Synopsis
Summer 1971. A lone spacecraft is on its way to Mars. Meanwhile, Venus Dawson heads toward Pasadena – and back to her job at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where confidence is high among rocket scientists that the red planet will soon reveal its secrets. Venus is in no hurry. Her male colleagues make lewd jokes about her, enter her in beauty contests against her will, and encourage her to wear her miniskirts even shorter. So she dawdles as she drives, examining the journal she’s just inherited, written by her Great Aunt Lulu, secretary “with benefits” to a famous astronomer, and a woman who gazed at the red planet through a giant telescope long before women were allowed to do such things. The clever JPL scientists are certain their new spacecraft will discover evidence of life on Mars, but Venus finds it first – on the pages of Lulu’s journal. But before she can use this information to level the workplace playing field, a cosmic misstep strands her at Lulu’s old haunt, Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff. Venus must navigate the Victorian era and the space age simultaneously to claim her place in an expanding universe. In this stylish and edgy novel, author Jan Millsapps deftly teases the female experience out of a history of mostly male astronomers and rocket scientists, and tells a mesmerizing story about generations of women struck by the stars.
About the Author
Jan Millsapps, Ph.D., is a pioneering digital filmmaker, an early web innovator, and a versatile and accomplished writer. She has produced films, videos, digital and interactive cinema on subjects ranging from domestic violence to global terrorism, and has published in traditional print and online venues. Her media work has been shown at the Smithsonian Institution, the Kennedy Center, the International Center of Photography in New York, the National Educational Film and Video Festival, the Mill Valley Film Festival, San Francisco City Hall, the National Latino Health Conference in Washington, D.C., Bay Area Kaiser Permanente medical centers, and USC’s “Interactive Frictions” conference on new media theory and practice. Her scholarly, political and personal essays have appeared in the journal "Film Literature Quarterly," in the book "International Film, Television and Radio Journals," in the "San Francisco Chronicle," on the "New York Times" wire service, and in the inaugural issue of "Sinister Wisdom." Her early web work was cited in a 1995 book, "The 500 Best Film & Video Sites and in the "Journal of the Writer's Guild of America." She has been a featured blogger on the Apple Learning Interchange and a contributing editor for the online, rich media journal, "Academic Intersections." In 2007 she published her first novel, "Screwed Pooch," about the Soviet space dog Laika. As professor of cinema at San Francisco State University, she created and taught the first "Cinema as an Online Medium" class and founded a unique Interdisciplinary Digital Arts program; currently she teaches courses in digital cinema, interactive cinema, web cinema and short format screenwriting. She was profiled as an outstanding California educator in the 1998 television series "Quest for Excellence," and in 2004 she was named an Apple Distinguished Educator. She earned her B.A. with honors in Creative Arts at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte; her M.A. in English at Winthrop University; and her Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Composition at the University of South Carolina. She also holds an academic certificate in cosmology. She lives in San Francisco with her husband, music and media producer Phill Sawyer.
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