Gaines began publishing short stories in the early 1990s. 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. 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. 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." It is considered an early contribution to the
Lab lit genre. 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." 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. ==Bibliography==