"I love strong women, so that's what I write." Author and host of the Debut Spotlight podcast Rachel Barenbaum returns to talk about her latest novel, Atomic Anna, an intergenerational time-travel story. Rachel shares why the 1986 Chernobyl disaster has long been a source of inspiration for her, how she manages to write so visually, and what moral questions she believes more people should ponder especially after the past two years of Covid.
Rachel: I am just a lover of science. One of the big questions that I struggled with, and still struggle with, is what is time? What is this notion of time? A second, an hour, a calendar, it’s something we have invented. We've all agreed on it. It’s really important to have schedules to organize, for example, train schedules, but it's just made up. What is time? I really came at it and Einstein from this philosophical perspective. He wasn't even really a very good mathematician. He was better than me, but he was a not a genius mathematician. He was more this genius thinker. He had genius mathematicians help him.
