If I could go back in time and tell my younger self something about life as a theoretical physicist, I might say: mind the gap between what鈥檚 exciting about physics and what the job actually is. My new book, , was born in part out of thinking about the physical questions that get pushed to the margins in professional physics. Big-picture questions like, what is the material nature of space? What is a quantum theory of time? It is very difficult to build a professional life working on these questions 鈥� even as books tout them as the most exciting ones in the universe.

I was recruited into the world of physics by the Errol Morris documentary about Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time. Eventually, I read Hawking鈥檚 book of the same name and my impression of a working life in physics was that, for the most part, physicists think big thoughts about wonders of the universe every day.

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Today, I鈥檓 a tenured professor of physics at a major research institution, and a lot of my job is sending emails about bureaucratic things, like asking whether anyone can tell me the policy that is governing changes that the university is making to my grant. On a good day, I get to have conversations about science with the postdoctoral fellows I employ in my research group 鈥� but that鈥檚 not every day. And in either case, the kind of research that we can get grant funding to do is quite limited. The sort of work Hawking did on the nature of time is financially out of reach for most physicists, a situation that is getting worse as the UK and the US both slash and burn basic science budgets.

The Edge of Space-Time was born in this gap between what we say science is and the reality of living it. I began it at a moment of transition. I had just been awarded tenure, which, in the US, historically has meant my position is permanent, and I am free to research whatever interests me without worrying about being fired. At the moment my tenure became official, I was thinking about what I had given up to get there, the strategic choices I had made.

I gave up working on quantum gravity, for example, both because of racism I experienced as a PhD student and because the job prospects weren鈥檛 good. I never took a class where we were asked to think deeply about time, space and the fundamental nature of space-time. Mostly, I learned to calculate and pursue questions that were broadly agreeable to the physics community, like understanding the nature of dark matter. And while I think these questions are important and interesting, they live at a kind of margin that physicists are pushed to by economic and social forces that determine which questions we can be paid to pursue and which we won鈥檛 be.

When I began working on the book in 2023, I was in the midst of a five-year stint working in US science policy, alongside colleagues from around the world (mostly the UK, Europe and Canada). As I learned more about the politics of science at the government level, it became clear to me that particle physics and cosmology were in trouble. Politicians were no longer sold on the fundamental importance of our research and didn鈥檛 see how it was beneficial to the capitalist economy or the military, which historically is how that support has been rationalised. The cultural arguments 鈥� that a well-cultured civilisation does things like try to understand the universe 鈥� didn鈥檛 seem impactful at all. And the general public, struggling with climate change and economies that don鈥檛 serve the 99 per cent, couldn鈥檛 see how we had anything to add.

I could see that we were about to be on the margins in a new way. And so The Edge of Space-Time became not just a return to my roots and the big-picture questions that once drove me, it also became a plea: don鈥檛 let me be the last of my kind. The cuts that are being made to science in the UK and the US right now seem like a political problem that is easily remedied, but it is more complicated than that. Even one year where there is a gap in funding means we haemorrhage workers who may never return. As those researchers leave, they take with them knowledge. Because the sciences work through apprenticeship, if there is no senior instructor to pass on knowledge, it doesn鈥檛 matter if there is money and an apprentice waiting in the wings.

With The Edge of Space-Time, I take readers on a journey through huge questions, like why does my favourite physics experiment foist the structures of quantum physics on us? And will we ever know what space-time really is, or is it always just going to be a useful mathematical construct that allows us to calculate motion in environments where gravity plays a significant role, like near black holes?

While thinking through the physics, I also try to make the case for why any healthy democracy needs people who live at the edge of what is known and what is unknown 鈥� the keepers of these cosmic stories that have fascinated humans for millennia. I make the case that, like poetry, physics gives us a viewpoint on the universe that we need because it is our ancestral inheritance. I also argue that spending time with what feels strange about physics can help prepare us to better reckon with difficult political questions.

Given the crises we face 鈥� genocides, climate change, attacks on transgender people 鈥� we need our critical faculties now more than ever. Thinking a bit about the various edges of space-time, like black holes and cosmic event horizons, can help us build the better world we need.

by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein (Canongate Books) is the September read for the 麻豆传媒 Book Club. Sign up for the club听here, and join the discussion on Discord听.

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s蔚 wo wer蔚 fi na wosan k蓴fa a, y蔚nkyi

it is not incorrect to go back and get what you forgot

鈥擜kan proverb

We are called to go back and get the history of space-time. And who am I to argue with the ancestors?

Even so, I do. Science in this society is often done for the wrong rea颅sons, I find myself telling them. And they remind me that because it鈥檚 my job to study the origin and evolution of the universe and every颅thing inside it, I know there is a location in space-time where the uni颅verse became transparent to light: the first place where light could fly free. The ancestors insist: This is a story that I have learned so I could tell it to others. To do cosmology鈥攖o study the beginning and evolu颅tion of space, time, and matter鈥攊s to be a griot, a keeper of stories and history. To do cosmology is to go back and get the beginning, to map out the future.

So: Quite nearly at the beginning, the universe said let there be light. And particles of light鈥攑hotons鈥攁ll of them traveling at the speed of light, the fastest in the universe, couldn鈥檛 get very far. They were stuck in a plasma stew where they constantly bumped into par颅ticles, especially electrons, which swallowed their energy and spat it out in the form of new photons and other particles.

Humanity has only been aware of this cosmic light for eighty-two years. It has been there almost since the beginning of everything and has been traveling for nearly 14 billion years. It was there when the universe was cool enough for atoms to form. It was with the sun when it was just a cloud of gas, and it was there when the sun鈥檚 hydrogen ignited with fusion, turning the sun into a star. It was there when the leftovers from the gas cloud condensed into planet Earth. And it was there when carbon-based life forms evolved into apes.

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This light is a cosmic edge: We cannot look past it because at any time earlier than that, the photons were trapped, unable to get out. And this edge is a reminder that physics is a way of gaining deep insight into the universe, one we can add to the variety of overlapping forms of knowing that we have long used. To understand this bound颅ary, and how we have come to know about it, is to deepen our rela颅tionship with ourselves and the universe around us in a very specific and beautiful way. We should embrace it, for ourselves, and for future generations, because it is our history鈥攁nd who are we to argue with the ancestors?

鈥�

The book you are reading is about the queer, poetic wonder that is our universe and what we gain when we look at it from the margins. It is my version of what historian Aim茅 Dafon S猫gla calls cosmovi颅sions, a response to the question of why we should bother trying to get beyond the edges of human knowledge about the physical universe. The Edge of Space-Time is part of a larger tradition that includes not just scientists but also artists. People like jazz percussionist, artist, and technologist Milford Graves, who used percussion, sound, and observations of praying mantises and plant growth to understand a phenomenon he termed 鈥渃osmic energy.鈥� Graves, a maker working in a long tradition of Black artists, was not formally trained as a scien颅tist, and 鈥渃osmic energy鈥� sounds a little like mystic talk. But when I listened to him describe his ideas in the documentary Milford Graves Full Mantis, I heard a familiar sensibility about how matter is linked with and through space-time, a relationship that takes center stage in this book.

As a set of knowledges and techniques, physics provides a path颅way toward answering the same questions Graves asked about the fundamental nature of our cosmos and the relationship between matter, energy, and space-time. It allows us to specify in great detail the relationship between photons and the plants in Graves鈥檚 garden which transformed the photons into living particles. It is another entry point to what plant biologist and Black feminist theorist of intersectionality in science Beronda L. Montgomery calls lessons from plants.

When it鈥檚 at its best, physics is a kind of poetry, a story about the cosmos that is made from metaphors鈥攁nd a producer of metaphors in its own right. We often analyze the world through metaphor, and I believe that seeing the universe through the perspective offered by physics strengthens our ability to understand what work metaphors are doing on us and how we might wield them. It is in this sense that physics works on us like poetry: a perspective on the world that provides insights not available to us elsewhere. This helps us under颅stand why we should bother with it. We should bother with physics because it is, in part, how we as a species learn to use our minds. We should learn and teach poetry, physics, algebra, and other abstract ideas because they train us to think in symbolic and figurative terms. The same goes for calculus and quantum mechanics. And if we can颅not learn to think in and through the abstract and the symbolic, then we are pliable. We are sitting ducks for the fascists and authoritarians who will use us for their ends, and their ends are ultimately catastro颅phe for the rest of us. That鈥檚 always been true, and it always will be.

In a world where genocides (plural) can be live-streamed and still continue unabated, it is hard to imagine that society could be oth颅erwise when what is broken about it feels so total and, in the case of the families shattered and lives lost, so final. I don鈥檛 think cosmology by itself can save the world. Even so, I believe in the ways that people experience a connection to the cosmos as nourishing. And I believe in preparing for the better world that is coming.

This is an extract from by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein (Canongate Books), the September read for the 麻豆传媒 Book Club. Sign up for the club听here, and join the discussion on Discord听.

When you make a purchase via the links听on this page, we receive a commission.

The 麻豆传媒 Book Club moved from a far-future space opera in July鈥檚 read, Claire North鈥檚 Slow Gods, to a much nearer future on Earth in our read for August. Peter Heller鈥檚 takes place after a flu pandemic has wiped out the majority of Earth鈥檚 population, and follows the story of Hig, a lonely pilot, his dog Jasper 鈥� and their somewhat problematic neighbour Bangley. If that pandemic-struck world sounds like Peter was riffing off the real events of 2020, he wasn鈥檛: he wrote it well before covid, and (as he wrote in an essay for the book club) found it extremely eerie to find life imitating art, as the world shut down around us six years ago.

I have to start with an admission: I am a big Peter Heller fan. He was an adventure writer and journalist before turning to fiction, and I really enjoyed his thrillers The River and The Guide for their unique blend of gorgeous nature writing and heart-in-your-mouth survival. Somehow, I鈥檇 never got round to reading The Dog Stars, and when I discovered that it was about to be released as a film by Ridley Scott 鈥� and that it was a piece of post-apocalyptic fiction 鈥� I couldn鈥檛 wait to read it with our book club.

I wasn鈥檛 surprised to also love this novel. It combined all my favourite things: wilderness survival, a post-disaster world, lovely writing 鈥� and a Very Good Dog. I was fascinated to learn, in Peter鈥檚 essay, how he wrote the novel cold 鈥� no initial research, no planning: 鈥淚t was as if Hig were on the other side of a campfire on an October night, with the wind blowing the flames around, telling me what had happened to him a few years before. I wrote in a white heat. I was constantly surprised, awed, devastated by what happened. I鈥檇 have tears dripping off my chin onto the coffee shop table.鈥� In our interview, Peter also told me about how he decided on the nature of the apocalypse that would affect his world, and what it was like to see his characters appear on the big screen, courtesy of Scott 鈥� spoiler alert, there were tears.

There was more of a mixed response to The Dog Stars from book club members. Karen Warren 鈥渇ound the first half a bit tedious, and probably wouldn鈥檛 have carried on if it hadn鈥檛 been a book club choice鈥�. But ultimately she was glad she did, and 鈥渃ouldn鈥檛 put it down towards the end鈥�. 鈥淚 loved the way that there was hope even in a seemingly impossible environment,鈥� she wrote on , describing the novel as 鈥渁 testament to the triumph of the human spirit鈥�.

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The writing in this book is very distinctive 鈥� jumpy and disjointed, reflecting Hig鈥檚 state of mind. Readers entered into an interesting debate about the reason for this. 鈥淚 read it as him losing some of his expressive power while living with Bangley: not much real conversation, not much novelty, a lot of silence and repetition,鈥� wrote warsaw_sun. 鈥淭here鈥檚 a suggestion of fever in his history, is that supposed to have affected his language, or is it just that 鈥榤en of action鈥� try to cut the descriptions right down following Hemingway?鈥� wondered Alan_P.

Overall, Alan was not a fan. 鈥淚鈥檓 sure a lot of people will enjoy the book 鈥� but for me the view of human nature is just too grim and not realistic,鈥� he wrote. He compared The Dog Stars to Tim Winton鈥檚 Juice 鈥� another book club read that is also set post-apocalypse, this time a climate one. 鈥淲hat bothers me is how these stories naturalise the idea that the only way to survive is to become the very kind of armed, unchallengeable patriarch that helped create the violence in the first place,鈥� he wrote. 鈥淎s humans we do well when we cooperate and badly when we don鈥檛. Perhaps I wouldn鈥檛 survive a holocaust, but I don鈥檛 think empathy is weakness, I don鈥檛 think that kindness is naivety, and I don鈥檛 want to read any more dystopias.鈥�

For Kelly, The Dog Stars was 鈥渘ot so much an apocalypse story (the how and the why) but a people story鈥�; for Barbara Howe, it was 鈥渁s much an old-fashioned Western as it is science fiction, if not more so鈥�. 鈥淎s in, isolated men with guns defending their claim and their women against marauders.鈥� Dee55, meanwhile, was left pondering the very nature of science fiction. 鈥淚鈥檝e been meaning to ask other readers here 鈥� does anything set in the future automatically count as science fiction? Or does the epidemic make it science fiction because that鈥檚 not a known type?鈥�

It鈥檚 a great question! For me, science fiction is a broad and generous church, ranging from the science-light writing of the likes of The Dog Stars or another book club read, Kaliane Bradley鈥檚 The Ministry of Time, to the hard sci-fi of Kim Stanley Robinson鈥檚 Red Mars and the space opera of Slow Gods. Next month, however, defining sci-fi isn鈥檛 something the book club will need to worry about鈥�

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The 麻豆传媒 Book Club has been reading Peter Heller’s post-apocalyptic novel The Dog Stars in August. He joined head of books Alison Flood to discuss the trend for dystopian fiction, how he didn’t plan anything before writing the book – and what it felt like to watch Ridley Scott’s film adaptation, released later this month.

I keep the Beast running, I keep the 100 low lead on tap, I foresee attacks. I am young enough, I am old enough. I used to love to fish for trout more than almost anything.

My name is Hig, one name. Big Hig if you need another.

If I ever woke up crying in the middle of a dream, and I鈥檓 not saying I did, it鈥檚 because the trout are gone, every one. Brookies, rainbows, browns, cutthroats, cutbows, everyone.

The tiger left, the elephant, the apes, the baboon, the cheetah. The titmouse, the frigate bird, the pelican (gray), the whale (gray), the collared dove. Sad but. Didn鈥檛 cry until the last trout swam upriver looking for maybe cooler water.

Melissa, my wife, was an old hippy. Not that old. She looked good. In this story she might have been Eve, but I鈥檓 not Adam. I am more like Cain. They didn鈥檛 have a brother like me.

Did you ever read the Bible? I mean sit down and read it like it was a book? Check out Lamentations. That鈥檚 where we鈥檙e at, pretty much. Pretty much lamenting. Pretty much pouring our hearts out like water. They said at the end it would get colder after it gets warmer.

Way colder. Still waiting. She鈥檚 a surprise this old earth, one big surprise after another since before she separated from the moon who circles and circles like the mate of a shot goose.

No more geese. A few. Last October I heard the old bleating after dusk and saw them, five against the cold bloodwashed blue over the ridge. Five all fall, I think, next April none.

I hand pump the 100 low lead aviation gas out of the old airport tank when the sun is not shining, and I have the truck too that was making the fuel delivery. More fuel than the Beast can burn in my lifetime if I keep my sorties local, which I plan to, I have to. She鈥檚 a small plane, a 1956 Cessna 182, really a beaut. Cream and blue. I鈥檓 figuring I鈥檓 dead before the Beast gives up the final ghost. I will buy the farm. Eighty acres of bottomland hay and corn in a country where there is still a cold stream coming out of the purple mountains full of brookies and cuts.

Before that I will make my roundtrips. Out and back.

*

I have a neighbor. One. Just us at a small country airport a few miles from the mountains. A training field where they built a bunch of houses for people who couldn鈥檛 sleep without their little planes, the way golfers live on a golf course. Bangley is the name on the registration of his old truck, which doesn鈥檛 run anymore. Bruce Bangley. I fished it out of the glove box looking for a tire pressure gauge I could take with me in the Beast. A Wheat Ridge address. I don鈥檛 call him that, though, what鈥檚 the point, there鈥檚 only two of us. Only us for at least a radius of eight miles, which is the distance of open prairie to the first juniper woods on the skirt of the mountain. I just say, Hey. Above the juniper is oak brush then black timber. Well, brown. Beetle killed and droughted. A lot of it standing dead now, just swaying like a thousand skeletons, sighing like a thousand ghosts, but not all. There are patches of green woods, and I am their biggest fan. I root for them out here on the plain. Go Go Go Grow Grow Grow! That鈥檚 our fight song. I yell it out the window as I fly low over. The green patches are_ spreading year by year. Life is tenacious if you give it one little bit of encouragement. I could swear they hear me. They wave back, wave their feathery arms back and forth down low by their sides, they remind me of women in kimonos. Tiny steps or no steps, wave wave hands at your sides.

I go up there on foot when I can. To the greener woods. Funny to say that: not like I have to clear my calendar. I go up to breathe. The different air. It鈥檚 dangerous, it鈥檚 an adrenalin rush I could do without. I have seen elk sign. Not so old. If there are still elk. Bangley says no way. Way, but. Never seen one. Seen plenty deer. I bring the .308 and I shoot a doe and I drag her back in the hull of a kayak which I sawed the deck off so it鈥檚 a sled. My green sled. The deer just stayed on with the rabbits and the rats. The cheat grass stayed on, I guess that鈥檚 enough.

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Before I go up there I fly it twice. One day, one night with the goggles. The goggles are pretty good at seeing down through trees if the trees aren鈥檛 too heavy. People make pulsing green shadows, even asleep. Better than not checking. Then I make a loop south and east, come back in from the north. Thirty miles out, at least a day for a traveler. That鈥檚 all open, all plains, sage and grass and rabbit brush and the old farms. The brown circles of fields like the footprint of a crutch fading into the prairie. Hedgerows and windbreaks, half the trees broken, blown over, a few still green by a seep or along a creek. Then I tell Bangley.

I cover the eight miles dragging the empty sled in two hours, then I am in cover. I can still move. It鈥檚 a long way back with a deer, though. Over open country. Bangley covers me from halfway out. We still have the handsets and they still recharge with the panels. Japanese built, good thing. Bangley has a .408 CheyTac sniper rifle set up on a platform he built. A rangefinder. My luck. A gun nut. A really mean gun nut. He says he can pot a man from a mile off. He has done. I鈥檝e seen it more than once. Last summer he shot a girl who was chasing me across the open plain. A young girl, a scarecrow. I heard the shot, stopped, left the sled, went back. She was thrown back over a rock, a hole where her waist should have been, just about torn in half. Her chest was heaving, panting, her head twisted to the side, one black eye shiny and looking up at me, not fear, just like a question, burning, like of all things witnessed this one couldn鈥檛 be believed. Like that. Like fucking why?

That鈥檚 what I asked Bangley, fucking why.

She would have caught you.

So what? I had a gun, she had a little knife. To like protect her from me. She maybe wanted food.

Maybe. Maybe she鈥檇 slit your throat in the middle of the night.

I stared at him, his mind going that far, to the middle of the night, me and her. Jesus. My only neighbor. What can I say to Bangley? He has saved my bacon more times. Saving my bacon is his job. I have the plane, I am the eyes, he has the guns, he is the muscle. He knows I know he knows: he can鈥檛 fly, I don鈥檛 have the stomach for killing. Any other way probably just be one of us. Or none.

I also have Jasper, son of Daisy, which is the best last line of alarm.

So when we get sick of rabbits and sunfish from the pond, I get a deer. Mostly I just want to go up there. It feels like church, hallow and cool. The dead forest swaying and whispering, the green forest full of sighs. The musk smell of deer beds. The creeks where I always pray to see a trout. One fingerling. One big old survivor, his green shadow idling against the green shadows of the stones.

Eight miles of open ground to the mountain front, the first trees. That is our perimeter. Our safety zone. That is my job.

He can concentrate his firepower to the west that way. That鈥檚 how Bangley talks. Because it鈥檚 thirty miles out, high plains all other directions, more than a day鈥檚 walk, but just a couple of hours west to the first trees. The families are south ten miles but they don鈥檛 bother us. That鈥檚 what I call them. They are something like thirty Mennonites with a blood disease that hit after the flu. Like a plague but slow burning. Something like AIDS I think, maybe more contagious. The kids were born with it and it makes them all sick and weak and every year some die.

We have the perimeter. But if someone hid. In the old farmsteads. In the sage. The willows along a creek. Arroyos, too, with undercut banks. He asked me that once: how do I know. How do I know someone is not inside our perimeter, in all that empty country, hiding, waiting to attack us? But thing is I can see a lot. Not like the back of the hand, too simple, but like a book I have read and reread too many times to count, maybe like the Bible for some folks of old. I would know. A sentence out of place. A gap. Two periods where there should be one. I know.

I know, I think: if I am going to die 鈥� no If 鈥� it will be on one of these trips to the mountains. Crossing open ground with the full sled. Shot in the back with an arrow.

Bangley a long time ago gave me bulletproof, one of the vests in his arsenal. He has all kinds of shit. He said it鈥檒l stop any handgun, an arrow, but with a rifle it depends, I better be lucky. I thought about that. We鈥檙e supposed to be the only two living souls but the families in at least hundreds of square miles, the only survivors, I better be lucky. So I wear the vest because it鈥檚 warm, but if it鈥檚 summer I mostly don鈥檛. When I wear it, I feel like I鈥檓 waiting for something. Would I stand on a train platform and wait for a train that hasn鈥檛 come for months? Maybe. Sometimes this whole thing feels just like that.

This is an extract from by Peter Heller (Tinder Press), the August read for the 麻豆传媒 Book Club. Sign up for the club here, and join the discussion on Discord .

When you make a purchase via the links on this page, we receive a commission.

was my first novel. It begins nine years after a super-flu pandemic kills off most of humanity. Hig lives with his old dog Jasper at a little country airport in Erie, north of Denver, Colorado, which he shares with a gun nut named Bangley who has been waiting for the apocalypse his whole life. Hig has lost his wife, who was pregnant with their first child, and all his friends, and he and Jasper fly a patrol every day in their 1956 Cessna searching for survivors.

When I sat down to write the book, I didn鈥檛 want to plot or outline. I had wanted to be a fiction writer since I was 11, but when I got out of college, I had to make a living and so I wrote for magazines. With every story I wrote I knew the ending, and I knew what was going to happen next, because it happened. It was journalism. Now, I didn鈥檛 want to know. I grew up as a kayaker and what I loved about running rivers was that if the stream had never been descended or described, you came around a tight bend in a canyon and there might be a waterfall, or a cougar drinking, or a flight of backlit swallows. I wanted the same thrill writing the novel. I wanted to launch onto a narrative current and follow it into wild new territory.

Also, poetry was my first love. The novels I adored were the most lyrical. Conrad at the height of his power, in the grips of a typhoon. Faulkner following the cadence of the words into the mind of a smitten cow. Welty describing a slow stream. They seemed to be as much about the music of the language as any story. I knew that I would have to be enamoured first, of the sound of my own language, and follow the song into the narrative.

I went to the coffee shop in my neighborhood in Denver and I sat down and told myself, 鈥淒on鈥檛 think, don鈥檛 think, just listen.鈥� I wrote, 鈥淚 keep the Beast running. I keep the 100 low lead on tap. I foresee attacks鈥︹�� A few lines later, 鈥淢y name is Hig, one name. Big Hig if you need another. If I ever woke up crying in the middle of a dream, and I鈥檓 not saying I did, it鈥檚 because the trout are gone, every one.鈥�

I sat up. 鈥淪peak,鈥� I murmured. 鈥淵ou are a fisherman, just like me.鈥� And then it was as if Hig were on the other side of a campfire on an October night, with the wind blowing the flames around, telling me what had happened to him a few years before. I wrote in a white heat. I was constantly surprised, awed, devastated by what happened. I鈥檇 have tears dripping off my chin onto the coffee shop table and I knew the other patrons were thinking, 鈥淭hat poor sonofabitch is going through a bad divorce. Or his dog died.鈥� But really, I was completely transported, and more thrilled than I鈥檇 ever been in my life.

Hig鈥檚 plane, the Beast, is one of the most prominent characters in the novel. Hig and I had a few stories about it to help fill out the novel. Once on a trip to kayak a wilderness river in Montana with one of my oldest friends, we got a ride to the river on a single engine Cessna into a remote backcountry airstrip. This was before I wrote the book. The pilot flew so close to the ridges I could see the elk tracks zigzagging in the snow. I was fascinated. I said, 鈥淗ey, how fast could I learn to fly like this? Could I do it for an article?鈥�

The pilot was a cowboy in every sense, had a handlebar moustache and a brash manner. He said, 鈥淕imme five grand and three weeks of your time and we鈥檒l get her done!鈥�

He was fired two weeks later for drinking on the job. But the chief pilot of the little airport was one of the greatest bush pilots alive, and he gave the thumbs up. Dave Hoerner had 30,000 hours flying wildlife biologists into the mountains to track grizzly bears and wolves. The most dangerous kind of flying. I went back up to Kalispell and flew three times a day and studied aviation books at night. I got my pilot鈥檚 license in 20 days. I bought a 1956 Cessna 182 single engine plane. The engine was timed out, meaning it had run so many hours I was required to rebuild it, but I thought I could nurse it along. It鈥檚 the same plane Hig flies, same colour, same tail number: N6333A. And I kept it in Hig鈥檚 hangar at the Erie airport. Soon after I bought the Beast, the engine died, right over the Continental Divide, and we had just enough altitude to glide home. In The Dog Stars, Hig flies past his point of no return looking for human connection.

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Eight years after I published the novel, on a cool day in March of 2020, Denver shut down for the Covid pandemic. I went fishing that afternoon in a state park south of town. There was no ranger at the gate, I just drove in. Eerie. No other fishermen parked in the gravel lot by the river. I waded into a lovely stretch that bends through a grove of old cottonwoods and began to cast. Alone, the way Hig does in the book. And the only fish feeding were white suckers. There were no trout that night, as in the novel. The sun settled on the ridge and the evening chilled and I got goosebumps, and not just from the temperature. I drove home up a large boulevard, the only car, and every business on either side of the road was shut.

The hair stood up on the back of my neck. It was as if Hig had transported into my world, or I into his. Again.

by Peter Heller (Tinder Press) is the August read for the 麻豆传媒 Book Club. Sign up for the club here, and join the discussion on Discord .

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The 麻豆传媒 Book Club has spent July reading Claire North鈥檚 space opera . Set in the far future, it follows the fortunes of a civilisation that has just learned that their planet will be destroyed by a supernova 鈥� in 100 years鈥� time.

鈥淲hat does it mean to look into the heavens and know the exact date when a star will die and with it, your world?鈥� North wrote in a fascinating essay for book club members on why they started the book with this conceit. 鈥淲hat choices do you make, and what price would you pay to save yourself 鈥� or your civilisation?鈥�

Alongside this end-of-the-world tale, Slow Gods is also a love story between North鈥檚 protagonist Maw, a pilot who can navigate the dangers of faster-than-light travel but who is a little prone to murdering people, and Gebre, a citizen of that planet on the brink of annihilation, Adjumir.

Our science-fiction columnist Emily H. Wilson had heartily recommended this one: 鈥淚t has been a while since I have read a piece of science fiction so purely delightful.鈥� I was also enraptured. North鈥檚 writing was elegant, insightful and effortlessly funny (I hate try-hard humour in my fiction). And the concept at the heart of the story, the idea of how a civilisation might deal with imminent, but not all that imminent, destruction? It was fascinating and terrifying; as North told me in our interview for book club members, this is a deliberate parallel with climate change. 鈥淪ubtle metaphor it is not,鈥� they said.

Slow Gods wasn鈥檛 only a hit with me and Emily 鈥� I think it鈥檚 one of our most popular books so far with members. 鈥淭he writing is gorgeous, and it has the big concept space opera feel that I really like,鈥� wrote adidubey on our . 鈥淥ne of the more satisfying reads we have had,鈥� added Matthew. 鈥淭his book club usually picks things I wouldn鈥檛 and some are good and some less so (none that I have not finished) but there is a lot of variety and it gets me out of my rut of only reading the familiar.鈥�

I did find the opening a little stodgy and slow to get going, which is often a problem for space operas, as the writer looks to set their galactic scene. Butterfly368 was with me on this: 鈥淭he beginning was a bit slow and confusing, but the deeper I got, the more invested I became. It鈥檚 one of those books that gradually pulls you in rather than grabbing you from page one,鈥� they wrote. 鈥淚鈥檓 also enjoying its commentary on the meaning we create in our lives and on society and culture more broadly. It鈥檚 given me quite a bit to think about.鈥� Melissa, however, loved it from the first. 鈥�50 pages in and totally engrossed. I鈥檝e felt gut punched with recognition at some of the terrible treatment of people but also laughed into an empty room a couple of times. Whyyyyyy do I have to go to work?鈥� she wrote.

Barbara Howe had some interesting comparisons to make with some of her favourite reads. 鈥淩eminded me a bit at the start of [Ann Leckie鈥檚] Ancillary Justice, mainly in how much I was struggling to understand what was going on, and how many questions were raised early on that didn鈥檛 get answered until much later 鈥� if at all,鈥� she wrote. 鈥淎lso, whenever [Maw] talked about having trouble with social situations and understanding his feelings, I was reminded of Murderbot 鈥榟aving an emotion鈥�.鈥�

North, incidentally, had some interesting things to say in our chat about Maw鈥檚 struggle to fit in; he 鈥渋s the protagonist you write when you are an adult diagnosed with autism late in your life鈥�, they told me. North and I also dug into the multiple pronouns used in this story 鈥� something Carrie noted on Discord, writing that 鈥淚鈥檓 really enjoying the world building and while they can take a little getting used to, feel that the introduction of new pronouns really add to the story and provide insight into the cultures we鈥檙e being introduced to鈥�. 鈥淧eople exist on a spectrum,鈥� said North in our chat. 鈥淚n the English language, we may still only really have 鈥榟e鈥� and 鈥榮he鈥� as the commonly accepted expression of gender, but that spectrum is enormous. It ranges from Arnold Schwarzenegger through to Harry Kane through to Alan Carr, then straight on keeps on going. The enormity of that spectrum feels too big for 鈥榟e鈥� and 鈥榮he鈥� to actually cover.鈥�

Alan_P was another big fan. 鈥淚 absolutely loved it. I鈥檓 looking up other books by the same author in my library which is something I rarely do,鈥� he wrote. 鈥淚 also (unexpectedly for me 鈥� I鈥檓 not a fan of romance in general) found myself really enjoying the love story at the centre of the book. For me it鈥檚 the very clever way that the author has woven these different themes of not quite requited love, galaxy spanning science fiction, commentary of contemporary events and a really good story that makes it one of my favourites in a good while.鈥� A bit of a success, then!

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The 麻豆传媒 Book Club has been reading Claire North’s space opera Slow Gods, in which a civilisation has to work out how to deal with a supernova that will kill everyone on a planet 鈥� but not for 100 years. Claire joined us to dig into the details of the book, chatting about everything from how their hero 鈥渋s the protagonist you write when you are an adult diagnosed with autism late in your life鈥� to the parallels between the climate crisis and the book’s world-ending supernova (鈥渟ubtle metaphor it is not鈥�). We also get into their terrifying version of faster-than-light travel 鈥� and how even the “science-iest” science fiction can need a little magic.

This is the story of the supernova event known as Lhonoja. By the end of it, several planets will have burned, a couple of civilisations will have fallen, and I will have spoken to an entity some consider a god, and whose theological status will remain in question throughout.

Before then, I must explain how I came to be, and for that, I must take you back several centuries, to Glastya Row.

听

Glastya Row started as a landing strip on the planet Tu-mdo.

Most urban establishments on most colonised worlds begin this way. Tu-mdo had been a prime terraforming candidate 鈥� comfortable gravity, good magnetic shield, not too hot, not too cold, not tidally locked and already possessed of a moon which, once water was thawed out in sufficient volume, would serve to stir the great big mixing bowl of Tu-mdo鈥檚 freshly churning oceans. The first colonists didn鈥檛 even need to spend five centuries in arcologies waiting for atmospheric conditions to settle, but were out and breathing without aid within a couple of pioneering generations. Two millennia later, Glastya Row had been transformed from pioneer鈥檚 outpost to merely another borough of some few million in the great city of Heom, a middling hub of profit and endeavour within the interplanetary-spanning United Social Venture.

They say you can tell a lot about a Venture based on how its employees name their children.

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In Antekeda, the Venture that ran my city, these were the most common middle names given to children at birth:

Chairman 鈥� 15 per cent

Entrepreneur 鈥� 10 per cent

Director 鈥� 9 per cent

Abundant 鈥� 5 per cent

Diligent 鈥� 4 per cent

In Theymann, a Venture specialising in deep space habitation, the distribution skewed towards Pioneers and Engineers, while in Halsect there was an almost sentimental emphasis on children called 鈥淎spiring鈥�.

My parents had all the ambition you might expect of residents of Glastya Row, combined with a grim realism. Thus when I was born, my name was registered as Mawukana 鈥淩espected鈥� na-Vdnaze. I might never achieve dazzling heights or have great Shine, but dammit, my neighbours would at least know that I was respectable.

It would be fair to say that things went downhill from there.

Deep-space sci-fi novel is delightful, profound and not to be missed

A planet is about to be destroyed by the collapse of a binary star system in Slow Gods, Claire North鈥檚 first venture into classic science fiction. Read it! says Emily H. Wilson

I am told that I cried an unhallowed amount when I was born, though no one seems able to clarify what 鈥渦nhallowed鈥� means. I imagine my scream rose a little in volume as they implanted my Chint in the top of my plump left bicep, already embedded with the debts I had accrued to the Venture that ran the hospital that sheltered me 鈥� 400 Glint for a standard birth, plus another 1,873 Glint for basic costs such as bedding, vaccinations, postnatal checkups, vitamin shots, etc. . . .

Thus, before I was placed upon my mother鈥檚 breast, I was marked with the overriding feature of life on Glastya Row 鈥� the debt I owed.

As befits two individuals who named their child 鈥淩espected鈥�, my parents were not irresponsible. They had carefully saved for this moment, and were between them able to bring my initial debt down to a mere 700 Glint, and keep on top of the 1.5 per cent child-rate interest payments my existence accrued. Moreover, to welcome me into the world, Antekeda gifted me with fifty shares, my ownership marking me as a citizen of the Venture. By the time I turned fifteen and sat my assignment exams, those shares were worth nearly 600 Glint 鈥� though my educational and civic debts were well in excess of 92,000.

This system, we were taught, was about fairness. We were pioneers and our world was a place of scarcity, hardship and struggle. Everything the Venture gave us 鈥� the air we breathed, the roads we walked down, the schools we learned in 鈥� had been sweated for, bled for, and our debts were a marker of the needful labour we would give back in return.

All are born equal, and by their labours shall they rise.

This philosophy was the underlying constitution of the United Social Venture. Both it and the more anthropologically engaging qualities of social and economic status that arose from it were known as Shine.

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We were not a high-Shine family. My parents ran a small restaurant that served cold-broth dumplings to hot middle Managers too tired and busy to cook. They did their best to improve their Shine, constantly cooing over difficult, well-dressed customers and putting themselves forward to run catering events in Shiny houses or at Shiny events, but nothing could really wipe the smell of Glastya Row off their grease-stained aprons and soap-scoured fingers. Every six months, an Antekeda representative would come by and offer them another course or long-distance learning diploma in business growth and radical enterprise, and sometimes my mother, always the more energetic of the two, would sign up and do her coursework and pay her fees, and talk at the table about how this was it. This was the change we needed to get out, move up. It never came to anything.

During my 鈥渃ute鈥� years, which I was told were seven to eleven years old, I worked as a waiter in the shop in the hope someone would give me that most wondrous of miracles, a 鈥渢ip鈥� for my services. By the time I was twelve, you could see the shape of the adult I was going to be. My father鈥檚 thick, straight black hair was overgrown around my mother鈥檚 sunset-through-smog face. I was always a little short, with green-grey eyes that narrowed to almost impossible lines when I squinted in confusion (as I did a lot) and pale lips that didn鈥檛 smile enough, or smiled wrong, or just didn鈥檛 quite get the smiling business right, whenever I tried to move them.

鈥淪mile with your eyes,鈥� my mother commanded, during one of her we-shall-advance phases. So I stood in front of the mirror in the grubby upstairs bathroom and squeezed my eyelids tight and waggled my eyebrows and tried to inventory every tiny muscle about my growing grubby dishcloth of a face, until I could at least achieve something that didn鈥檛 seem to upset people too badly.

Despite, or perhaps owing to, these efforts, I was relegated to the back of the kitchen so that my mother could stay out front, charming and occasionally bamboozling the customers. By the time I was fourteen and my schooling was getting unfeasibly expensive, it was already apparent that I would not have a Shiny life. Most of my classmates were starting to drop out into the menial labour that was the heart of every Venture, and those who remained were preparing for adulthood with an endless dance of alliances, enmities, petty acts of cruelty and theft, out-daring each other in who could game the system. Bullies thrived 鈥� so long as they were not caught. Being caught was far worse a sin than being a thief, a liar or simply cruel.

Many economists, observing the Shine, have marvelled at the low levels of educational obtainment common across its population. The circular economies of most other worlds, powered by the sunlight or atomic reactors and fed by agricultural systems whose architects can sit in their pantries dispatching drones to the harvest, consider education not merely of primary importance to the success of their systems, but as frankly the most interesting thing the population can do with their expansive time.

However, education breeds curiosity. And curiosity is one of the very first qualities that the leaders of the Shine seek to eliminate from the population.

This is an extract from by Claire North (Orbit), the 麻豆传媒 Book Club鈥檚 pick for July. Sign up for the Book Club here, and join the discussion on Discord .

When you make a purchase via the links on this page, we receive a commission.

When I decided to write a space opera, I wanted to start with a supernova. There is no force in the universe like it, either in scale or destructive power 鈥� but though it is irrefutably dramatic, it鈥檚 also something you can see coming. As a writer, I find this fascinating. What does it mean to look into the heavens and know the exact date when a star will die and with it, your world? What choices do you make, and what price would you pay to save yourself 鈥� or your civilisation?

This is the story of Slow Gods.

Let鈥檚 imagine for a moment that you are one of these astronomers, watching the stars that will soon destroy your world. For millennia, you鈥檝e known the supernova is coming, and for millennia your people have ignored it. It鈥檚 a difficult sell: 鈥淟et鈥檚 fundamentally transform our entire society to save the lives of billions of people鈥� in about 500 years鈥� time.鈥� Everyone agrees in a 鈥渞hubarb-rhubarb鈥� sort of way that fine, yes, this is a good idea. For someone else. Later.

Well shucks. Suddenly millennia became centuries, became decades. Time is running out. Perhaps you are looking at your newborn grandchild when you realise: you know how, and when, this babe will die. Perhaps they suffocate as the oceans boil, burn alive as the atmosphere ignites or simply die from radiation sickness, skin and organs slowly liquefying. All the incremental changes you made down the years 鈥� a distant colony here, a bit of a space elevator there? Not enough. It鈥檚 time for your entire civilisation to re-tool around the grim but inescapable premise of saving what you can in the time that remains.

Deep-space sci-fi novel is delightful, profound and not to be missed

A planet is about to be destroyed by the collapse of a binary star system in Slow Gods, Claire North鈥檚 first venture into classic science fiction. Read it! says Emily H. Wilson

Some hasty maths ensues. You鈥檝e got a century to rescue a population of 5 billion before your planet burns. You build space elevators and vast motherships to carry people across the stars, and at the height of the project can evacuate almost 50 million people a year. (You are going to ignore the perpetual danger of the things lurking in the monstrous dark, infesting the crew with madness, playing tricks with biology or simply gobbling a ship whole. Such creatures defy computation, after all.)

In 100 years you can maybe, in a pinch, get everyone off-planet 鈥� but of course it鈥檚 never that simple.听 Children are still being born, the population renewing itself faster than you can evacuate. Perhaps you try to limit population growth? But no 鈥� a childless century is as sure a death for your civilisation as fire itself. Life must continue, even if you know that for every child saved, another will die when the planet burns.

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Perhaps you are selective about who鈥檚 evacuated, and in what order. Do you prioritise the educated, the most fertile, the famous? And by implication, are you going to leave the disabled, the vulnerable, the marginalised behind? This is a genocide by omission, civilisational eugenics 鈥� is that who you are?

Fine 鈥� a lottery system. At least people can agree it鈥檚 fairer, even if no one wants to accept their own powerlessness. You hope and hope that your number will be called, but as the years tick by, that hope begins to slip away. Your people expect you to die quietly, all because of a simple bit of bad luck. Do you?

Even if you escape, where do you go? Some worlds straight up reject your people, leaving millions stranded in the endless dark. Others are more willing to accept you, but only a few hundred thousand at a time, shoved into the most desolate corners of an unwelcoming planet that your biology simply isn鈥檛 adapted to. Your people are being scattered into tiny enclaves across the stars, cut off from each other, forgetting their own customs, languages, ideas. You have saved lives, certainly 鈥� but you haven鈥檛 saved your civilisation. Historians leap into action, bickering over what songs and stories are most quintessentially you. You watch as your society is put into a museum, history sold to the highest bidder, and know that whatever is displayed is only a fraction of who you are.

Or maybe you don鈥檛. This is after all just one story in the galaxy of Slow Gods.

Maybe instead you downplayed the crisis and said 鈥渟omeone else will sort it out鈥�, as if anyone can out-bluff a supernova, and now you鈥檝e got less than a decade before your seas boil, and there are billions of people with nothing to do except die. The richest and most powerful have saved themselves, but they still need income, and for that they need people. Desperate, terrified people who will do anything to survive.

You eye up your gunships. You eye up other worlds 鈥� vulnerable worlds, outside the blast radius. And you maybe make a choice to save your own children, even if that means someone else鈥檚 child will die, because what parent will do less? Choosing between guaranteed annihilation or violence without end, perhaps you choose a war that will burn the galaxy, having decided that this is no choice at all.

Claire North鈥檚 听(Orbit) is the July read for the 麻豆传媒 Book Club. Sign up here, and come and discuss the book on our Discord channel .

When you make a purchase via the links on this page, we receive a commission.