NUCLEAR FICTION NEWSLETTER, Issue 1. April, 2026

I want to introduce myself to strangers and reintroduce myself to friends as an author of fiction. After a long career as a clinical psychologist and nonfiction author, I am returning in retirement to my early love of writing novels. My first, Fission: A Novel of Atomic Heartbreak will be published by SheWrites Press in January, 2026. I have another novel in the final drafting stage and a third that I have recently begun.

I bring my knowledge of people, relationships, and sexuality to my fiction. Fission is based partly on my parents’ tales of life in the secret city of Oak Ridge during the Manhattan Project. A fictional subplot draws on recent revelations about Soviet atomic spies there. In that book, atomic fission is a metaphor for heartbreak, but whether I write about nuclear fission or nuclear families, I always write about the chain reactions sparked in relationships. And in each of my novels, expect a spunky heroine who is too perfectionistic for her own good!

I have been asked if I started to write Fission because of the movie Oppenheimer. I had long wanted to do something with my parents’ Oak Ridge stories. I was inspired when news broke several years ago about two, previously unknown Soviet spies at Oak Ridge, Oscar Seborer and George Koval. I wondered if my parents had known either one?

My father joined the Met Lab group at the University of Chicago in 1943 as a twenty-three-year-old electronics technician without a college degree. He and my mother, then age twenty, were already married and had a baby. My mother, a University of Chicago undergraduate, had to drop out of college when she had an unintended pregnancy very soon after the wedding. They always recounted how my father’s group leader, the eminent chemist Dr. Charles D. Coryell, invited them to dinner at his home to recruit my father. His group desperately needed experts in instrumentation for their mission of creating plutonium and other radioactive isotopes. One of my parents’ friends, a physics undergrad, was already working in the project and told my father that his skills were needed. My father was reluctant, since he already had a job with Jensen, designing loudspeakers for battleships.

Perhaps it was to convince him of the importance of the project, but by the end of the evening, Dr. Coryell had told both my parents about the atomic bomb and his group’s part in it. When they went home that night, my mother asked my father if he was going to accept the job. He replied, “Honey, I don’t think I have a choice!”

This story always intrigued me, since it was “well-known” that the vast majority of people working in the Manhattan Project had no idea of its goal, other than physicists at Los Alamos and top scientists at Oak Ridge. However, as I read personal accounts from others in the Coryell group, including very extensive interviews with Charles Coryell himself (A Chemist’s Role in the Birth of Atomic Energy Julie E. Coryell, Editor), I realized that most of the highly technical people quickly learned about the atomic bomb. It was rare, however, that a wife who was not working in the project would be in on the secret. I have wished many times that I had asked my mother what it was like to have that knowledge.

When the Coryell group moved to Oak Ridge in September, 1943, my father worked in the X-10 building, which housed the nuclear reactor. Although the Soviets were our World War II allies, the United States government kept the Manhattan Project secret from all except the British. Stalin still got wind of it, and a number of spies were recruited and managed to give bomb design and production information to their handlers. At Oak Ridge, Oscar Seborer and George Koval were electrical engineers working at X-10, like my father. They were both a few years older and came from a similar background—Eastern European Jewish families that had emigrated to the United States. Unlike my father, both believed in communism, a common ideological reaction to the pervasive antisemitism of that era. For a beautifully researched account of George Koval’s career, read Sleeper Agent by Ann Hagedorn, published in 2022. Koval served in the Special Engineering Detachment, an army unit formed to supply the Manhattan Project with brainy recruits with technical skills. He was a radiation safety officer at Oak Ridge. Coincidentally, my father had an accidental radiation exposure there.

I wondered if Dad’s radiation overdose would have brought him together with George Koval, even if he didn’t encounter him otherwise. I used this plot device in Fission but in reality, his exposure probably occurred before Coryell convinced the army to build a special “hot lab,” to work more safely with radioactive materials. The hot lab was completed by January, 1944. In real life, Koval did not arrive in Oak Ridge until August, 1944. Spoiler alert:

the fictional Soviet spy, Dave Sokol, has an affair with the fictional wife in the novel, Doris Friedman.

In the end, I did not solve either the mystery of why Coryell disclosed so much to my parents or whether they knew either Soviet spy. In the novel, however, I created fictional solutions that I hope the reader will enjoy.

For more about writing Fission, excerpts from scenes that will hopefully make you want to read the whole thing, previews of my other writing, and up-to-date notifications of author events, please keep reading this newsletter. I also intend to review other novels and fascinating nonfiction accounts of the Manhattan Project, and even to post video interviews with fellow authors. Next issue: Watch a video of Dad recounting his radiation exposure.

Don and Janet Schover, 1941