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primeideal"Atomic Anna" starts with a bang--literally. In 1986, the Soviet scientist Anna Berkovna is working at the Chernobyl reactor when it melts down. The radiation causes a ripple in space-time, and she jumps to December 1992, when her daughter, Molly (aka Manya), is bleeding out in a secret laboratory in Armenia. Molly tells Anna that she needs to research time travel and change the past to save Molly's daughter, Raisa; Anna also has survivor's guilt from the Chernobyl disaster once she returns to her own time, and so a three-generation family quest is underway.
The next few chapters are less directly SF, and another example of "literary fiction writer switches gears to speculative fiction, results rocky at first." All the chapters begin by identifying the POV character (Anna, Molly, or Raisa), the timestamp, and the time relative to the prologue: "September 1961, Thirty-One Years Before Molly Dies on Mount Aragats" feels like forced drama to remind us of the "countdown"--we know how to subtract--and because some of the early chapters span long time periods, the pacing can feel awkward. (That first chapter starts with Molly age ten, and goes through the summer before her junior year of high school.) Here's young Molly, after a "we'll explain it when you're older" conversation with her adoptive parents:
This slow start primed me to be nitpicky about later developments. I can certainly believe, for instance, that Anna would have had a hard time with sexism in the Soviet labs during and after WWII, not only because women in nuclear physics research were rare (but not unheard of--she meets the RL Lise Meitner!), but also because the Soviet regime was very harsh and brutal towards suspected foreign agents. But for Raisa in 1980s Philadelphia to be the only girl at all in math competitions, or "steal" library books without checking them out because Molly just detests math that much, felt like a stretch--she can still be a special snowflake without being the specialest evar. Also, Anna has difficulty with one time jump because she can't tell whether a handwritten date is in 1970 or 1986. If you're confused about both of the last two digits, wouldn't 1976 or 1980 also be candidates? :P
But as the story unfolds, even the non-SF aspects of family dynamics and how one generation's fears and hopes influence the next become more engaging, and the cascading timelines--what happened "before" Molly's death, both in that timeline and across timelines?--are neat. The author's notes mention that the secret cosmic ray station is actually based on a real place, which I had not expected!
Like "Station Eleven" by Emily St. John Mandel, there's narrative nonlinearity circling around family dynamics that play out across generations. And most specifically, both titles refer to an in-universe comic book that is more fantastical than the characters' real world. Molly finds creating comic books a way to express girl power, but also react against her mother's scientific background; later, Anna sends the fictionalized comic books to Raisa, asking for her help in the research. And like "A Swiftly Tilting Planet" by Madeleine L'Engle, we see the pain and grief in a family over several generations; finding the key to where Anna needs to jump involves forcing her to confront her own past, and the resolution isn't when you might expect.
Bingo squares: Standalone, Name in the Title, Published in 2022, Wibbly Wobbly Timey Wimey, No Ifs Ands or Buts, Family Matters (hard mode and then some).
The next few chapters are less directly SF, and another example of "literary fiction writer switches gears to speculative fiction, results rocky at first." All the chapters begin by identifying the POV character (Anna, Molly, or Raisa), the timestamp, and the time relative to the prologue: "September 1961, Thirty-One Years Before Molly Dies on Mount Aragats" feels like forced drama to remind us of the "countdown"--we know how to subtract--and because some of the early chapters span long time periods, the pacing can feel awkward. (That first chapter starts with Molly age ten, and goes through the summer before her junior year of high school.) Here's young Molly, after a "we'll explain it when you're older" conversation with her adoptive parents:
"Shh," Mama said, and their voice dropped. Molly leaned back and felt the weight of what she had just heard like an anvil on her chest. She didn't understand everything. Space-time, gamma rays, and ripples were all new words, but her instinct was to defend her birth mother. Surely Molly didn't come from a woman who could build a bomb to kill millions of people. But her parents didn't lie to each other--which meant Molly's birth mother built the Soviet atomic bomb, the reason behind that stupid shelter in their basement.
...
Molly went around and around in circles before she convinced herself that Anna was like the superheroes Molly had been reading about. Her power was her brain. She used her brain for good, and evil characters, the Soviets, took what she did and used it for bad. "That's it," she said out loud, convincing herself. "Anna needs to fight them so her work is only used for good. For good guys." The notion helped settle her a bit.
"Kid overhears parents talking about disturbing family secret and jumps to conclusions" felt kind of stale. Similarly, when Anna begins her time travel research, she has the idea that she'll first fix Chernobyl, then jump again to fix her family issues, and a colleague basically tells her "what if you're not able to do both, you need to choose between saving the world and your family," which felt kind of lampshady. Then Anna, and the readers, discover the "rules" to how time travel works in this universe: a jump can last at most two hours, you can only visit the same year twice, and can't be too close (geographically) to your original self. So, because she originally tried visiting her lab in 1985, and that failed, she can't just jump back again to "easily" fix Chernobyl....
Molly went around and around in circles before she convinced herself that Anna was like the superheroes Molly had been reading about. Her power was her brain. She used her brain for good, and evil characters, the Soviets, took what she did and used it for bad. "That's it," she said out loud, convincing herself. "Anna needs to fight them so her work is only used for good. For good guys." The notion helped settle her a bit.
This slow start primed me to be nitpicky about later developments. I can certainly believe, for instance, that Anna would have had a hard time with sexism in the Soviet labs during and after WWII, not only because women in nuclear physics research were rare (but not unheard of--she meets the RL Lise Meitner!), but also because the Soviet regime was very harsh and brutal towards suspected foreign agents. But for Raisa in 1980s Philadelphia to be the only girl at all in math competitions, or "steal" library books without checking them out because Molly just detests math that much, felt like a stretch--she can still be a special snowflake without being the specialest evar. Also, Anna has difficulty with one time jump because she can't tell whether a handwritten date is in 1970 or 1986. If you're confused about both of the last two digits, wouldn't 1976 or 1980 also be candidates? :P
But as the story unfolds, even the non-SF aspects of family dynamics and how one generation's fears and hopes influence the next become more engaging, and the cascading timelines--what happened "before" Molly's death, both in that timeline and across timelines?--are neat. The author's notes mention that the secret cosmic ray station is actually based on a real place, which I had not expected!
Like "Station Eleven" by Emily St. John Mandel, there's narrative nonlinearity circling around family dynamics that play out across generations. And most specifically, both titles refer to an in-universe comic book that is more fantastical than the characters' real world. Molly finds creating comic books a way to express girl power, but also react against her mother's scientific background; later, Anna sends the fictionalized comic books to Raisa, asking for her help in the research. And like "A Swiftly Tilting Planet" by Madeleine L'Engle, we see the pain and grief in a family over several generations; finding the key to where Anna needs to jump involves forcing her to confront her own past, and the resolution isn't when you might expect.
Bingo squares: Standalone, Name in the Title, Published in 2022, Wibbly Wobbly Timey Wimey, No Ifs Ands or Buts, Family Matters (hard mode and then some).
