I have a new story out! “Lise Meitner Speaks to the Living” is out in volume 8 of Horror Library, edited by Eric J. Guignard. It’s one of my science history stories, this time about Lise Meitner, who was one of the physicists who discovered nuclear fission. She was invited to work on the atomic bomb in World War Two, but refused on moral grounds. I don’t know how much comfort that would be in the wake of something like Hiroshima and Nagasaki, though… it was still her work being used as the basis for slaughter. That must have been very hard to live with.
In many ways this is a bookend story; the second of a pair. The first of them, “Otto Hahn Speaks to the Dead,” about a chemist who worked on chemical weapons in World War One, was originally published in The Dark.
Meitner and Hahn were friends. Complicated friends, but friends for all that. When push came to shove, one of them went along and one didn’t. That, too, must have been hard to live with. A relationship built on ground seeded with landmines, I think. I wonder how much each of them resented the other, deep down. If they did. (How could they not?)
It was meant to be a two-story thing. Two and done.
I’m not sure that I am done, to be honest.
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