Kate Greene - Four Way Interview

Image copyright Dia Feli

Kate Greene is an essayist, poet, journalist, and former laser physicist whose work has appeared in Aeon, Harvard Review, the New Yorker, The Economist, and WIRED, among others. She was second-in-command on the first simulated Mars mission for NASA’s HI-SEAS project. She holds a BS in chemistry, an MS in physics and an MFA in poetry, and has taught writing at Columbia University, San Francisco State University, and the Tennessee Prison for Women. She lives in NYC. Her latest book is Once Upon a Time I Lived on Mars.

Why science?

The mystery! And discovery, but mostly the mystery—the questions, the transmutation of a question into something approaching an answer that often leads to more questions. It’s good if you’re curious. A renewable resource.

Why this book?

I had to write it so it’d stop taking up so much space in the brain. There were too many strange and satisfying connections between my HI-SEAS experience and the rest of life to ignore.

What’s next?

Writing-wise, it’s a poetry chapbook that’s finally come together. I’m also poking at a beast of a larger project that deals with artificial intelligence and 'algorithms of the self.' I hope to queer the usual questions and frameworks around AI.

What’s exciting you at the moment?

In poetry it’s Larry Eigner, a Bay Area poet who wrote from the 50s to the 90s in a fragmentary style that is utterly compelling to me right now. I’m also making my way through Ursula Le Guin’s essays and other nonfiction and short stories by Robert Walser. I’m excited about policy changes forthcoming from the Biden administration and the efforts toward racial equity that seem rooted in practical, useful measures. And finally, I’m very excited about the vaccine for COVID-19. Less excited about the slow roll-out, but still grateful that lives are being saved and hopeful that distribution will improve.

Comments

The Meteorite Hunters - Joshua Howgego *****

This is an extremely engaging read on a subject that everyone is aware of, but few of us know much detail about. Usually, if I'm honest, geology tends to be one of the least entertaining scientific subjects but here (I suppose, given that geo- refers to the Earth it ought to be astrology... but that might be a touch misleading). Here, though, there is plenty of opportunity to capture our interest. The first part of the book takes us both to see meteorites and to hear stories of meteorite hunters, whose exploits vary from erudite science trips to something more like an Indiana Jones outing. Joshua Howgego takes us back to the earliest observations and discoveries of meteorites and the initial doubt that they could have extraterrestrial sources, through to explorations of deserts and the Antarctic - both locations where it tends to be easier to find them. I, certainly, had no idea about the use of camera networks to track incoming meteors, which not only try to estimate where they wi...

Against the Odds - John Gribbin and Mary Gribbin ****

The number of women working in STEM subjects has expanded dramatically, but as John and Mary Gribbin make clear, in the history of science this is a very recent occurrence. Here, they bring us the stories of 12 women, from Eunice Newton Foote, born in 1819, to Vera Rubin, born in 1928 - effectively covering nearly 200 years in that Rubin died as recently as 2016. There are some names that will already be familiar from popular science histories (and deservedly so). You will find, for instance, Dorothy Hodgkin and Rosalind Franklin represented. But there are plenty like Foote that few will have come across, including Inge Lehmann, Chien-Sung Wu and Lucy Slater. While arguably Foote is there primarily to demonstrate the difficulties she faced (her discovery of an aspect of greenhouse gas behaviour was independently bettered within weeks), the rest have all made significant discoveries or developments against the odds and often missed out the recognition the deserved. The most prominent ob...

Pagans (SF) - James Alistair Henry *****

There's a fascinating sub-genre of science fiction known as alternate history. The idea is that at some point in the past, history diverged from reality, resulting in a different present. Perhaps the most acclaimed of these books is Kingsley Amis's The Alteration , set in a modern England where there had not been a reformation - but James Alistair Henry arguably does even better by giving us a present where Britain is a third world country, still divided between Celts in the west and Saxons in the East. Neither the Normans nor Christianity have any significant impact. In itself this is a clever idea, but what makes it absolutely excellent is mixing in a police procedural murder mystery, where the investigation is being undertaken by a Celtic DI, Drustan, who has to work in London alongside Aedith, a Saxon reeve of equivalent rank, who also happens to be daughter of the Earl of Mercia. While you could argue about a few historical aspects, it's effectively done and has a plot...

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