SUSAN M. GAINES is the author of the novel Carbon Dreams and the science narrative Echoes of Life: What Fossil Molecules Reveal About Earth History. Her short stories have appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies and been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and been selected for the Best of the West. Gaines’s fiction is informed by a youth spent hiking and birding California’s mountains and coastline, and by her education in chemistry and oceanography. She is the recipient of an Art in Science Fellowship at the Hanse Institute for Advanced Study, as well as the 2018 Suffrage Science Award. Gaines divides her time between her native California, Uruguay, and Germany, where she co-directs the Fiction Meets Science research and fellowship program.