Interviewing Pippa Goldschmidt

Hellooo!!

A few weeks ago I reviewed an excellent short fiction collection Schrodinger's Wife (and Other Possibilities) by Pippa Goldschmidt . A collection that focuses on science as much as science fiction plus also the people who actually work behind it in particular often the forgotten or should we say omitted key women involved. I was delighted to have a chance to invite Pippa to the blog to talk about the collection.

How do you like to book Schrödinger’s Wife (And Other Possibilities)?

It’s a collection of short stories that are (mainly) inspired by (mostly) women in science, but if that sounds a bit educational and worthy, then you might want to know that these stories also play around with form and genre. Some of them are realistic, historical stories that focus on an episode in the life of a real-life scientist, others are more speculative, set in a future. One of them is told entirely through footnotes, another one is from the point of view of a scientific theory. And by ‘women in science’ I don’t just mean women scientists but also spouses, cleaners, medical subjects…

Many of the tales look at the social history (often less well known) around science. How have these stories come across to you and what draws you to giving a voice to the past?

I used to be an astrophysicist myself, and I was always told that I was one of the first generation of women in that discipline. But that’s simply not true; the more I read around, the more women I discovered who have been forgotten about, or whose achievements were downplayed or incorrectly assigned to men. So, when I started writing, I though I could use fiction to investigate these hidden stories, and open them up. Fiction seems ideally suited to examining the gaps in real history.

In many of the tales we see real life mixed with a scientific principle influencing or echoing the characters. Which tends to come first when your write a story?

They both come at the same time! I can’t write a story unless I can ‘hear’ a character’s voice, understand what makes them tick, and how they think and express themselves. And I enjoy using scientific principles as a way of examining characters, or as a metaphor for their lives.

Which real life character has been the most fascinating to research and why?

To be honest, they’ve all been so interesting. When I’m writing a short story, I’m completely immersed in the relevant characters. But I was particularly intrigued by the German scientists in the story ‘The First and Last Expeditions to Antarctica’ – this is inspired by the real-life missions to Antarctica by East and West German scientists in 1989, the year the Berlin Wall came down, and how these groups - who previously weren’t allowed to communicate with each other - started interacting. And, to make it even more interesting, the West German scientists were all women, for the first time in that country’s history.

Another story ‘Distant Relatives of the Samsa Family’ was inspired by the real-life Institute for Typhus and Virus Research in the early 20th century in the city that was variously Lemberg or Lwow, and is now Lviv. People there volunteered to be bitten by lice so that a new vaccine against typhus could be tested. I was intrigued by the relationship between people and lice, traditionally the lice are viewed as the parasites, but what if you get rewarded for being bitten by lice? What if that saves your life when first the Nazis and then the Soviets come to town? And as you can maybe tell from the title, I also had Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis’ in mind when I was writing this story…

What was the hardest tale to write?

The title story! A few years ago I spent an inordinate amount of time writing an entire novel about the quantum physicist Erwin Schrödinger and his wife Anny, and their complex marriage. There is an apocryphal tale in physics that, when Schrödinger discovered (or invented, take your pick) the wave equation for which he’s famous, he did so whilst on holiday with a ‘mystery woman’ (sic) while Anny was ‘left behind at home’ (sic). That tale always annoyed me it just seemed a lazy and cliched way of viewing women as either sexy mistresses or boring wives. So I wrote a novel about this, in which his ideas about quantum physics (and of course, the cat, which had to make an appearance, as it were) were intertwined with his and Anny’s lives, but I couldn’t sell that novel. So I cut it down and completely rewrote it, and turned it into a long short story, almost completely focussed on Anny and in which she uses Erwin’s ideas about quantum physics to get her revenge on him.

What else can we look forward to from you in the future and where can we find out more in this weird world of social media?

I actually have a non-fiction book coming out in Germany in a few weeks, it’s about my German grandfather and me. A few years ago I ‘reclaimed’ my German citizenship and I wrote about that process, and about returning to my grandfather’s home city of Frankfurt from which he fled in the late 1930s. So far the book is currently only available in German as ‘Deutschstunden’ (from CulturBooks) but I’m hoping it’ll come out in English some day.

On social media, I’m on bluesky as @pippagoldschmidt.bsky.social, and on insta as @pips_in_germany, and I try and regularly update my websites: www.pippagoldschmidt.co.uk and www.pippagoldschmidt.de

If there was one book, not your own, that you wish you could get everyone to read what would it be and why?

My fave reads recently have been: ‘Doppelganger’ by Naomi Klein – a disturbing but also funny deep dive into the weaponisation of our digital selves – I’ll never again confuse Naomi Klein (yay!) with Naomi Wolf (grr..). And ‘All For Nothing’ by Walter Kempowski, a superb novel about the very last days of the Second World War in Germany when that country had completely descended into moral and physical abyss, and Germans who lived in then-East Prussia (now Poland) were fleeing westwards from the advancing and vengeful Soviet Army. I love the way in which Kempowski uses a free indirect style to evoke the inner lives of his characters, and his delicate, ironic style allows us to feel some empathy for even the worst characters. It’s a very tricky balancing act, but he manages it.