LIKE RABBITS

This collection of interconnected stories imagines the inner lives of people poised at the intersection of history and science.

A new father in the Golden Age of Dutch Science searches for the source of life; two aviators at the cusp of their careers grapple with adulthood and a disastrous crash; a young woman prepares to write the Olympics of mathematics exams in nineteenth-century Cambridge; a manuscript changes hands from 9th-century Baghdad across continents, altering meanings as it goes. Based on historical figures and archival research, in each story the deeply personal and the scientific layer produce unexpected new meanings. The title story Like Rabbits will appeal to fans of scientific biography (Oppenheimer, The Theory of Everything), or to readers of Benjamin Labatut and Andrea Barrett. Nayani Jensen is a writer and historian of science from Halifax, Nova Scotia (Kjipuktuk). After studying Mechanical Engineering and working on climate research projects, she received a Rhodes Scholarship and went on to study English Literature and History of Science at the University of Oxford. In both her academic and creative work, she is interested in merging arts and sciences in interdisciplinary approaches to history, science and fiction. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in publications including Nature, Augur Magazine and The New Quarterly. She received the 2024 RBC Brownwen Wallace award for Emerging Writers from the Writers' Trust of Canada. She is currently completing a PhD in the History of Science at the University of Toronto and working on a collection of historical-science short fiction.