Fusion Fragment – ojcade.com

I have a new reprint out! My story “The Meiosis of Cells and Exile,” originally published in Asimov’s, is out in the January issue of Fusion Fragment, which is dedicated to novelettes. I love novelettes, and I’m increasingly writing more of them. They’re a great length for when you want to explore something in a little more depth than a short story would generally allow, but still don’t want to waffle on forever and ask your readers for an hour or more of attention.

“Cells and Exile” is about the Soviet biochemist Lina Stern, who was sent, after a show trial and the execution of her colleagues for anti-fascist activities, into exile. She was in her seventies at the time, so you’d be forgiven for thinking that this whole traumatic, violent experience would have, not to put too fine a point on it, killed her off. Not so. Lina was tough as old boots, and she survived her imprisonment and exile. She even outlived both Stalin and the brutal torturer who jailed her before her exile, and after both their deaths she came back from banishment and went right back to work at the Academy of Sciences, no doubt both deeply grateful and extremely (if quietly) smug.

I’m so glad that this story has seen the light of day again! One day it’ll end up in another collection of mine, one themed around historical scientists, but until that day you can read about Lina in Fusion Fragment, along with the other fantastic novelettes published there.

I have a new story out! Actually, it’s a novelette, which is nice. It’s got a fairly long title to go with it’s lengthy self as well: the full title is “The Women Who Didn’t Win Nobels, And How World Trees Are Not A Substitute.” It’s in the latest issue of Fusion Fragment, and I love them for taking this gargantuan mash-up of a story, I really do. The story is science history and climate fiction and mythology and compromise layered over and over each other, so you see “fusion” is really the best word for it.

“The Women Who Didn’t Win Nobels” focuses on three women who, indeed, did not win Nobel prizes for their work in science: Lise Meitner, Rosalind Franklin, and Chien-Shiung Wu. All of them arguably should have won in their respective fields, but the main storyline here is them spending their afterlives at the World Tree, being interviewed by another woman, another scientist, who is considerably less talented than they are and who has a decision to make. She is looking for advice, essentially, or perhaps she is looking for confirmation. Science comes with compromise, and the decision on where to make that compromise, and the decision on if it should be made at all, is a fundamental one… especially in a world which in which climate change may increase the potential for conflicts. And these three women who, in alternate realities would have received more credit for their work, were all touched in some ways by war and/or conflict, and they have ideas about how such should be navigated.

It’s a story that I’m particularly attached to, so I’m glad it’s finally out there in the world!