Getting the SETI field moving again required more than a specific new technology; it required a new way of thinking about technology as a whole. ‘I was never a big fan of what might be called “beacon SETI”,’ the astrophysicist Adam Frank from the University of Rochester tells me. ‘The idea is that you’re waiting for somebody to send you a message with radio, but I thought, maybe nobody wants to do that.’ Frank is one of the leading researchers embracing a different approach, one that focuses on the hunt for ‘technosignatures’: evidence of any kind of alien technology that modifies its environment in detectable ways.
The shift from SETI to technosignature is an intellectual sea change in thinking about what extraterrestrials could be, and about how they might reveal themselves to us. The emerging science of technosignatures has also reopened a high-stakes, long-dormant debate. To make contact, do we need to stop just listening and start talking as well? Or is announcing our existence to the Universe an invitation to destruction?
To write a poignant sentence or a precise description is a joy, but the pleasure of writing is not content-dependent. Making marks is the thing. I have distinctive penmanship—small letters, precisely assembled, compact but not cramped, legible. But sloppier, dashed-off notes come with their own satisfaction, a race between head and hand, stretching out letterforms from small blocks of ink to interconnected shapes that approach the undulating waves of my mother’s cursive.
At first glance, Kwon Yeo-sun’s “Lemon” appears to be your typical whodunit; much of its first chapter is dedicated to an interview between detective and suspect. But then Kwon directs the reader’s attention elsewhere. Yes, by the end, the reader will know who the killer is, but that knowledge takes a back seat in this poignant tale.
On the surface, S. A. Cosby’s Razorblade Tears is a crime novel about channeling grief to exact revenge. However, right underneath there is much more. For starters, it’s a timely narrative about coming to terms with Otherness, accepting difference, recognizing that love is love, and the devastating effects not doing those things can have on families. Also, it’s a story that takes the Black experience in the South and places it in a rural context, which is something most contemporary crime fiction has failed to do. Cosby, a Black man born and raised in a family of limited means in southeastern Virginia, knows exactly how to bring authenticity to the page. While these elements are enough to make this novel an outstanding read, Razorblade Tears is more than the sum of its parts. This is crime fiction packed with everything fans have come to expect of the genre, but the way Cosby writes about emotion is more aligned with literary fiction. Razorblade Tears expands into social commentary that’s not preachy.
In The Lincoln Highway, Towles gives us what all great road novels give us: the panoramic sweep of the prairies and hills, adventures that seem to spring from the landscape itself, the propulsive rhythm of the road. The novel is told through multiple perspectives and each is as engaging and fully realised as the next.