The Falling Sky - Softcover

Pippa Goldschmidt

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1908754141 ISBN 13: 9781908754141

Publisher: Freight Books, 2014

Synopsis

A blackly comic campus satire combined with a heart-breaking family mystery, The Falling Sky brilliantly mixes fiction and astronomy into a fascinating, compelling, and moving narrative

Jeanette is a young, solitary post-doctoral researcher who has dedicated her life to studying astronomy. Struggling to compete in a prestigious university department dominated by egos and incompetents, and caught in a cycle of brief and unsatisfying affairs, she travels to a mountaintop observatory in Chile to focus on her research. There Jeanette stumbles upon evidence that will challenge the fundamentals of the universe, drawing her into conflict with her colleagues and the scientific establishment, but also casting her back to the tragic loss that defined her childhood. As the implications of her discovery gather momentum, and her relationships spiral out of control, Jeanette's own grip on reality is threatened, finally forcing her to confront the hidden past. This bittersweet debut novel blends black comedy, heartbreaking tragedy, and fascinatingly accessible science, in an intricate and beautiful examination of one woman's disintegration and journey to redemption.

About this title

About the Author

Pippa Goldschmidt has a PhD in astronomy and worked as an astronomer for several years, followed by posts in the civil service including working in outer space policy. She has written on astronomy for the New York Times. In 2012 she was awarded a prestigious Scottish Book Trust/Creative Scotland New Writers Award. The Falling Sky was runner-up in the Dundee International Book Prize.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Falling Sky

By Pippa Goldschmidt

Freight Books

Copyright © 2013 Pippa Goldschmidt
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-908754-14-1

CHAPTER 1

NOW

Jeanette may as well be invisible. She's standing on the stage in the auditorium in front of about two hundred other astronomers, presenting the results of her PhD work at the annual British conference. But she can tell no one's listening.

She doesn't blame them. She wouldn't listen either, if she didn't have to. If she could only find a way of drowning out that slightly tremulous voice in her head, which is going on and on about dust in early galaxies. Still, not long now. She's reached the final slide, showing the actual data. That may interest them more.

She shines the red dot of the laser pointer onto the screen, wishing it didn't betray her nervousness. She's trying to show them the centre of a galaxy, the point where the contours on the map converge into the peak of intensity, and the dot is dancing around it, refusing to settle down. Perhaps it doesn't matter. She's only just finished her thesis, she's expected to be young and overawed by the prospect of speaking at a conference.

But they're not interested in this slide either. Some of them are working on their laptops, others are talking to each other. Several people are fiddling with their phones, reading the conference programme, even reading newspapers. Her boss, the Death Star, is asleep. That's to be expected, he always sits in the front row and sleeps, only waking up at the end to ask some horribly pertinent question. She wonders what he'll ask today. Because it's not enough to give the talk in a whisper and be ignored; the experience isn't complete without the ritual of questions afterwards, to allow the (mostly male) audience to do the verbal equivalent of showing their tail feathers off to each other.

She gets to the end, clicks off the laser, stands and waits. She doesn't have to wait long.

'Why haven't you used visible wavelengths as well as infrared?' from someone who appears to have been playing a game on his mobile phone and clearly hasn't listened to the main point of her talk, which was the comparison of visible and infrared images.

'Have you considered an alternative explanation of the results?' This is from someone she fears, a Bright Young Thing not long arrived here from Harvard and keen to demolish all before him.

'What sort of alternative explanation are you thinking of ?' She certainly can't think of any and he obviously wants to enlighten everyone. He sets off on an elaborate discussion, gargoyled with words she has never heard of. When he finally stops talking she can't even summon the energy to reply to him, she just points silently to someone else who is waving his hand at her, as if summoning a waitress to remove his dirty plates.

'Why haven't you referenced my paper on this galaxy?'

'I have.' She hopes she sounds rude.

The Death Star wakes up and stares at her as if he's never seen her before. 'What does it mean?' he asks before his eyes snap shut again, not bothering to wait for her reply.

What does it mean? It means what she has already explained to him and everyone else, that the peak of infrared emission from this galaxy is spatially offset from the peak at visible wavelengths, implying a large amount of dust must be present which is obscuring some of the stars, soaking up the light and re-emitting it at longer wavelengths. The dust is made by exploding stars come to the end of their lives, so this is an old galaxy, it's already produced at least one generation of stars. Interesting enough, if you want to know the detail of how galaxies work.

It means she has fulfill

Edition details

• Publisher: Freight Books
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1908754141
• ISBN 13: 9781908754141
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 264