I like Robinson’s Mars books and am interested in the atom bomb, so I did not expect this to be so flat. The short story is not provocative or insightful. The essay is a mess of science-y argument—quantum this, neurology that, chaos theory, therefore history is messy—and the interview is aimless, almost without relevance to the preceding elements.

(Perhaps I would have been impressed had I not already been convinced that the massacre of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not necessary to end the war with Japan, nor to avoid an invasion? Not dropping the bomb on citizens should not be astonishing.)