Atomic Fiction

In 1943, the US government established a more or less secret scientific community at Los Alamos, New Mexico as part of the Manhattan Project, the goal of which was to provide the means necessary for developing an atomic bomb before the Germans did. Under the direction of physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientists, engineers, and support personnel working at Los Alamos were charged with designing the bomb itself. By July 1945, they had developed two types of nuclear bombs. In the early morning hours of July 16, 1945, they tested and exploded the world's first nuclear bomb at the Trinity Site, as it became known, in the desert of southern New Mexico. Three weeks later, two bombs were dropped on Japan. What happened at Los Alamos during the war is, of course, part of the historical record. But, it's also the stuff of fiction.

Before I discuss the books, I'd like to make a general observation. Based on my reading, it appears there are some unspoken rules for fiction set in Los Alamos, regardless of the time period. Any book must mention one of the following:

J. Robert Oppenheimer wore a porkpie hat and was sometimes called Oppie.

Bathtub Row was the nickname for a street in wartime Los Alamos, where the houses had bathtubs in the bathrooms.

While waiting for the test bomb to explode at Trinity Site in July 1945, many of the scientists slathered sunscreen on their arms and faces.

If any of the protagonists are adolescents, they are generally smart as a whip and have an above average grasp of physics.

It must contain lyrical descriptions of landscape.

Part One: Margaret attempts to read some thrillers

In 1986, Martin Cruz Smith of Gorky Park fame published Stallion Gate, set in wartime Los Alamos. In it, Joe Peña, a pueblo Indian sent to Leavenworth for sleeping with his commanding officer's wife, is suddenly released. The reason: He met Oppenheimer when Oppenheimer came to New Mexico as a teenager. Peña's job is to be Oppenheimer's driver and to spy on him to see if he shows any communist tendencies. As a character, Peña is unconvincing. He's always in the right place at the right time to hear or see something happen. He has a love affair, becomes Oppenheimer's confidante, helps out with experiments, solves all sorts of problems, and finds spies. The book culminates the night and morning of the Trinity test, which turns into a very busy time for our protagonist. Not only does he have to win a boxing match that night, he also has to stop someone from framing Oppenheimer as a spy, and has to make sure the Trinity test goes off. I wouldn't read this for so much for the Los Alamos parts, but for the interesting subplots about local Pueblo Indian customs, the 1940s music scene in New Mexico, and back-alley boxing.

If you read Stallion Gate and then read Los Alamos by Joseph Kanon, you can be forgiven for wondering if you've seen this plot before. While Los Alamos is a very different book, it shares some characteristics: an outsider who comes to town, a love affair, an investigation, and a final scene set at Trinity. Los Alamos is a murder mystery that revolves around what could have been an interesting question: How do you solve a mystery in a town that's not supposed to exist? In fact, the scenes in which Michael Connolly, the investigator, has to interact with law enforcement in Santa Fe are some of the best in the book. The problem with Los Alamos is that by page 88 to be exact, I was pretty sure I knew who'd committed the murder, so I flipped to the end to see if I was right. I was. (Writing tip: When you introduce a character that you want the reader to think is a minor character so the ending will be a surprise, don't introduce that character with a large amount of detail.) So, why keep reading the next 400+ pages? Got me. I did, but I'm not sure why. If you want to know how Connolly actually solves the crime, how his love affair turns out, or how Kanon portrays wartime Los Alamos, go ahead. But, if you want a mystery with a surprise ending, look elsewhere.

Lest you think I have it in for the mystery/thriller genre, that’s not quite true. Year Zero by Jeff Long is not set during the war, but in a not-so-distant future. It’s an apocalyptic genetic engineering thriller, if such a sub-genre can be said to exist. The plot, which calls for a willing suspension of disbelief on the part of the reader, is overly complicated, doesn’t always make sense, and suffers from less than stellar writing. Despite that, I wanted to know what what he was going to come up with next. Here’s my attempt at plot summary: A collector of illegally gotten relics from the first century is sending fragments of human remains to labs to be tested to find the DNA of the historical Jesus. This unleashes a plague that has lain dormant for 2,000 years. There is no vaccine, and it kills practically anyone who is exposed to it. Panic sweeps across the planet, and Los Alamos, reprising its wartime role as the place that will invent something that saves the world, becomes ground zero for finding a vaccine. The research is led by a 19-year-old female genius, who creates clones from safe first century relics, hoping to genetically engineer a human who has an immunity that can be turned into a vaccine. When an anthropologist searching for the dissertation advisor who double-crossed him shows up at Los Alamos and begins interacting with the clones, even more hell breaks loose.

If you know anything about Los Alamos, this book has some nice touches. For example, instead of the nuclear scientists being in charge, the biologists and chemists run the show. The nuclear experts are relegated to security guards. And, Los Alamos being run by a female scientist, regardless of her age, definitely pushes this book even more toward fantasy.

Part Two: Margaret reads books written for a much younger age group.

Paul Zindel’s The Gadget takes it title from the nickname the scientists gave to the bomb project. In 1944, thirteen-year-old-Stephen is sent from London to live with his father in Los Alamos. We know Stephen’s father is important because they live on Bathtub Row. Stephen is interested in finding the secret of Los Alamos. The plot is somewhat contrived because Stephen is one of these right-place, right-time characters. Despite that, it moves along quickly and holds interest. With his friend Alexei, Stephen visits a sick scientist in the hospital and gets his first hints about the purpose of the Gadget. He and Alexei even manage to sneak into the convoy going to the Trinity Site and watch the explosion of the first atomic bomb. The major surprise in the book has nothing to do with the bomb, but with the ulterior motives of Alexei’s family that Stephen doesn’t discover until it’s almost too late.

The effect that living in a place as isolated as Los Alamos was during the war can have on a family is at the core of Jacqueline Davies’ Where the Ground Meets the Sky. Hazel is twelve when she and her parents move to Los Alamos. The isolation of the town affects each of them in a different way. Hazel’s father retreats into his work, and her mother, who detests the secrecy of Los Alamos, begins to have a mental breakdown. As a result, Hazel is left to her own devices. she befriends some older boys who have rigged an illegal ham radio set. They, like her, want to have contact with the outside world. Breaking a military regulation, they decide to send out a radio signal from a town nobody on the outside is supposed to know exists.

The Secret Project Notebook by Carolyn Reeder humorously and realistically weaves the history of the bomb project with the daily life of twelve-year-old Fritz, his family, and his friends. Of course, Fritz is interested in finding out what’s really going on, and he keeps the information he and his friends collect in a secret notebook. He also gets into trouble. A prank he and some friends play on the mail censor goes a little too far, but that’s nothing compared to what happens when he and a friend go horseback riding in a restricted area. A lot of the book is set at school—in the social studies class—and the characters’ assignments and discussions provide a believable forum for discussing the complexities and ambiguities of the war.

After the war, Los Alamos shifted gears, shed some of its secrecy, and expanded its areas of research. If you want to know what it was like to live there during the Cold War, there’s no better book than Tiger Eyes by Judy Blume (yes, that Judy Blume). In it, 15-year-old Davey Wexler, her brother, and her mother move to Los Alamos to live with relatives after her father is killed. Blume lived in Los Alamos for a couple years, and she nails the place. I had flashbacks to high school the whole time I was reading it. The descriptions of the town, the way the Lab is at the background of everything that goes on, the social cliques at the high school (Do other high schools have Loadies and Stomps?), the hangouts, the pressure to excel academically and go to a good college, etc.

Part Three: Margaret reads serious fiction about the legacy of Los Alamos

Bradford Morrow obviously knows his history and loves New Mexico. His place descriptions are excellent. I’ve been to many of them, and when I read them, I could close my eyes and see the places perfectly. He’s written two books( and I think there will be a third), Trinity Fields and Ariel’s Crossing, about Los Alamos. Both books explore the conflicted feelings people can often have about how and where they grew up and how these feelings subtly affect the choices one makes throughout a lifetime.

Trinity Fields follows two friends, Brice and Kip, who are born on the same day in Los Alamos in 1944. The book’s first scene is set in 1959 when they steal a car and drive to the church in Chimayo to atone for their parents’ work on the bomb. When they leave Los Alamos for college, their lives begin to diverge. Kip goes to Vietnam and Laos, where he takes part in covert operations, and Brice becomes an anti-war activist and lawyer. They both fall in love with the same woman, Jessica, who has Kip’s daughter, Ariel. Jessica marries Brice, who helps raise Ariel. Believing that Kip died in Vietnam, Brice is surprised when, after more than 20 years, Kip calls to arrange a meeting at the church in Chimayo and extracts a promise from Brice that will tell Ariel who her father really is.

Ariel’s Crossing picks up at this point. When Ariel first learns that Kip is her father and still alive, she does nothing. But, three years later, finding herself pregnant by a man who has no wish to be a father, she goes to New Mexico to find him. To me, the most interesting part of this book to me was not ift Ariel would find Kip and what their meeting would be like, but the novel’s major subplot, which involves the Montoya family, who take Kip in at their ranch below Los Alamos. When one branch of the Montoya family decides to reclaim its land in southern New Mexico appropriated by the government for the Trinity test site, the lives of Ariel, Kip, Brice, Jessica, and the Montoyas become permanently intertwined.

The Ash Garden by Dennis Bock tackles major strands of WWII—Hiroshima, the building of the atomic bomb, and the Holocaust. It has three characters: Anton Boll, a German scientist who worked at Los Alamos and went to Hiroshima to study the bomb’s effects; Sophie, his wife, a Jewish refugee he met in Canada; and Emiko, a documentary filmmaker, who was a six-year-old in Hiroshima when the bomb was dropped. Emiko was one of the Hiroshima maidens, a small group of bomb survivors brought to the US for plastic surgery. When Emiko hears Anton give a speech on the fiftieth anniversary of Hiroshima, she asks for an interview. When she visits Anton and Sophie in Canada, Anton reveals an unexpected—and personal-- connection to Emiko. Bock is a beautiful writer, whose descriptions engage all the senses. Not only do you see what he’s describing, you taste it, smell it, and feel it, too.

To say that I enjoyed Oh Pure and Radiant Heart by Lydia Millet would be an understatement. It’s part history, part satire, part commentary, part dystopia, and part time-travel. In 2004, Ann, a librarian in Santa Fe, has a dream about the Trinity test. At the same time she has the dream, three of the scientists who worked at Los Alamos—J Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, and Leo Szilard—are transported into the future, where they are forced to confront the legacy of nuclear weapons. Since the three of them are a little disoriented about suddenly finding themselves in the twenty-first century, Ann and her husband Ben take them in. Ann and Ben use their life savings to take the scientists to Hiroshima, where they are horrified by what the bomb has done. The three of them, with the help of Ann, Ben, and a carnivalesque cast of characters, set out to prove they are who they say they are and rid the world of its nuclear capabilities. By the end, Millet’s packed in a little too much and a few too many crazy characters, but the book’s a great and thought-provoking read. And, when the apocalypse comes at the end, it’s not what you expect.

This novel is one of the few I’ve read that presents the wartime scientists as real people, with quirks and annoying habits, just like the rest of us. It also has several funny scenes. For example, there’s one in a bar where Oppenheimer and Fermi are discussing what they’ve learned happens to them after reading their biographies. And, when Szilard tries to drive a car with power steering and brakes, you can only imagine what happens.

Part Four: Margaret quickly suggests some non-fiction

There's an enormous amount of non-fiction about Los Alamos and the Manhattan Project. You could probably devote the rest of your life to reading it--and never finish! (There's much less fiction. You could defintely get through it.) But, if you'd like some more facts, here's some of my favorites to add to your reading list:

The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes is the classic history of the development of the atomic bomb, and it's excellent.

Katrina Mason's Children of Los Alamos is a collection of fascinating oral histories about what is was like to grow up in Los Alamos, during the war and immediately after.

If you like photographic history, Peter Bacon Hales' Atomic Spaces: Living on the Manhattan Project uses hundreds of previously unavailable and amazing photos to tell the story of the atomic bomb.

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