Oppie Redux

A lot about J. Robert Oppenheimer has survived an otherwise horrific, but complex, project, of which he was technical leader, the Manhattan Project. He was affectionately known as “Oppie,” self-caricatured in Panama hat atop dangling cigarette, complemented by the skinniest of frames,. The factual story of the Manhattan Project is brilliantly told in Richard Rhodes Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Making of the Atomic Bomb” (1986). The recent box office-hit movie about Oppie brought to film his personal story as described in Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s “American Prometheus: the Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer” (2005).

And now Oppie resurfaces in a work of historical fiction by first-time novelist Rachel Robbins, in “The Sound of a Thousand Stars” (2024). Mid-twenties PhD physicist Alice Katz signs on, along with a lot of other young people, for a mysterious and secretive war-related project in the no-man’s-land of Los Alamos, New Mexico. It was a time when women physicists were even rarer than now and often served as only the pencil-and-paper “computers” for male “colleagues.”

It is a tale of hard-drinking young people recruited to help build the “gadgets,” atomic bombs to be dropped first in New Mexico as the Trinity test of theory, and then as a horror of man-on-man at war over Hiroshima and Nagasaki during a few days in August 1945. Actually, not over, as some wanted it to be, but on, with the best pilot in the Air Force at the Enola Gay flight controls for Hiroshima first, Captain Paul Tibbets. That flight carried the “Little Boy” payload.

The young people did not know what the end product of their work was to be at first. They just came to Los Alamos to be part of something to which someone thought they could contribute. But they mingled with the great names of the times, including Oppie himself, often as host of his many parties, Robert Serber, Hans Bethe, Isidor Rabi, and Richard Feynman. Some of these people speak to us in a documentary video: “I Am Become Death: They Made the Bomb,” directed by Arthur MacCaig (1995). It is no longer listed in the WLN on-line catalogue and hard to find elsewhere (But librarians do amazing things!).

Among these young people were Alice and Caleb Blum, protagonists in a story both historical fiction and romance. They are what the author imagines of her grandparents, who were actually among the young recruits at the time. A tale of two opposite backgrounds, Alice of financial comfort, social connections, and secularity, and Caleb of the poorest of the poor with orthodox religion in his formative bones.

Chapters are, alternately, from the viewpoint of one or the other protagonist, each moving forward in time to the critical days of A-bomb explosions. Interspersed are short chapters from the point of view of a fictional, surviving victim of the Hiroshima event. His name is Haruk Sato and his tale is a “Story Told Backwards.” It begins with August 1996, when Haruki is disabled with a limp and an oxygen tank for what remains of a shattered life after the Hiroshima bombing. Only suicide is on his mind at this point.

It is hard to imagine a more unique historical setting and circumstance in which to place an evolving romance, but Rachel Robbins has cleverly done it, at just the time when a film about Oppie has had such a good run. The book rounds out the earlier Oppenheimer story in fiction for those who prefer fiction to classical nonfiction. If you liked the film, then try this book too, though you might have to ask a librarian to obtain it from outside the WLN, or add it to the catalogue.