Vonnegut’s General Electric stories were often bitterly satirical, presaging the increasingly bleak tone his fiction would take in later years.

Moreover, Strand’s account of what went wrong with U.S. science in the latter half of the twentieth century is oddly framed. The culture of “Big Science”—a term first used by the physicist Alvin Weinberg in 1961, toward the end of the period chronicled in The Brothers Vonnegut—certainly has its dystopian aspects, not least in its connections to what President Eisenhower called “the military-industrial complex.” But Strand chooses to focus instead on how, in these years, being a scientist became less fun. The early House of Magic is portrayed as a delightful playground, which “encouraged its scientists’ fixations the way parents encourage a child’s passion for dinosaurs or ants.” But this spirit of childlike wonder is soon suffocated by the sinister agendas of business and government, not to mention the balkanization of science itself. Several times Strand refers to disciplinary specialization (which, we should note, was already well underway by the turn of the twentieth century) as a lamentable development. In the mid-’40s, she says, “the scientific disciplines were just beginning to divide into a series of silos, their boundaries patrolled by ever more focused specialists.” Bernard, in particular, is presented as one of the last of a dying breed of intrepid, generalist “Victorian scientists”: “Bernie was a tinkerer. For him, tinkering was what science was about. You played around with something until you understood it.” This innocent curiosity, Strand claims, was welcomed at the early G.E. Research Lab, before “the white-collar world of the scientists, allied with the government and the military, [began] edging away from the blue-collar world of the Works and into its rarefied technocratic sphere.”

Langmuir, too—the man who gave Wells, and later Vonnegut, the idea for ice-nine—is presented as a brilliant, admirable oddball. In the early ’50s, Langmuir went head-to-head with the Weather Bureau, seeking to prove (via statistics) that cloud-seeding trials had affected rainfall in New Mexico in the summer of 1949, while the Weather Bureau sought to prove (via different statistics) that they hadn’t. “For all his brilliance, Langmuir had failed to see the irremediable flaw in his method pinpointed by the bureau statisticians,” Strand writes. “Langmuir’s calculations of probabilities for rainfall in seeded areas assumed that rain in one area could be considered independently of rain in the next—that in looking for patterns, he could treat rainfall levels as if they were random numbers. But rain in one place is probabilistically related to rain in a place nearby; a touch in one place eddies and flows, setting up a touch in the next.” The Weather Bureau’s analysis took this interconnectedness into account, while Langmuir’s didn’t.

From this, Strand concludes ruefully that Langmuir “did not see that his whole way of doing science—his generalist, do-it-yourself, paper-clip-and-string mode of Victorian science—had become a liability.” But we’re not talking about Big Science versus Victorian science here, really: We’re talking about good statistics versus bad statistics. Langmuir was simply wrong, and we don’t need to reach for broad sociohistorical explanations to understand why he lost out to the Weather Bureau on this one. Strand also equivocates about the effectiveness of cloud seeding itself, which she admits, is still viewed skeptically by many meteorologists: “The general consensus today is that in certain conditions it works in a limited way,” she hedges, though “the huge modifications Irving [Langmuir] promised never came to pass.” If cloud seeding was not, as now seems likely, an important scientific discovery, is it really the best vehicle for a narrative about the decline and fall of Victorian science? Maybe it was simply a dead end?

All of this would matter little if Strand were able to show us Kurt and Bernard Vonnegut as complex, vulnerable human beings, the way Vonnegut shows us characters like Billy Pilgrim, Dwayne Hoover, or Professor Arthur Barnhouse. We are repeatedly told the relationship between the Vonnegut brothers was close, but we get virtually no evidence of their actual rapport. Early on, Strand sketches the Vonnegut family dynamic—“[Kurt’s] brother was brilliant, and his sister was artistic and beautiful. He couldn’t compete on brains or talent or glamour. So he nurtured his penchant for humor.”—but what follows is short on descriptions of actual interactions between the siblings, and sister Alice, whom Vonnegut idolized and to whom he devoted an entire novel (Slapstick), barely appears at all. A traumatic occurrence that would seem to be crucial to the emotional lives of the Vonnegut brothers during this period—the drug overdose, and possible suicide, of their mother Edith in 1944—is mentioned in passing but never really investigated. All of these seem like missed opportunities; and while it’s possible the Vonnegut estate prevented Strand from making use of materials that could have shed light on some of these mysteries, she could still have found a way to at least gesture at some of her narrative’s darker corners.