Month: December 2025

"Write what you know" remains one of the most common pieces of writing advice – although one that often requires experience to stick. With the desire to appear professional, and with professors grading along their chosen literary styles, learning writing often begins as imitation. But equally so, writers who persists reach a vital moment of giddy insubordination where they stop emulating Raymond Carver or whichever literary idol, cast aside their guilt of autobiographical writing and put their own thoughts on the page. While this might be the bias of the author, I believe that given practice and development, the cadence of your own speech, the textures of your dreams, and your own storehouse of memories can prove just as valid as any writer in the canon. You can be an anthropologist of your own mind and have enough to write a career.

This is, of course, an encouragement to write fiction, but it's also an introduction to Andrea Barret, whose historical short story collection Ship Fever could come from experience or research alike. Is she a scientist writing what she knows? Or did she write her way into science?

The answer seems to be both. According to her website, Barret has a degree in biology and according to Wikipedia, she started, but did not finish, a PHD in zoology, beginning writing in her thirties. Regardless, the stories collected here represent a masterly understanding of pace, perspective, and empathy-building. The main character of "Rare Bird," for example, is wealthy enough to be educated in the 18th century, but despite her cosseted upbringing is still not privileged, as a woman with the mind of a scientist but no outlet for career. Or take the doctor in "Ship Fever," who is motivated by jealousy to wake from his academic complacency and devote himself to a public health crisis. This character turns questionable motivation into ethical action – but pays the cost.

More than most fiction, the stories in "Ship Fever" narrate the actual problems of science. For example, several focus on the Swedish biologist Carl Linnaeus, a towering figure considered "the father of modern taxonomy" but who still clung to mistaken beliefs, like that swallows hibernated in lake bottoms during the winter: a "fact" anchored in Aristotle and propagated by hearsay. This reminded me of Einstein, a luminary who forced a cosmological constant into his theories – not because of scientific reasoning but assumption and later called this his "greatest blunder." When the narrator of "Rare Birds" argues with Linnaeus, Barret glorifies her narrator's thinking but does not disparage her opponent. Bias and pre-conceptions come naturally, even to the scientists among us.

In various ways, all of these stories ask "what is the cost of real science?" What toll is extracted from those opposing orthodoxy? The doctor in "Ship Fever" cannot find patients because, unlike his contemporizes, he does not believe in bloodletting. What happens when an adherence to truth costs a career? We so easily chide yesterday's mistakes but falter when assessing our own, especially when the stakes reach the ultimate. Both "Ship Fever" and a previous Humanities Highlights, The Ghost Map, subject the battle of ideas to the pressures of plague and death, where we cling to the familiar until we can't.

Even still, her collection echoes other Humanities Highlights as well, like The Knife Man, which detailed John Hunter's grisly early surgery techniques; techniques that may have helped bring about reason-based and inductive surgery practices, but came at the expense of true boundary-crossings. Body-snatching, boiling down human remains, tasting bodily fluids, etc. In her own stories, Barret assesses the gamble of science here. What if Hunter's acts had not led to any medical advance? What would that have made him? Similarly, while killing and preserving specimens in the Amazon, the naturalist in "Birds Without Feet" fills journals with details but never arrives at a theory. Did he kill – and numb himself to the process of cutting up bodies – for nothing?

Unanimously, her characters MUST go out and see – and unanimously, they pay the cost of doing so. A Hollywood narrative would have her characters facing the odds and eventually vindicated (maybe even after substantial periods of neglect), their efforts acknowledged and bettering the world. Barret rarely grants her characters such consolation. Linnaeus sends his pupils out to taxonomize the globe, and almost all catch foreign diseases and die. The aforementioned naturalist in "Birds Without Feet" leaves his home and upbringing and does not succeed. The young woman in "Rare Bird" abandons the family manor to practice science in America, but we never learn what came of her. Even Barret's non-science-based narratives repeat this motif; two biologists abandon their marriages only to be disappointed with the life they bought for themselves.

Of course, both the successes and sacrifices of science must be motivated one way or the other (and many do not know whether they succeeded or not, like Gregor Mendel, another of Barret's subjects), but by what? In Einstein's famous speech for the birthday of Max Planck, "Principles of Research," he posits three types of scientists: the careerists, the utilitarians, and those driven by necessity. Einstein extols Planck as the last but does not spell out the cost for those driven this way, which is often great.

This is not to discourage anyone from their chosen career but to advocate for fiction to fill the gap. Fear, betrayal, lapses in memory, failure – these are fiction's terrain and given their full due in Ship Fever. The scientist might fail to discover a theory but find a story nonetheless. The artist cannot determine which stories they can honestly capture, but they should not tire in dipping their nets, just as the scientist (should they find themselves motivated to do so), should not stop witnessing – and thinking through – their world. The writers who develop their own voice and the scientist who validates their theories are those who persist as such. At the very least, excellent fiction like Andrea Barret's gives shape to our often-shapeless narratives and can help us assess our own motivations and whether, like the characters within, we must go out and see.