The German literary critic and author Christa Wolf began writing Accident: A Day’s News not two months after the explosion, and completed the manuscript in September 1986. Novelists are usually better equipped to handle history than a current event: The former comes with context, a sense of retrospect and narrative arc, while the latter is still subject to unexpected disclosures. Accident, for instance, seems to have been written under the belief that the explosion resulted from a random accident, something innate to nuclear power itself, rather than a calamitous series of human errors. Nevertheless, Wolf, the author of Cassandra and The Quest for Christa T., managed to produce a focused meditation that’s lost none of its power three decades on.

Accident is authorial, not authoritative. Instead of representing Chernobyl itself, the novel comprises the thoughts of a writer over the course of a day just after news of the accident has spread—thoughts that range over visions of environmental collapse, “the entire breathlessly expanding monstrous technological creation,” and imaginative forays into an operating room where her brother is having brain tumors removed. In real time, Accident captures the first cognitive impact of Chernobyl, and it continues to represent how almost everyone grapples with the tragedy: imaginatively, from afar.

Wolf perceived a definitive historical break in Chernobyl—“Once again, so it seemed, our age had created a Before and After for itself”—a break most apparent on the level of language. “In my grandmother’s day the word ‘cloud’ conjured up condensed vapor, nothing more,” she writes. Now, however, Chernobyl’s radioactive cloud “has knocked the white cloud of poetry into the archives.” The airborne toxic event is figured as a specter of postmodernism, its shadow recasting previously stable distinctions, and challenging literary endeavor itself.

The first work of Chernobyl literature written in English is the first to fall prey to authoritative depiction. In docudrama fashion, 1987’s Chernobyl: A Novel by Frederik Pohl tracks each minute of the accident, as well as the plight of the liquidators, the evacuation of the Zone, and even some high Cold War intrigue among the Party elite. Although a minor work in the oeuvre of Pohl, a science-fiction writer with dozens of books to his credit, everything in Chernobyl is done on an epic scale, as if only a novel conceived in grand Russian style could have a chance at absorbing the subject. The cast of characters includes everyone from plant managers to diplomats, engineers to novelists, Soviet soldiers to American TV producers.

On the back cover, Isaac Asimov says, “Forty years ago, Chernobyl would have been far-out science fiction; now it is sober (and sobering) fact.” To read Chernobyl is to see science fiction become fact before becoming fiction again. The intent is clear enough: to harness imagination so as to deliver the reader sympathetically into the Zone. But for all its meticulous research and panoramic scope, Chernobyl seems narrowly governed by conventional storytelling logic. Pohl superimposes a dramatic scheme on Chernobyl, and so it makes a kind of sense, and finds a kind of closure, that rings false. Even operating with an incomplete picture of what happened, Wolf’s Accident better captures the breakdown of convention—in both the real and literary realms—that makes Chernobyl singularly difficult to absorb.