Trade paperbacks fueled a bookstore bonanza. Two groups loved the new format: adult readers who wanted to stretch their book dollars, and the huge baby boom generation, whose seventy million members were starting to buy books and had no prejudice against paperbacks.
Arion Press is one of the world’s great printing centers. Located in San Francisco’s The Presidio, it is shrouded in chilly drifting fog from the ocean. A towering smokestack testifies to its former use as a hospital boiler plant. Inside, multi-ton letterpresses clank and whir, fires roar, melting down metal and bookbinders painstakingly fold pages upon pages upon pages. Some of the most exciting things in the rare-book universe are happening at Arion, a company with origins dating back a century and which still uses that century-old machinery.
Earlier speculations about extraterrestrial civilizations were based primarily on astronomical and technological considerations like the number of planetary systems in the galaxy and how long it might take an intelligent species to discover and begin using radio waves. That left little attention for the specific attributes of potential host planets—other than the presence or absence of water.
Stern is a geologist at the University of Texas at Dallas who studies the evolution of the continental crust, and Gerya is a geophysicist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology who models Earth’s internal processes. Their conclusion may disappoint extraterrestrial enthusiasts: The likelihood that other technologically sophisticated societies exist is smaller than previously thought, because basic amenities we take for granted on Earth—continents, oceans, and plate tectonics—are cosmically rare.
From our privileged position in history, we know that advances in energy use often come with increases in efficiency, not simply increases in size or expansiveness. Think of the modern miniaturization of smartphones versus the mid-20th-century trend of computers that filled up whole rooms. Perhaps we should be looking for sophisticated and compact alien spacecraft, rather than motherships spewing misused energy.
Max, a thirtysomething creative writing tutor, has died, and now haunts the second-floor flat in London’s Tulse Hill where he once lived with his Australian girlfriend, Hannah. This is inconvenient, as Max doesn’t believe in ghosts, and yet here he is, watching Hannah grieve, “floating about like a jellyfish, my tendrils … sweeping up the lint and hair from the floor. Sometimes when I come forth I take up the whole of a room, like a balloon slotted between ribs and blown up to make a space for breath.” Notice that funny, mysterious “come forth”, and the near-violence of the simile that follows (“slotted between ribs”): this is not going to be a quirky-sad love story, all poignant memories and hard-won insights. We are in Evie Wyld’s precise and unforgiving hands, and she knows exactly where she wants to take us.
If you’re going to write an opposites attract romance, this is exactly how you do it: by infusing the story with so much witty banter and heart-soothing tenderness that readers can’t bear to put the book down for even a second (who needs to eat or sleep anyway?). It hits all the right emotional beats, giving readers two impulsive and imperfect but down-right perfect-for-each-other characters to sympathise with and root for from the moment they appear on page to the very end of the book.
Like the commonplace books of Milton’s era, “The Garden Against Time” is a kind of anthology, a word whose Greek origins evoke the careful picking of flowers. One such “flower” is a quotation that frames the book, first in an epigraph and then repeated in the final lines, from a fourteenth-century psalter: “This boke is cald garthen closed, wel enseled, paradyse ful of all appils.” Laing borrows and adapts this image of a paper paradise stocked with fruit for the reader’s taking: her book, she hopes, is not a “garthen closed” but “a garden opened and spilling over.” That’s one way to unwall your paradise and have it, too.