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Riddley Walker, Russell Hoban’s remarkable futuristic novel about England after a nuclear holocaust. The strength of Canaday’s book lies in the encapsulated history of modern physics he presents to make his case for a connection between fic-

In The Nuclear Muse, John Canaday, poet, teacher, tutor, and student of science, using techniques of literary analysis (close reading of texts with a touch of Derrida), tries to demonstrate that science (specifically physics) and literature share “crucial common ground” (p. xiii). In so doing, Canaday joins the ranks of sociologists, historians, and anthropologists (Bruno Latour, Sharon Traweek, Hugh Gusterson, among others) who have donned literary lab coats and peered into the universe beneath the microscope. Canaday’s approach, much like Gusterson’s, is to examine a number of “texts” produced by physicists: Niels Bohr’s “The Quantum Postulate,” his notable attempt to describe the unintelligible paradox of complementarity; the Blegdamsvej Faust, a humorous rewriting and performance of the Faust myth by physicists at the end of a 1932 conference in Copenhagen; The Los Alamos Primer, lectures used to train newcomers to Los Alamos; and Leo Szilard’s 1961 novella, The Voice of the Dolphins. Canaday also scrutinizes Riddley Walker, Russell Hoban’s remarkable futuristic novel about England after a nuclear holocaust. The strength of Canaday’s book lies in the encapsulated history of modern physics he presents to make his case for a connection between fiction and physics. He explains abstract and complex ideas with an enviable degree of clarity. Yet too often he employs a kind of verbal legerdemain. For example, his deconstruction of the word primer (The Los Alamos Primer) involves hidden meanings—insiders at the lab versus outsiders—and “metaphorical connotations” that Canaday himself admits might “strike many readers as strange or extraneous” (p. 115). Canaday later uses the term “fiction” to indicate “an imaginary structure made of words or actions that do not exist in the ‘real’ world in the particular form in which the fiction depicts them” (p. 124). Defined that way, anything could be fiction. Canaday, of course, wants his definition to apply to the world of quantum mechanics, where evidence of the senses is notably missing. Einstein’s B O O K R E V I E W S