance, were able to escape Nazi-controlled countries in World War II due to their perceived value as researchers. In another example, the Soviet biochemist Lina Stern was sent into exile (rather than executed) following the Night of the Murdered Poets, again because of her perceived value to science. If science has, in its history and its present, both isolated and targeted minorities and other outsider groups, it can also mobilise to protect them.
The story “Distant Relatives of the Samsa Family” is an example of this. The lovers of literature and insects amongst us will recognise, in this title, a reference to Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (1915), in which the hapless Gregor Samsa wakes one morning as a cockroach. At least, the popular assumption is that he’s a cockroach. Kafka was rather more ambiguous in his verminous presentation, but cockroaches are sufficiently disgusting to many people that this particular interpretation filled the mental gap.
The protagonist of “Distant Relatives” is Galia, and she is not a cockroach. Not literally, anyway, although the association with vermin develops on two different levels—both of which are disturbing. Galia is a Ukrainian Jew in 1940. She is also a young woman from an impoverished family who is due to be married. It is an arranged marriage, and neither she nor her prospective bridegroom are especially happy about it. Galia attempts to brainstorm her way out of the marriage, and her chosen solution is to make herself appear unclean. She does this not through cockroaches, but through lice.
The local university has a helpful methodology. Colonies of lice are kept in boxes attached to the human body, and it takes three weeks of this close and constant connection to gorge the creatures on sufficient blood that they can be harvested. It sounds like a horror movie, but what is created here—apart from the hybrid monstrosity of the human louse—is a vaccine for typhus. One presumes that Galia gets some monetary compensation for this, but the real advantage to her is that being an experimental subject in this way protects her from the SS. Nazis need vaccines as much as anyone else, and Galia’s participation in science is an active shield: The Nazis already consider her vermin, so she might as well benefit. She becomes quite fond of the lice, thanking them for their protection: “We are utterly reliant on them now, and so we will feed them for as long as they want” (p. 170).
This is a horrifying story, yes. It’s one thing to leverage science to your advantage, and it’s quite another to use it for this sort of camouflage, for that almost Kafkaesque assumption of identity. Then again, in Galia’s place I’d do the same thing. I’d like to think that the real-life scientists of the Institute for Typhus and Virus Research used the tools that they had at hand to save who they could, as far as they could.
If there’s a repeated theme in Schrödinger’s Wife (and Other Possibilities), it’s how the practice of science mirrors the life of its practitioners. As a science communicator, I’ve used this technique myself in my own stories: It’s a way of talking about science, and reinforcing relationships and cause-and-effect, in approachable ways. Consider a short paragraph from the collection, focused on the science (original italics):
When a radioactive atom of element X decays into a daughter atom of element Y, nothing connects Y to its parent atom X. Daughter atoms show no trace of their origins. They may in turn be radioactive and decay further.
For readers who may be interested in science but not particularly knowledgeable about it—it might have been a long time since high school physics—this may not be especially meaningful. It can be hard to picture. Embed it in a story where the narrator of that paragraph is the daughter of a woman recently dead from cancer, and it begins to make a little more sense. That daughter finds an X-Ray of her mother’s body; the image comes from radiation marking her decay. It’s hard not to think, while reading, that there can be genetic elements to cancer. Will the daughter, so unwilling to be photographed in turn, show no trace of those origins, or will she be subject to the same decay?
Suddenly that initial paragraph reads a little clearer. Suddenly, too, it’s imbued with emotion, and for all science can be a cause of wonder and horror, it can be one of grief as well, and romance. There’s no romance in “Eurydice at Work” as she looks back from her position at CERN to the death of her mother, but the repeated theme of work mirroring life goes on. Readers might argue that the connections seem a little too convenient at times, a little too obviously synchronous, but I read “Safety Manoeuvres” today, in which Eva, who troubleshoots a robotic Mars rover that’s got itself stuck in unreliable ground, goes home to find a circular crater in the middle of her garden—on the day there was a circular crater in the back garden. Eva suspects her sewage system might have given way; mine certainly did—my septic tank was being dug up, and there I was, shoving coincidence into text.
But what of romance? It’s a lighter application of the theme here, and one that’s very often presented as tongue-in-cheek. In “Yellow,” for instance, the zoologist Margaret Bastock is working on the experiment that brought her to prominence in fruit fly genetics. Drosophila, that staple of the biological laboratory, has a mutation that gives a yellow tint to the bodies of said mutants. Margaret monitors the mating behaviour of these yellow flies, and discovers a link between mutation and behaviour. At the same time, she’s fumbling through courtship rituals of her own: Bombarded with advice on how to land a man, she bores her dance partner rigid with talk of flies, receives and refuses an unwanted proposal, and takes far too long to realise that her interested, supportive lab assistant is not only enamoured with Drosophila. “How about going blonde?” her hairdresser asks (p. 14), and whether or not Margaret appreciates the comparison, I certainly do.
There’s another laboratory love story here that’s a little more black-humoured, and it’s perhaps the most speculative of the lot, although in a very quiet, is-this-really-happening kind of way. It involves an extremely attractive mouse. (“It’s a bit mousy,” Margaret’s hairdresser comments [p. 14], of Margaret’s non-yellow hair, but then she never experimented on love with either insects or rodents.) There is something wrong with the lovely, lovelorn mouse of the delightful “An Investigation Into Love by Babcock and Wainright,” because all the other mice shun it like poison, yet all the humans are completely enraptured by it. There’s Something About Mousey, and all the lab falls in love except the poor lonely mouse, who dies suddenly from what we can can only assume is a broken heart. At this point, all the romantic relationships that have permeated the lab, encouraged by whatever the hell has been wafting off this mouse, fall apart—including that between the two author-experimenters, who suddenly remember the need to squabble about who gets first billing in any subsequent paper.
That’s the most appealing thing about this collection for me: the layers and layers of identity. Some come from outsiders and some from metaphor, but all of them are ways of welcoming readers into the stories of science, and what they find there will always be worth it. One of those author-experiments, wonders whether “things would get better if they found another mouse to love” (p. 152). She starts to notice footnotes in published papers about particularly appealing mice, and the implication is that there’s a strain of mutants wandering the cages of the world’s laboratories, spreading love and sex and disruption wherever they go. Except, by the time “An Investigation” comes along in this collection, readers will have long since picked up on that mirroring effect, and begun to wonder for whom the mice are a metaphor, precisely. If you’re not cackling by the last line of the story and its perfectly reasonable spitefulness, perhaps it’s time for a good hard look in the icy, yellow, lice-infested mirror.
While you’re at it, go check for sunken spots in the garden.