- Book information
- Equilateral by Ken Kalfus
- Published by: Bloomsbury
- Price: ?12.99/$24
- Book information
- The Falling Sky by Pippa Goldschmidt
- Published by: Freight Books
- Price: ?8.99
Those seeking certainty in the heavens are likely to miss vital human operations around them (Image: Ben Hobbs/Millennium)
If your holiday takes you under dark skies, you might want a novel with astronomy at its heart: try The Movement of Stars, Equilateral or The Falling Sky
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THERE'S more to travel than sunshine. Clear, cloudless nights, far from the pollution of the city, invite us to look up in wonder.
But three recent novels also remind us of astronomy's dark glamour. They share a familiar irony: those seeking certainty in the heavens are likely to miss vital human operations around them. The authors understand the pull and charm of stellar observation, conveying it with sympathy, and, sometimes, real power.
Amy Brill's The Movement of Stars is based on the life of the US's first female professional astronomer, Maria Mitchell. The story charts the journey of the heroine, Hannah Gardner Price, from obedient Nantucket Quaker to globetrotting proto-feminist, with stirring descriptions of how she turns away from her Quaker community in pursuit of truths at once universal and personal. A tremendously moving, humanist love story, it is a reminder that readers cannot live on irony alone.
Luckily, no one told arch-ironist Ken Kalfus, whose book Equilateral drips detached amusement at the follies of his hero, Sanford Thayer. Like the 19th-century American astronomer Percival Lowell, Thayer infers the existence of intelligent life on Mars from "canals" he has observed on the planet. Wanting to make contact with the Martians, a consortium funds him to construct a gigantic equilateral triangle in Egypt's Western desert, to be filled with pitch and lit so it is visible to Martian astronomers. What could possibly go wrong?
A series of potentially easy pot-shots at stiff-collared Victorians is transformed by Kalfus's acute rendering of the astronomy. Thayer does everything "right": his inferences are intelligent, his ambitions grand, not egotistical. But he ends up blind in the desert, neglects the woman who loves him, and is unaware that a pretty servant girl may be a Martian observer. He succumbs to disaster ? not because he is a fool, but because he pits himself against a world much bigger, richer and more ambivalent than he is.
Pippa Goldschmidt's The Falling Sky is about modern astronomy. Our heroine, Jeanette, has made a computer image of two galaxies that appear connected. But the galaxies have different red shifts. Something screwy is going on, something that might destroy the big bang model, and which, meantime, wrecks Jeanette's life.
"Perhaps the only way of understanding the universe is to retreat from normal life," Jeanette reflects. In her quiet way, she is a very brave scientist, sticking by a troubling observation in order to understand it. She is also a lover, a sister, a friend. It's a complex portrait, handsomely done: proof if proof be needed that astronomers are people, too. They need their friends, their flights of fantasy ? even their holidays.
This article appeared in print under the headline "Travel companions"
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