Title: Love in the Time of Markov Processes
Author: Megan Arkenberg
Date of First Publication: 2015
Place of Publication: Daughters of Frankenstein
Type: Short Story
Characters: No characters
Themes: QUEER FRANKENSTEIN; WOMEN WRITING MONSTERS; MAD SCIENTIST/MONSTER
Critical Summary: A young woman takes a bus ride and meets a popular scientist whom she has only previously seen in magazines. They sit together the whole bus ride and the narrator explains to her idol how she believes that she could have also been a scientist. After a short conversation about their common interests in science, the woman asks the narrator to become her assistant. Shocked that her idol asked for her assistance, the narrator agrees. From then on, they spend the majority of their time together in the lab on the ocean floor. The idolized woman tells the story about her grievances with her mother, and how her mother passed away. It becomes clear that she wishes the situation was different. Later, the two women start working on an engine that allows them to travel through different realities. The two become closer as they work on their creation and quickly fall in love. Once the creation is complete, the narrator’s lover asks if she would want to use the engine to travel to another universe or reality. With their newly found love, the couple agree to use the engine to travel, only, the problem is that the engine only travels in one direction. The characters become aware that they can never go back to where they started. The lover, eventually, becomes fixated on a redheaded woman she once knew and she tries to send messages to her. The narrator becomes aware of this and realizes that her lover’s feelings have changed. While time goes on, the narrator slowly feels that her lover no longer has the same feelings she did upon departure but disregards those feelings as they drift though another reality.
While Arkenberg does not follow a typical Frankenstein-like story of monsters and scientists, she explores concepts like mad scientists. She illustrates this as her written scientists become obsessed over their creation of an engine. The lover is a mad scientist whom is fixated on the idea of changing the events in her life through a machine. The characters’ creation of the engine ultimately ruins the bond between the two. In addition, the author represents a queer theme where two women produce a machine as a way of having connectivity to each other in a heterosexual dominated society. The engine, their creation, is a birth for the two women. This, ultimately, changes their reality as the two women are unable to produce.
Administrative Notes: Bobbi Stone, CSUF; Cynthia Alvarado (editing)