Ship Fever (1996)

Brilliant. Understated, disturbing and very well-written. The stories are infused with science and scientific theories but it's the characters who linger after the book is closed. Highly recommended, and many thanks to Susann for leaving this on my to-read pile. ( )

There's been a lot of talk lately about a fourth culture that would put science and the humanities in productive conversation. There's plenty of art that does this, for example, the work of Steve Kurtz or Eduardo Kac. I know of some literature that does this too, and not only Paradise Lost: Richard Powers' The Goldbug Variations, in which DNA is a great symbolic ediface, comes to mind, as do the several episodes in Byatt's Frederica Tetrology that concern artificial intelligence, "deep grammar," fibonacci numbers, and ecology. Because of a shared concern with 19th-century naturalism, Byatt's Angels and Insects is probably the closest to Ship Fever.

All this is a long-winded way of praising Barrett for this set of stories about science, and natural science in particular, but also a way of saying, too, that many of the calls for "fourth culture" that I've seen (and I confessedly haven't read that many), seem to keep calling for a fourth culture without, however, speaking much about the various ways that artists have already been engaged in putting science--whatever that is--and the humanities in productive conversation. Highly recommended, then, for correcting this, and for its feminism and political engagement (especially in its title story: good for the angry anticolonial Irish who should be in all of us) and also, in its stories about Linnaeus and the (fictional) Marburg Sisters, for its very human concern for memory and loss and memory as a kind of having. ( )

Her characters are realistic. She deals with the sadness of real life - how things don't work out and how real people deal with it - growing old and dying but losing your memory first, giving up a marriage for a love you don't understand and regretting it, sisters and the connection between them, and the struggle to become what you were suppose to be. They are well developed - good examples of what a short story should be ( )

The stories collected here are about scientists and explorers, but tend to be pretty bleak. ( )

A collection of short stories in the category of historical fiction and dealing with famous people and/or incidents in science and natural history. ( )