Fiction Reviews
Schrödinger’s Wife (and other possibilities)
(2024) Pippa Goldschmidt, Goldsmiths Press, £17, pbk, 248pp, ISBN 978-1-915-98318-3
There is science-fiction and then there is science fiction, in which scientific episodes are re-imagined and re-examined from an alternative - in this case, mostly gendered - perspective. Pippa Goldschmidt has already demonstrated her talent for spinning such fables in her previous collection, The Need For Better Regulation of Outer Space (Culturbooks, 2014) and here she displays to the full her ability to get under and flip over the history of science in a diverse set of stories that are by turns poignant and intriguing but always engaging.
The title is taken from the penultimate piece which is also one of the most powerful. Quantum physicist Erwin Schrödinger’s proclivities when it came to young girls are now well-known and his biographers’ earlier attempts to gloss them are laid out by Goldschmidt as the examples of intellectual pusillanimity that they are. Taking that famous period in late 1925/early 1926 when he had the crucial insights that led to his eponymous wave equation, she revisits it from the viewpoint of his much put upon wife Anny. However, Goldschmidt not only interweaves the known history through Anny’s narrative but also adroitly frames the account within a ‘many worlds’ structure of alternative possibilities. In doing so she further thumbs her nose at the man by reminding us of the leading alternative interpretation of his ‘wave mechanics’.
Other pieces are less weighty but just as compelling and well-crafted. In ‘Mrs McLean and Margaret Are Now In Charge’ the focus is on the first named, who is the charlady at the University of London’s Mill Hill Observatory and is, sadly but typically, overlooked and ignored by the astronomers who cluster around the telescope. Until, that is, they are all taken off to war and she bumps into Margaret Burbridge who, together with her husband and the likes of Fred Hoyle, explained how heavy elements are produced through nuclear fusion in stellar cores. Stories like this and ‘First And Last Expeditions To Antarctica’, about the pioneering all-women West German mission to that continent, and their encounter with the East German team as the Berlin Wall fell, are presented as more or less straightforward narratives. Others are more inventive, however, such as ‘Footnotes To A Scientific Paper Concerning The Possible Detection Of A Neutrino’ which limns the life and defection to the Soviet Union of Italian particle physicist Bruno Pontecorvo through, as the title indicates, the deft use of footnotes.
Similarly enigmatic but also deeply moving is ‘Latent Image’ which explores the nature of mental illness, and its impact on those closest to the sufferer, through the device of photographs and their negatives. In ‘Unsettled’ the device Goldschmidt chooses are the catastrophic consequences of the climate emergency which unsettle the narrator just as her surveillance work unsettles the reader. In a related vein, ‘The Shortest Route On The Map Is Not The Quickest’ is another of my favourite stories and is beautifully reflective, as it considers how personal loss and that which cannot be observed may still push and pull on our worldlines.
Despite the lack of the explicitly fantastical the stories in this volume are definitely speculative and, above all, fabulous, in all senses of the word. It is not just that they are neatly constructed and thought provoking but that, above all, they are immensely entertaining. This is by far one of the best collections I’ve read in a long, long while.
Steven French
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