Lucie Loves Neutrons and the Good Samarium by Thoraiya Dyer (Clarkesworld #219, December 2024)1 opens with Izzy (the main character) with her wife Lucie at their house in France:
Izzy simultaneously adores the French farming village, because stepping into her stone-lined cellar feels like stepping back four hundred years, and loathes the village, because her neighbors’ social attitudes feel like stepping back four hundred years.
This chippiness (first seen in an encounter with the estate agent) is most often manifested in the comments about their neighbour Gaston, an old man who runs a nearby vineyard, but Izzy’s concern about this recidivism is dwarfed by other events that are ongoing in Europe:
Both women’s phones had pinged, and they’d pulled out their devices, to see that the yellow nuclear strike threat warning level had been raised to amber alert. Amber was the second highest level. It meant there was credible information to suggest an imminent attack within a certain radius of their location.
Red alert would have meant duck and cover. Dropping face down, putting her hands under her body, and closing her eyes, until the blast wave passed and debris stopped falling. Izzy had waited, as she always did, heart pounding, to see if missiles had actually been launched.
We learn that both of the women work in the field of nuclear science: Izzy works at a new research reactor nearby, making medical radioisotopes, and Lucie works at ESA with neutron tomagraphs. These nuclear occupations will eventually drive the events at the end of the story but, before then, it is mostly a family soap opera where they settle into their new lives in France and an engineer friend called Miron become a sperm donor for the couple’s first child. While this all this is happening a number of other things occur: a colleague struggles to launch thousands of tiny telescopes to create an orbital array; Izzy finds out that most of Lucie’s extended family died of nuclear test radiation poisoning in Tahiti; Lucie discovers an new mineral that may be able to absorb neutrons to form stable superheavy elements; they receive an allocation of Finnish and Polish war refugees as the war worsens; and Lucie’s baby is later born during an amber alert—a traumatising event for both of the women. Their relationship then deteriorates under the stress of having a young baby to look after and another two tactical nukes being dropped five hundred miles away.
The final section sees Miron arrive unexpectedly. He sees the child for the first time (prompting some defensiveness from Lucie), solves Lucie’s colleague’s launch problem by using the cyclotron in an MRI machine, and then, while talking to Lucie about her work, prompts her to reveal her plan to make anti-nuclear bombs using the new mineral she has been researching and superheavy elements she intends to manufacture in Izzy’s reactor.
Subsequently (spoiler), they launch a test vehicle (based on a drone stolen from Gaston); Lucie manufacturers the neutron absorbing element 124; and, finally, they then decide they need someone else to test the device, handing it over to a secretive third party (while making plans to publicise the discovery). This third party turns out to be the Chinese, who televise a demonstration missile launch which is neutralised by the new weapon. The war winds down, at least on a nuclear level, and the refugees leave. The couple’s lives return, more or less, to normal, and Luc goes to school.
As you can probably tell from the synopsis, there are a lot of moving parts in this story, but, for all that, it unfurls in a relatively organic way—if anything, too organically at the beginning: at times it drags and threatens to devolve into a rustic family soap opera. The other weaknesses I thought it had were the hand-wavium science explanations, the unlikely gadgets that are cobbled together, and the Chinese being the ones who receive the device (under the noses of wartime allied intelligence agencies?) Overall though, it works, and it was a pleasant change to read something that develops organically, has an interesting theme (the anti-nuclear weapon), and sounds like it was written in a British voice rather than an American one (I realise the author is Australian, but still). Awful title.
*** (Good). 10,050 words. Story link.
1. This is one of the 2025 Clarkesworld Readers’ Poll novelette/novella finalists.