Docent #1: I was trained as a geologist and a diver. We dived at Bikini and Eniwetok. Mostly Eniwetok. The trouble at Bikini is that there were a lot of shots on the same site, so it was hard to isolate the effects. At Eniwetok there were a lot of different sites. We scuba dived and had submersibles, for the deeper sites. We looked at the damage to the coral. This was 20 years later.

Castle Bravo was at Bikini, Mike was the big shot at Eniwetok. There was another shot that was in a tank, a water tank. That let us study the effects for the more modern type of weapons. Like the bunker busters, yes… You have a technical background? (No, but my father was an engineer and I think my grandfather was involved in the British atomic tests.) Yes, many thousands of us were involved.

Ironically I ended up helping to create the specifications we sent to the DOE for new designs. Because I understood the effects, as a geologist, I could advise on changes. Improvements. (More efficient? More destructive?) Both.

Of course I worry they’re going to be used. Did you see the Doomsday Clock? (Yes, and I check it frequently.) Then you know we’re at 90 seconds to midnight. It’s the most dangerous time we’ve ever seen, and people don’t realize. The last of the effective treaties with Russia runs out next month. In the eighties, in the old cold war, people knew what we were up against. Now we’re in a new cold war, and people don’t even know how much danger we are in. I wish we had leaders who understood it.

Docent #2: Back when we had an Atomic Energy Commission, it paid for me to go to graduate school. Nuclear engineering. I worked at Sandia. I have a measly master’s and I worked in safety, an I would write these reports and the scientists would say, “I have a DOCTORATE.” They do say PhD stands for piled higher and deeper…

I was in San Francisco in the seventies and eighties. I loved it. Is it still like that? Are you all right? I was working with colleagues at Lawrence Livermore, and I would get over to the city every chance I got.

I had some other Australians in here this week! You’re from Australia, you know how common uranium is, especially in your country, but you don’t even use it for energy. You sell it all to China. (Yeah, like that’s not gonna come back to bite us.) Yeah, you get the money, but at what cost?

I think we should get rid of them all. Everyone who works on them feels that way. But the trouble is that if we get rid of them, the other guy still has them. There are nine countries that have them, and some of them, the leaders are pretty… Unreliable. (What can we do?) Don’t vote for the unreliable ones. You’re both younger than me. It’s in your hands now.

As far as she was concerned, the feudal era had never ended.

I read 109 books this year only if you count the four series I read (George Smiley, A Dance to the Music of Time, Jinny at Finmory and the Vorkosigan saga) as one each, so there’s probably another 20 or so in there. Looking back, the books that have made the biggest impression were Dan Ozzi’s Sellout, a venture capital story and the perfect accompaniment to My Chem’s Long Live the Black Parade tour; Elaine Pagel’s Miracles and Wonder, which I like so much I’ve started a podcast about it, and Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.

I’ve been annoying my loved ones by thinking aloud that Origin may be the most profound book ever written in English. I first tried to read it when I was fifteen (my older kid: “Why did you try to read it when you were fifteen?” Jeremy: “You know what she’s like.”) Coming back to it forty years later is like returning to La Sagrada Familia with the stained glass windows in; it took my breath away. You may know that of all fictional characters my most ardent affection is reserved for Stephen Maturin. Brilliant, fussy, fretful Darwin is his original.

Origin of Species sees Darwin assembling forty years of patient, painstaking, insightful work in natural history, corresponding with a vast web of respected peers, and synthesizing a staggering amount of data into a careful, considered and powerfully supported argument. At the same time, he understands what the evidence points towards, and what its implications are. Christianity will never be the same again.

Darwin and his wife Emma buried their favorite child Annie when she was ten years old. There’s a glib way to read this – that the loss caused Darwin to turn against God. My impression is quite the opposite. Despite what the promise of resurrection held out to him, and to his beloved wife, Darwin perceives the world with tremendous integrity. One cannot reconcile the account of the creation as written with our current understanding of geologic time. His clarity on this point, and what it cost him, breaks my heart. He stands at the end of a Church of England ontology and with great courage, faces a new and chaotic modernity –

My older kid: “So what you’re saying is, he reminds you of your Dad.” Me: “HEY now. That is UNcalled-for.” Jeremy, sympathetically: “Oh no, have you been perceived?”

English, which had started out as a language of the oppressed, had become an oppressor.

Were there schools? A few, to train servants of the empire.

It was pleasantly cool in the room. The old gentleman took the lid off the iron kettle, which had begun to boil, and as he did so there was a terrible flash of bluish-white light outside. It seemed to rush past from east to west—from the built-up part of Hiroshima, that is, toward the hills beyond Furue. It was like a shooting star the size of hundreds of suns. 

Bring me the bones of Australian babies, the more the better.

I sometimes wonder if all those English country gentlemen who built themselves big houses with long sightlines and high walls did it because they were afraid of people coming across the seas for vengeance. I hope they were terrified.

…just as people in colonized India and Africa often created ways of communicating that remained unintelligible to their European occupiers, so Jesus often hid from outsiders, especially from the Roman occupiers, what he wanted to reveal only to those who, he said, “had eyes to see, and ears to hear.”

I had one trajectory and that was to get out.

You can never make that crossing that she made, for such Great Voyages in this world do not any more exist. But every day of your lives the miles that voyage between that place and this one you cross. Every day. You understand me? In you that journey is.

…she was struck by how private American forces of mercy were straining to offset America’s public agents of cruelty.

Looking at the bright light on the horizon, your first thought was: well, that’s it then. Nuclear war. Sydney’s gone.

…the ‘ancestors’ and the ‘communities’ we believe we have shucked off (where I come from, at least) are still present. They haunt us, not least because they make it possible for us to be alive.

British colonisation was the beginning of the end for natural Australia.

The plunders and even the occupation of earth by the Europeans violated the land. Bennelong hoped they could be taught that fact. It might have been one of the reasons he stayed so long in Sydney Cove, and risked his soul.

The enduring lesson of the Rum Rebellion was the power of the big men of New South Wales.

Like many others who went through that time, he was gripped by what he could think of only as a numbness, though he knew it was a feeling compounded of emotions so deep and intense that they could not be acknowledged because they could not be lived with. It was the force of a public tragedy he felt, a horror and a woe so all-pervasive that private tragedies and personal misfortunes were removed to another state of being

Hard to write about this book without spoilers, so let me just say I raved to the group chat that this deserves to be as well known as Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and a dear Goth friend got it from the library and read it and replied Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God. Which is the correct reaction.

One of the most spectacularly unreliable narrators I have encountered, telling an entirely different story from the one she thinks she is. So brilliantly and exquisitely done. Just read it. (NYRB Classics is about my favorite publisher these days, reprinting so many twentieth century women writers who should be incessantly praised.)

Few and far between are the writers that can kick off an authentic hyperfixation, alas, but Adam Higginbotham has done it to me twice now. His Midnight in Chernobyl is up there with Svetlana Alexeivich in the definitive bibliography of that clusterfuck. Now he takes on the other great engineering catastrophe of the first half of 1986. His is an oddly specific niche.

I am so profoundly torn about the shuttle program. It represented the democratization of space. Its astronaut class, the thirty-five new guys, was the first to include women and people of color. Dad and my brothers and I got up before dawn to watch Columbia’s first launch. When I took the kids to see Endeavour in Los Angeles, I cried. This awkward camel of a spacecraft made the universe bigger: no shuttle, no Hubble Ultra Deep Field. I’m such a fucking fangirl, I have NASA plates on my car.

But NASA straight up murdered the Challenger 7. The agency’s budget peaked during the Apollo program, and the diversity of astronaut class eight was an attempt to build public support for space exploration. It kind of worked! Everybody loved Sally Ride, the hot bi butch with the name right out of Mustang Sally! That line of reasoning led to putting a social studies teacher on top of a missile and, in the presence of her parents who were on camera as these events took place, blowing her up.

NASA’s position was: look at all we can do, with how little money! Everyone can play, even the girls and the brown people! Just keep letting us fly rockets. Politicians were all, I wish to associate myself with these impressive feats! But no, you can’t have any more money. Meanwhile engineers at Morton-Thiokol knew the O-rings would fail at low temperatures. There was an impassioned conference call about it the night before the launch. NASA had so many chances not to kill these seven incredible and accomplished people, and it missed them all.

And then seventeen years later, it did it again.

I think this particular book hit so hard in this election year because we are all of us helpless passengers on a spaceship out of control. Anyway, my hyperfixation – after this book I borrowed everything the SFPL had on the space programs. My standouts: Michael Collins is the best writer of the Apollo astronauts – as somebody somewhere said, his Carrying the Fire reads like EB White got a trip to the moon. First Man is an extraordinary, very literary biography of Armstrong, adapted into maybe my favorite space movie since The Martian. (Armstrong was a near-contemporary of the New Zealand writer Janet Frame, whose An Angel at my Table made a striking compare-and-contrast to First Man. Tl; dr much better to be a weird clever man in the 20th century than a weird clever woman.)

Bringing Columbia Home is the kind of awkwardly written but almost unbearably moving account of the recovery of those astronauts. Leaving Orbit, about the last flights of the shuttle, has a similarly elegiac mood. Finally, the podcast The Space Above Us, which deals with crewed space missions one at a time, kept me and Jeremy enthralled on an entire 12-hour road trip home from Portland. A gem of the genre.