Two summers ago, I found myself face to face with a 400-year-old mystery. I was trying to escape the maze of books at Firsts, London’s Rare Book Fair, in Battersea Park. The fair was a tangle of stalls overflowing with treasures gleaming in old leather, paper and gold. Then, as I rounded a corner, a book stopped me. I felt as though I had seen a ghost—and, in a sense, I had.
Stamped onto its cover was an intricate monogram that I recognized instantly. It identified the book as the property of Lady Mary Wroth. She was a pathbreaker. A contemporary of Shakespeare in the early 17th century, Wroth was England’s first female writer of fiction. The startling thing about seeing this book was that her house in England burned down two centuries ago, and her extensive library with it; not one book was believed to exist. As a literary scholar specializing in rare books, I had seen a photograph of the monogram five years earlier on the bound leather manuscript of a play Wroth had written that was not in the library at the time of the fire. Now it appeared that the volume I was staring at—a biography of the Persian emperor Cyrus the Great—had escaped the inferno as well.
Buying the first issue of Heavy Metal magazine in the winter of 1977 was a life changing event for thirteen year old me. An anthology graphic arts magazine that launched in April, 1977, Heavy Metal was published by the same folks who brought us National Lampoon. An American version of the French comic Metal Hurlant, the magazine mostly reprinted European artists who were new to most Americans, but soon became internationalist graphic art heroes: Angus McKie, Philippe Druillet, Enki Bilal and Mobius.
The latest contribution to this collection was published in the journal Nature in June, a paper by astronomer Lisa Kaltenegger (fittingly director of the Carl Sagan Institute at Cornell). Kaltenegger and her collaborators used new data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission to figure out which stars have, have had, or will in the next 5,000 years have the right view to detect Earth in orbit around the sun—using the same technology that we today use to detect planets around other stars. Kaltenegger told me that part of her inspiration—aside from the new availability of this Gaia data—was to help guide future searches for extraterrestrial intelligence; SETI research looks for signals extraterrestrials might be beaming to Earth. She said, “In the ’60s,” at the dawn of SETI, “they started to think if we wanted to send a signal, we would send it to a place where we know there’s a planet. … And so then you reverse that viewpoint.” Who might be out there who knows the Earth is here?
Francisco Goldman’s latest novel, Monkey Boy, launches its protagonist, Frankie Goldberg, on a journey of self-reflection, as he takes a three-day voyage from New York City to visit his ailing Guatemalan mother in the Boston area. Old neighborhoods and haunts rush by his train window, triggering memories of a past he’d thought hidden, blacked out. From his experiences of an abusive father and childhood bullies to the events of the Guatemalan Civil War, about which he writes articles as a journalist (including an assassination case he is investigating that is tied to the war), Frankie excavates the past in the hopes of finding himself among the rubble of his memories.
In this subtle and profound meditation on the science of life, filled with memorable insights into the past and future of biology, Zimmer reveals the extraordinary complexity and diversity of life, as well as the ingenious attempts of scientists to probe its origins and how it may have evolved on other worlds.
In midsentence. Like a pregnant sow
in another mud- and mire-laden trench,