Having recently finished Mike Chen’s Here and Now and Then, I undertook another sci-fi novel—and was blown away by Light from Other Stars. Wow!!!—exquisite prose in an ambitious novel told in two timelines, the present (with the protagonist, Nedda Pappas, on a space voyage with three other crew members) and the past which looks at the effects of a machine Nedda’s father built intended to fight entropy—he wants to give his daughter all the time she needs to mature. Instead, his machine, the Crucible, wreaks havoc on the Florida town of Easter, its orange groves, kudzu, and its inhabitants, particularly Nedda’s best friend Denny and her father.
Light from Other Stars starts with Nedda at age eleven, watching the Challenger disaster, and mourning her idolized astronauts. She is a prodigy who feels “it was stupid to send grown men into space when a girl would be a better fit.” Later, she is an astronaut whizzing through space with three other crew members with an ailing life support system.
This is a book that tears at your heart and soul. I sobbed through a goodly portion of it. It’s hard to imagine a sci-fi book so focused on pure, deep emotion while centered on the Earth and the wonders of space. Light from Other Stars hits big issues: loneliness, the bond between parent and child; grief; death and what happens to us after death. Theo, Nedda’s father is an archetypal absent-minded professor character, but her mother, Betheen, is unique. She goes from being a mother unable to bond with her daughter to one who handles the biggest crisis in her daughter’s life with aplomb, giving incredibly poignant advice that both comforts Nedda and admits to its own limitations.
Plain and simple, I loved this book.
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Light from Other Stars will be released May 7, 2019 by is available for pre-order from:
