Luminous Fish: Tales of Science and Love

A scientist's singular purpose, and its ruinous influence on human relationships, is brilliantly depicted by Margulis. Highly recommended!

Once I started, I couldn't put this book down. Vivid, real characters, touching insights into our place in life and time. I can't forget the haunting encounter with Oppenheimer. Great read for anyone interested in the human side of science.

Evolutionist and author Lynn Margulis examines the scientific personalities she's known in the course of her profession, considers the love lives of three generations of scientists, and provide stories which would be considered scientific biographies were it not for their added ability to shed insights on interactions between scientific colleagues. The blend of biography and science from an insider holds elements of both and thus provides both real and fictionalized observations - while LUMINOUS FISH may prove a challenge to categorize, it will prove a lively and different pick many a public library holding will wish to acquire.

A suite of connected short stories concluding with a memoir of a youthful encounter with J. Robert Oppenheimer, Luminous Fish is the first work of literary fiction published by world-class microbiologist Lynn Margulis. Revolving around the work and love lives of practicing scientists, it's delivered with a punch. Margulis has an accomplished style: these fictions are immediately enjoyable and very well constructed. "Raoul" stands out as pulling together the widest range of narrative gambits. This story follows the scientific life of the shy French Jewish protagonist from his adolescent hazing in Vichy France to his emergence on the international circuit of atmospheric and space science (suggestive of the NASA milieu of Margulis's collaboration with the British atmospheric chemist James Lovelock, originator of Gaia theory). His young American lover Rene takes over the narration midway with a long letter of amorous frustration, from which point Margulis lets these characters with whom we're now intimate have increasingly larger portions of the saying of the story. In each piece singly, and as a connected series, the denouement is deft, brutally efficient, and satisfying.