Gaines began publishing short stories in the early 1990s.[14] Her short story The Mouse was selected for The Best of the West 5, one in a series of annual anthologies of short stories, published annually from 1988 to 1992.[15]
Her novel Carbon Dreams was published in 2001. Set in the early 1980s, it tells the story of a woman who discovers a way to study climate in the distant past that may have relevance for the climate of the future, and about the scientific, ethical and personal controversies that she inadvertently becomes embroiled in.[16] Elizabeth Wilson, writing in Chemical and Engineering News, called it a "step forward in the evolution of science-in-fiction.... A remarkable job of conveying what it's really like to be a scientist, and to make scientific discoveries - not in the blink of an eye, as television or movies would have it, but with gradually shifting insight."[17] It is considered an early contribution to the Lab lit genre.[18]
Gaines's 2020 novel Accidentals is the story of an Uruguayan-American family, noted for its "melding of sensual landscapes with ruminations on political history and environmental devastation" and "critique of globalization."[1] Like Carbon Dreams, it has been recognized as a "rare" and "well-written" example of a realist novel about science and compared to the work of Barbara Kingsolver.[19]
A work of non-fiction Echoes of Life: What Fossil Molecules Reveal about Earth History, published in 2009, provides an up-to-date survey of the interdisciplinary field of organic geochemistry, using the history of discovery, from early experiments in the 1930s to modern areas of research, to make the material accessible to students and scientists in different fields.[20][21]
^Gaines, Susan M.; Jeffrey L. Bada (June 1988). "Aspartame decomposition and epimerization in the diketopiperazine and dipeptide products as a function of pH and temperature". The Journal of Organic Chemistry. 53 (12): 2757–2764. doi:10.1021/jo00247a018.
^Gaines, Susan M.; Jeffrey L. Bada (1987). "Reversed-phase high-performance liquid chromatographic separation of aspartame diastereomeric decomposition products". Journal of Chromatography A. 389: 219–225. doi:10.1016/S0021-9673(01)94425-5.
^Missouri Review, Spring 1991; Sacred Ground: Writings about Home, edited by Barbara Bonner, 116-142. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions 1996: 116-142; The Cream City Review 17, no.2 (1993)
^Christensen, Thomas (March 4, 2001). "She Blinded Them With Science". San Francisco Chronicle. Archived from the original on July 7, 2012. Retrieved May 1, 2010.; New Scientist vol 170 issue 2294 - 09 June 2001, p. 47; Kvenvolden, Keith A. Organic Geochemistry. Vol 32, Issue 5, May 2001, pp. 771-771. ISSN0146-6380
^Wilson, Elizabeth K. Chemical and Engineering News, June 4, 2001.
^Wilson E.K. “Novelist Combines CO2 and Romance” C&E News 79 (2001): 80-81.