#lablit

[sciwritingfi]

Jennifer Rohn - The Pair-Bond Imperative (2008)

Jennifer Rohn was born in 1967 and received her Ph.D in Microbiology from UW in 1996, with postdoctoral work at Cancer Research UK. She currently works at University College London as a cell biologist and researches UTI treatments. She has written several novels and short stories, and is most known for coining the term “lab lit,” which is a sub-genre of works that describe scientists/science accurately in their stories.

In “The Pair-Bond Imperative” short story, Rohn explores a world in which genetic diversity is of the upmost importance in order to avoid the consequences of inbreeding for their species. The story follows a mother watching her young daughter rebelliously try to “pair-bond” with a boy much too similar to herself, and society’s attempts to stop her.

https://www.nature.com/articles/454666a

“Eve knew the rules like everyone else, but, unlike her mother, when she looked at the man, who was called Paul, she stubbornly saw only differences. His hair was like nothing else on the planetoid: it was the hue of honeycombs held up to the sun, glowing coppery-gold, or perhaps the soft shade of citron fuzz on the insects that created them. His eyes weren't the same blue as hers or anyone else's; they were the blue of the midsummer double-solstice sky when the system's two suns remained half-set all night long, causing a perpetual twilight and a muted glow that blocked out the starlight. When she looked at him, she didn't think about her duty, or the survival of her people. She saw the knowing reciprocal glimmer of his face and felt a deep, implacable tug that had yet to be bred out of their species. She wanted, like a desire for food or water, something that was both part of him and part of her, though she had little conscious understanding of the underlying genetic imperative.”

With powerful imagery, here we see the daughter Eve struggling with their society’s rules, because love still hasn’t been “bred out of their species.” She refuses to see how genetically similar he is to herself, and dramatically details all the wonderful characteristics she sees in Paul with a near-primal desire.

[titania177]

My first review: LabLit

I have been waiting eagerly for my first review, especially from a publication which deals with fiction and science, and here it is: Amy Charles on LabLit. And I must say I am thrilled. But not because it is universally glowing and positive (it isn't), but because it is a beautifully-written and thoughtful review that I can clearly see engaged with my stories and pondered them, the characters, the content, the settings, the structure, and put them in the context of other fiction/art, whether "science-inspired" or not. She says:

Take the Metropolitan Opera’s new production of Doctor Atomic – it’s got an elaborate and very pretty backdrop, patterned on the boxes of the periodic table, with formulae scrawled in light on a scrim; but when I saw it in the New York Times’ video, I saw no particular meaning in it beyond “atomic science here”, and when I heard the director say “I know nothing about science”, I thought: “Science-decorator.” Tania Hershman does better. She’s not a scientist, nor a science-decorator. Instead she’s an interested, dreaming science observer who pays serious and at times myopic attention to sci-tech news stories and considers what they might mean, how people might live with them if handed them like a lump of clay.

While she enjoyed many of the stories, Amy Charles talks candidly about the ones she didn't connect with:

Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain blooms sickly with the living, dreaming meanings of tuberculosis, and of the tuberculosis patient; Thomas Pynchon's Gravity’s Rainbow turns the Poisson distribution into an object of sex-entangled terror. So is Hershman a new Mann? No; neither is she, I think, the new Atwood or Bradbury her blurbists claim her to be. The stories are uneven, and the workmanlike, deadline-driven reporter is still fighting with the poet. Too often she writes over the surface of the plot (this happens, then that happens, and y looks like z) without getting beneath to a transformative dream or an emotionally arresting moment, getting by on snap and rhythm. The stories take place in familiar but abstracted nowheres – a bedroom, an office, a hill – with the places in a story not necessarily joining at any seams, and this gives the strange, untethered effect of photo montage. Hershman gets by with it, but I get the feeling that the strategy is a workaround for having trouble setting short-short stories more concretely.

Interesting, the last point. I won't debate it, I will consider it for a while. She rounds off the review on a more positive note:

What saves most of Hershman’s stories is the fact that she writes well and with a coherent sense of dream, so that even the stories that most remind me of Mondino’s video of Bjork stabbing a doll (“Violently Happy”) are literate and well-made. ....Throughout the stories runs a novelty, a grown woman’s voice telling frank, taboo stories about motherhood and other facts of womanhood. They aren’t comic poses; they aren’t breathy sentimental vignettes. A woman hides from her son, whom she thinks stupid and dislikes. Narrators talk without any attempt at self-delusion or at ingratiating themselves of the burdens of sex, fertility, men, childrearing. As I read, I thought how well Hershman does it and how unusual it is, and what a pity that it should be so in contemporary fiction.

The whole review actually moved me, this is a reviewer who really took the time to look deeply into my stories, and I feel that she "got" what I was trying (consciously or unconsciously) to touch on, to get at, even if it didn't always move her. What I am discovering as friends tell me about their experiences reading the book is that every single story has at least one fan - everyone connects with something different. If there had been one or two stories that everyone mentioned as their favourites, I would worry. But every person who wants to talk to me mentions a different story. And who could ask for more than that? What a wonderful first review to start me off. Thank you Amy, thank you LabLit. Read the full review here.