Universe of Two by Stephen P. Kiernan

July 10. 2020

Universe of Two by Stephen P. Kiernan

At the height of World War II, mathematician Charlie Fish is pulled from Harvard University immediately after graduation and assigned to the Manhattan Project at the University of Chicago.  For security purposes, each scientist is assigned a single task and forbidden to share his assignment with the others working on the project.  Charlie finds himself assigned first to figuring out complex arcs, and later to soldering complicated components.  After a few months, he is reassigned to Los Alamos in New Mexico.

While living in Chicago, Charlie meets a girl named Brenda who works in her family’s music store, demonstrating and selling organs.  Brenda is a lot more interested in all the soldiers on leave than she is in the war or even in Charlie.  When Charlie leaves for New Mexico, he and Brenda agree to write to each other, but that doesn’t stop Brenda from pursuing what she sees as an innocent flirtation with a high school friend, a pilot on leave from the air force.  When the pilot’s intentions turn out to be far more serious than Brenda’s, she decides to follow Charlie to New Mexico.  The bits and pieces that Charlie has been working on turn out to be the detonator for the atomic bomb, and when Charlie realizes the devastation that the weapon will wreak, he is overwhelmed with guilt.  Although Brenda urges him at first to go on with his work, once the first bomb is dropped, they are both overcome with remorse, and their great mental anguish affects their relationship.

The story line is based on the life of Charles Fisk, a real mathematician who worked in Los Alamos on the atomic bomb.  The reader knows almost immediately what Charlie is working on, and it should have been a great home front story.  The secrecy surrounding the project and the devastation that the bomb caused are described well, and there is good research here.  But unfortunately, the story drags and would have been improved by some editing that cut out 50-100 pages (did we REALLY have to hear about all 23 of Charlie's failed attempts to build the detonator, until another character waltzes in and tells him how to do it?).  

There are characters who make no contribution to the story – one character in particular, Mather, is extremely unlikeable and taunts Charlie throughout the book, for no apparent reason other than he thinks he’s smarter than Charlie.  The truly annoying thing is that there is no resolution to their "conflict" - Charlie and Brenda just move away.  There is another character named Beasley who is supposed to teach Charlie how to solder, and instead he is a complete asshole - could have done without him, too.  Why not just put Charlie in a lab by himself with a soldering iron and tell him to see what he can do?  Again, no character resolution.  Other characters are introduced but then disappear - Charlie's friend Monroe resigns from the project one day and vanishes, a cat adopts Charlie in New Mexico, and then disappears with no explanation.  A character should be introduced because they will move the story forward in some way.

The author also did not write his female characters very well.  I did not connect at all with Brenda – she was selfish and pushy, and then all of a sudden, she has turned into a mature woman who helped her husband through a difficult time, but we don’t know how this transformation came about.  There is also too much about their sex life after they get married, coming rather late in the book, that didn’t add anything to the story.  I didn't need to hear about all the times and places they had sex, and what kind of underwear Brenda wore.  You can tell a guy wrote the book, because that's the kind of stuff guys are interested in.  Too much interest in and description of clothes, in general.

Disappointing overall.

Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for providing an eARC in return for a review.