We went out by a path that led through a big clump of flickering starflowers and then into Batwing. A whole bunch of Batwing grownups and newhairs were in their clearing banging away at a giant redlantern tree with their blackglass axes, working in the pink light of its flowers.

We walked round the edge of their clearing to Family Fence, dragged away the branches at the opening, and went out into open forest. No more shelters and campfires ahead of us now: nothing but shining trees.

Hmmmph, hmmmph, hmmmph, went the trees. Hmmmmmm, went forest. We walked for a waking under the light of the treelanterns, slashing down whatever birds and bats and fruit we could get as we went along, and finally stopped to rest at the big lump of rock called Lava Blob. Old Roger handed us out a gritty little seedcake each, made of ground-up starflower seeds, so we could have something in our bellies, and then we settled down with our backs against the rock, so we didn’t have to worry about leopards sneaking up behind us. There were lots of yellowlantern trees round there, which we didn’t get so much back in Family, and also yellow animals called hoppers that came bouncing out of forest on their back legs and wrung their four hands together while they looked at us with their big flat eyes and went Peep peep peep. But hoppers were no good to eat and their skins were no use either, so we just chucked stones at them to make them go away and let us sleep in peace.

Free newsletter

Sign up to Book Club

Sign up to newsletter

When we woke up, Starry Swirl was still bright bright in sky. We ate a bit of dry cake and off we went again, under redlanterns and whitelanterns and spiketrees, with flutterbyes darting and glittering all round us and bats chasing the flutterbyes and trees going hmmph, hmmph, hmmph like always, until it all blurred together into that hmmmmmmmmm that was the background of our lives.

After a few miles we came to a small pool full of shiny wavyweed and all us newhairs took off our wraps and dived into the warm water for crabfish and oysters to eat. All the boys watched Tina Spiketree diving in, and they all thought how graceful she was with her long legs, and how smooth her skin was, and how much they wanted to slip with her. But when she came up she swam straight to me, and gave me a dying oyster with the bright pink light still shining out of it.

“You know what they say about oysters, don’t you, John?” she said.

Tom’s neck, she was pretty pretty, the prettiest in whole of Family. And she knew it well well.

In another couple of hours we reached the place where Peckham Hills began to rise up out of forest of Circle Valley, and started to climb up through them by Monkey Path, which isn’t really a path, but just a way we know through the trees. The trees carried on up the slopes – redlanterns and whitelanterns and scalding hot spiketrees – and there were flickering starflowers growing beneath them, just like in the rest of forest. Streams ran through them down from darkness and ice, heading towards Greatpool, still cold cold but already bright and glittering with life. And small creatures called monkeys jumped from tree to tree. They had little thin bodies, and six long arms with a hand on the end of each. Handsome Fox shot one with an arrow, and was pleased pleased with himself, even though they were all bones and sinews and only give a mouthful of meat, because they move fast and are hard to aim at with those big blotches on their skin that flash on and off as they swing among the lanternflowers.

As we climbed up it got colder. The starflowers disappeared, the trees became smaller, and there weren’t any monkeys any more, only the occasional smallbuck darting away through the trees. And then the trees stopped and we came out from the top edge of forest onto bare ground. Pretty soon, when we’d climbed above the height of those last few little trees, we could see whole of Circle Valley spread out below us – whole of Eden that we knew, with thousands and thousands of lanterns shining all the way from where we stood on Peckham Hills to Dark shadow of Blue Mountains away in the distance, and from Rockies over the left, with the red glow of Mount Snellins smouldering in middle, to the deep darkness over to our right that was Alps. And above all of it the huge spiral of Starry Swirl was still shining down.

Of course, with no trees to give off light with their lanternflowers or to warm the air with their trunks, it was dark dark up there – you could only just barely make things out in the starlight and the light from the edge of forest – and it was cold cold, specially on our feet. But us newhairs dared each other to run up as far as the snow. The ice felt like it was burning, it was so cold, and most kids took ten twenty steps, yelled and came running down again. But I took Gerry right up to the ridge of the hill and then, ignoring Old Roger yelling at us to come back, went far enough down the other side so that the others couldn’t see us.

“We’ve made our point now, haven’t we, John?” Gerry said, shivering. We only had waistwraps on, and buckskins round our shoulders, and our feet were hurting like they’d been skinned. “Shall we go back down to rest of them now?”

My cousin Gerry was about a wombtime younger than me – his dad was giving his mum a slip, in other words, about the time that I was born – and he was devoted to me, he thought I was wonderful, he’d do just about anything I asked.

“No, wait a minute. Wait a minute. Be quiet and listen.”

“Listen to what?”

“To the silence, you idiot.”

There was no hmmmmmmmm of forest, no hmmph, hmmph, hmmph of pumping trees, no starbirds going hoom, hoom, hoom in the distance, no flutterbyes flapping and flicking, no whoosh of diving bats. There was no sound at all except a quiet little tinkle of water all around us coming out from under the snow in hundreds of little streams. And it was dark dark. No tree-light up there. The only light came from Starry Swirl.

We could barely make out each other’s faces. It made me think about that place called Earth where Tommy and Angela first came from, way back in the beginning with the Three Companions, and where one waking we would all return, if only we stayed in the right place and were good good good. There were no lanterntrees back there on Earth, no glittery flutterbyes or shiny flowers, but they had a big big light that we don’t have at all. It came from a giant star. And it was so bright that it would burn out your eyes if you stared at it.

“When people talk about Earth,” I said to Gerry, “they always talk about that huge bright star, don’t they, and all the lovely light it must have given? But Earth turned round and round, didn’t it, and half the time it wasn’t facing the star at all but was dark dark, without lanterns or anything, only the light the Earth people made for themselves.”

“What are you talking about, John?” Gerry said, with his teeth chattering. “And why can’t we go back down again if you just want to talk?”

“I was thinking about that darkness. They called it Night, didn’t they? I’m just thinking that it must have been like this. What you get up here on Snowy Dark: it’s what they would have called Night.”

© Chris Beckett

This is an extract from by Chris Beckett (Corvus), the November read for the New Scientist Book Club. Sign up for the club here, and join the discussion on Discord .

When you make a purchase via the links on this page, we receive a commission.

I came up with the idea of the planet Eden in 1992 for a short story called . At that time, I had no idea that there really were such things as planets without suns, but it seemed likely to me. It also seemed possible to me that life might arise on such a planet, since, even here on Earth, whole ecologies thrive without sunlight around thermal vents in the deep ocean. Life on Earth may have even have begun in such places.

Quite often, if something seems likely, it does indeed happen. (In another , I predicted that a US president would one day seek to take over Greenland and Canada.) Having written that story, I learned that free-floating planets did indeed exist. Being dark, they’re hard to spot, but a number have been detected using gravitational lensing. And I gather it’s not particularly controversial to think that some of them might support life (though not quite in the form that I chose to imagine it – but I’ll come to that).

When creating a world for a story, I don’t usually seek to make the whole thing scientifically accurate, but I try to make it hang together in a way that feels coherent. I didn’t build Eden by doing a lot of research, but I did put a lot of thought into how it might all work. This wasn’t so I could put it all in the book – no one in Eden knows this stuff and the story is told entirely by its characters! – but so that I had something to guide my imagination and make my invented world feel coherent.

Free newsletter

Sign up to Book Club

Sign up to newsletter

My idea was that Eden had once been covered in ice, but its hot core meant there was liquid water below the ice in which life could come into existence. One particular kind of life form appeared, somewhat resembling tree roots, that was able to obtain additional energy by pushing deep down into hot rocks, pumping its sap through them to heat it, and then pumping it back up again, like a geothermal power station. One of the ways these organisms used this heat was to push upwards into the planet’s shell of ice, melting parts of it, feeding on the nutrients it contained, and creating more living space – and they carried on doing so until much of the surface of Eden was ice-free, and had an atmosphere that would turn out to be breathable by humans.

Millions of years later, this thawed-out surface, now populated by a multitude of different life forms, became the stage on which my drama could unfold: first that early story, then another story and then the novel Dark Eden and its two sequels. In Dark Eden, a tiny community of humans, descended from stranded visitors from Earth, eke out a living using tools made of stone and wood, and try to make sense of their life as exiles from a sunlit world that lives on in folk memory, but which they can only very shakily imagine. (In the biblical story of Eden, humans are exiled from Eden – my Eden is the place of exile.) Their stories tell them that Earth people could fly through the air, that there was a thing there called leckytrickity, that Earth animals had eyes that you could look into and see their minds looking back out at you, not like the flat, blank eyes of Eden creatures.

On the surface of Eden, those root-like life forms put up structures that Eden’s humans call “trees”. A whole ecosystem has evolved around them, including “starflowers” that parasitise their roots. (These, as it happens, turn out to be a rich source of Vitamin D. Phew! What a stroke of luck!) And there are many animals – or quote-unquote “animals”, strictly speaking, since they’re not related to the animal kingdom of Earth. There’s no sunlight in Eden (and therefore no alternation of day and night) but, like organisms that live in the ocean depths of Earth, Eden’s life has developed bioluminescence. The “trees” have luminous “lanternflowers”; the starflowers glitter. Imagine a leafless forest on a moonless night, lit by thousands of Chinese lanterns. Then add in twinkling fairy lights at ground level. With your eyes half-closed, the forests of Eden would look something like that.

Just as life on Earth depends on plants that turn sunlight into chemical energy, so the life of Eden depends on geothermal trees. They bring heat to the surface to power their metabolisms, they keep the air warm and, if you live on Eden, the steady “Hmmmph hmmmph hmmmph” of their constant pumping is the background of your waking and sleeping life, merging in the distance to a steady hum. All the trees are hot, and some of them are so hot that you’d burn yourself if you touched their trunks. If you cut down a tree, you have to watch out for the spurt of scalding liquid that bursts out.

When I read stories set on alien planets, I’m sometimes disappointed in the “animals” (I’ll drop the inverted commas now). Writers often seem to dream up a motley collection of bizarre creatures without much regard for how they might actually survive or how they are related to one another. I tried to design my animals on evolutionary principles, giving thought to how they were adapted to their environment, the role they played in the ecosystem and how they might plausibly have evolved. Animals on Earth fall into a large but finite number of basic body plans. For example, monkeys, cows, crocodiles and seagulls all have four limbs and, though some descendants of quadrupeds have lost their limbs (snakes, whales), there are no examples of quadrupeds developing extra ones. In the same way, large animals on Eden all have a six-limbed body plan. There are other animals that don’t conform to this, just as there are arthropods, et cetera on Earth, but the large animals are all based on this six-limbed pattern.

The 12 best science fiction books of 2025

From drowned worlds to virtual utopias via deep space, wild ideas abound in Emily H. Wilson’s picks for her favourite sci-fi reads of the year

I’ve already mentioned how different Eden eyes are from the eyes of terrestrial animals. They have evolved alongside the evolution of bioluminescence, rather in the way that colourful flowers and nectar-eating insects have evolved alongside one another on Earth. Eden trees use luminous lanternflowers to attract the creatures that help them reproduce, just as flowering plants on Earth use colour and scent.

I gave a lot of thought to the biology of Eden, but I have to admit that, in strictly scientific terms, my imaginary world isn’t entirely viable. Free-floating planets with warm cores? Yes! Not just possible, but a certainty! But free-floating planets with warm surfaces? Sadly no. More than one astronomer has told me they just couldn’t happen. No matter how many radiator-like trees there might be, I’ve been told, it still wouldn’t be enough to maintain liquid water or a warm atmosphere.

Let’s call it “fiction science”, science made up for a story, which works in some places and in others allows itself poetic licence. Almost all science fiction uses fiction science and Dark Eden contains several other examples. I took some liberties with human genetics, for instance. And then there’s the question of how people got to Eden in the first place. (It’s many light years away from Earth.) Like the writers of pretty much all stories set in interstellar space, I pretended that faster-than-light travel was possible and went with that, although it most probably isn’t.

(I think that’s OK. It allows us to visit, in our imaginations at least, parts of the universe we could never otherwise hope to reach.)

What I wanted from Eden was for it to be a world that hung together well enough to be a satisfying setting for my story, one in which I and my readers could immerse ourselves. The story is about exile and loss. The perpetually dark sky, and the animals with their blank unreadable eyes, serve as reminders that Eden folk are exiles. At the beginning of Dark Eden, every human being in Eden lives around a circle of stones that marks the place where their ancestors first touched down. And this circle represents to Eden folk the hope for return and redemption, which is central to their whole world view.

The fact that I took some liberties when constructing Eden doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be interesting also to write about a real free-floating planet. And, as it happens, I’ve had the opportunity recently to do just that. In a project initiated by Comma Press, I was one of a number of writers who paired up with astronomers from Jodrell Bank to write stories for an anthology called . My astronomer collaborator, Ida Janiak, helped me build a scenario in which a free-floating planet called Lupus arrives in the solar system. Apart from being roughly Earth-sized, Lupus isn’t much like Eden, but somewhat like the Jovian moon Europa. Its surface is covered by a kilometres-thick shell of ice in no danger of melting, with a liquid ocean beneath and… well, read the story! The anthology will appear in November but there will also be a condensed version of mine and Ida’s story in the Christmas edition of New Scientist, out online on 16 December and in print on the 19th.

I hope, meanwhile, you will immerse yourself in the luminous forests of Eden with their pulsing trees. Possible or not, they are very beautiful, if I say so myself.

by Chris Beckett (Corvus) is the November read for the New Scientist Book Club. Sign up for the club here, and join the discussion on Discord .

When you make a purchase via the links on this page, we receive a commission.

After a deep dive into particle physics in September with cosmologist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein’s non-fiction title The Edge of Space-Time, in October the New Scientist Book Club stuck with physics but made it fictional, with Emily St. John Mandel’s new speculative fiction novel Exit Party.

Set in the near future, this is a tale involving quantum entanglement and parallel worlds, but Mandel being Mandel, it’s much more a tale of the people who live in those worlds than the physics that makes them possible. Our sci-fi columnist Emily H. Wilson gave it a glowing review, saying Exit Party was “as elegant and brilliantly executed as [Mandel’s] fans will have grown to expect”.

Free newsletter

Sign up to Book Club

Sign up to newsletter

The book starts in Los Angeles in 2031 in the aftermath of civil war, as the curfew lifts and our protagonist Ari, recently released after years in prison, sets out for a party. She and her friends see some mysterious doppelgangers at the party, but the mystery isn’t really resolved until the second half of the book. By then, we’ve followed Ari through the anarchy and chaos of this lawless version of the US, and we discover that another version of the future is also unspooling.

I asked Emily (Mandel, that is) what it was like to write about her imagined near-future US when we chatted. “By the time I finished the book, I felt like I was struggling to stay ahead of the American news cycle,” she told me. “In 2022 [when she started writing], the notion of masked police seizing people off the streets or shooting civilians in broad daylight would have seemed quite fantastical, but those were literally the ICE raids in Minneapolis.”

I adored the novel Mandel is most famous for, Station Eleven, another imagined near-future but this time set in the aftermath of a flu pandemic. I agree with Emily (Wilson, that is) that this latest is just as beautifully and brilliantly written, but I wasn’t quite as compelled by it, at least for the first half of the novel. By the time we got to the second half, the drama and the science fictional elements ramped up and I ended up really enjoying it, but it’s never that great to press a book on a friend with the words “just give it 100 pages…”.

Book club members, chatting on as they read, were equally conflicted. “Just finished Exit Party. Not, IMO, Mandel’s best book,” wrote Tethysnz. “When I finished Sea of Tranquility, I went back and reread it right away to understand all the connections and undercurrents I’d missed. But with Exit Party connections are pretty clear and not all that interesting.”

Alan_P felt similarly to me about the first half – it’s “almost without incident except for the actual odd appearances and disappearances”, he wrote. “The pace does pick up a little in the final quarter of the book, but most of it is a beautifully described description of two very different societies,” he added. “It’s a good book – I don’t think it’s a great book but it is technically very good, and has an interesting ending. But it makes you work to get there and I don’t think that improves it.”

Matthew found Mandel’s writing style “overly careful, which gets in the way. Which isn’t to say she isn’t a very good writer, perhaps she just needs to let her hair down a bit”, while PiriShepherd, conversely, really enjoyed the novel’s opening. “I love the idea that a party is the place where the unintended bridge between universes opens up. A party is disorientating – somewhere you might be a bit drunk – where unexpected or inexplicable things happen – where people show up that you didn’t expect to see,” they wrote. “Where there might be consequences or disastrous events that extend beyond the next morning.”

“There’s such an intriguing start but then the mystery is largely left aside for a long time – possibly too long for the reader’s satisfaction?” said Dee55. “I found the book’s B part much more gripping – and disturbingly close to things that are already happening in some countries.”

Katita2026 found Mandel’s future visions very frightening. “She doesn’t give us a ‘bad world’ and a ‘good world.’ She gives us the two greatest political nightmares of the 21st century,” Katita   wrote, pondering if “the genius (and the terror) of this book lies precisely in this political pessimism”.

“By offering a world torn between absolute chaos and absolute tyranny, isn’t the author diagnosing that modern society has already lost the ability to imagine a future where democracy survives?” Katita asked.

As you can see, book club members really put this thoughtful, thought-provoking novel through the wringer!

Emily St. John Mandel, best known for her prescient flu pandemic novel Station Eleven, joined the New Scientist Book Club to talk about her latest book, the science-fiction novel Exit Party. Emily discussed everything from why she is compelled to write about the aftermath of disaster – this latest book takes place in a near-future US, after a civil war – to how hard it was to keep ahead of the US news cycle as she wrote.

In the first spring after the collapse of the United States, the blossoming of the jacaranda trees felt to Ari like grace. The trees bloomed in the same week that international peacekeeping troops withdrew from Los Angeles, and the convergence of flowers with the absence of foreign soldiers brought a delirious kind of hope. Everyone in the spring of 2031 knew the city was one terrorist attack away from disaster, but that peril made the season more vivid, not less.

It was Ari’s first spring outside of prison in nearly two decades, and she spent hours at a time walking the streets. Prison is a wasteland of sensory deprivation, and now the city was overwhelming. She kept expecting that the details of the world would cease to be extraordinary, but that kept not happening. No one around her seemed to notice the jacarandas, because in Los Angeles there are flowers every month of the year, but she walked streets where the trees were lit up by purple blue blossoms and thought, My god. This place. She was forty-eight years old but felt younger, because so much of the world was new.

Free newsletter

Sign up to Book Club

Sign up to newsletter

The United States had come undone following a coup d’état. Several states had seceded within a week of the coup, either alone or in alliances with neighbours, and war had broken out within the month. Now the fighting had subsided, for the most part, and Ari had been released into an uneasy aftermath.

“When I think of what the city was a year ago,” Gloria said. Gloria was Ari’s roommate in a very small apartment in Echo Park. She was about a decade younger than Ari, a refugee who’d fled fighting between rival militias in Tennessee. Gloria slept in the bedroom. Ari slept in the living room, with an old sheet stapled to the door frame as a makeshift door, and they met one another in the tiny kitchen. Gloria seemed to spend most of her time reading the news online, her eyes wide and blank in the blue light of her laptop. What the city had been like a year ago was Gloria’s favourite topic of conversation.

“I know,” Ari said gently, although she didn’t. Their experiences were not the same. A year ago, Ari had been imprisoned in what was now a different country and Gloria had been holed up in this apartment with a different roommate.

But tonight the curfew had lifted, and when Ari had gone for a walk earlier, her impression from passing conversations was that everyone in Los Angeles was going out tonight. Gloria was going to her friend Kareem’s party, one neighbourhood over, and had invited Ari to come. But now, with dusk approaching, she’d settled into her familiar position with her laptop at the kitchen table, and showed no signs of getting ready.

“What time shall we leave for that party?” Ari asked.

© Emily St. John Mandel

This is an extract from by Emily St. John Mandel (Picador),��the October read for the New Scientist Book Club. Sign up for the club here, and join the discussion on Discord .

When you make a purchase via the links on this page, we receive a commission.

The New Scientist Book Club has been testing its collective brain power in September with Chanda Prescod-Weinstein’s . Subtitled “particles, poetry and the cosmic dream boogie”, this sees the New Scientist columnist and theoretical physicist set out to explain our universe, from the quantum to the inner workings of black holes.

That’s a lot to get through, but as Chanda writes in her book, it is worth the effort: “We should bother with physics because it is, in part, how we as a species learn to use our minds.” She went further in an exclusive essay for book club members, challenging us to get to grips with the quantum nature of space-time. “Spending time with what feels strange about physics can help prepare us to better reckon with difficult political questions,” she wrote. “Given the crises we face – genocides, climate change, attacks on transgender people – we need our critical faculties now more than ever.”

Starting with a careful deconstruction of why we need to think hard about the metaphors we use in science writing to make sure they are helping rather than hindering readers in understanding non-intuitive concepts in science, Chanda goes on to take us through some of the most abstract areas of theoretical physics. It is, as member Dee55 put it, a “wild ride”, in terms of both the physics and the in-depth conversation that members have been having about the book over on our channel.

I really enjoyed this book. I am someone who didn’t manage to finish Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, but who, thanks to Chanda’s friendly, encouraging and (most importantly) clear writing, emerged at the end of this book a little more knowledgeable about physics. I liked how Chanda slipped in multiple references to literature and popular culture to help make her points, as well as how she told us firmly: “This is supposed to be fun, and there is no test at the end.” She reiterated this in our interview: “[Part] of welcoming people into the material is saying, this isn’t something that only… a lone genius can think about. You’re entitled to this as well. This is your universe, too.”

Many book club members were similarly enamoured. “One of the earliest statements in this book which blew me away (there have been many) was ‘Humanity has only been aware of this cosmic light[from the beginnings of the universe]for sixty-two years’,” wrote Melissa on Discord. “Just the incomprehensible fact of cosmic light from the unimaginable ancientness of the beginning of the universe—which is just there but people have only found out about it in the space of less than one human lifetime ago.”

Jodie has been “enjoying it a lot, even if it does make my head ache at times!” – I think that’s fair, Jodie! – while Dee55 has also found Chanda’s explanations mind-expanding: “For years I have been making periodic attempts to understand Quantum Stuff and always come away fairly befuddled but also intrigued – and this time feels just a little different, as if I am not exactly grasping something but perhaps catching fleeting glimpses of it (we don’t get far without metaphors, I find).”

“The wonderful gift this book gives us is the opportunity to spend time in practicing feeling unsettled, sometimes even bewildered, as we experience the strangeness of quantum physics,” added Laura Akers. “It’s several hours, in my case over many days, of practicing the acceptance that science and reality are strange, bizarre… rather than simple and reassuring – and it’s really okay.”

Free newsletter

Sign up to Book Club

Sign up to newsletter

“I’ve really enjoyed The Edge of Space-time,” wrote DavidCl on Discord. “About half way through I realised what my perspective of reading it was like. It’s like sitting down and spending time with a good friend who is way cleverer and more intelligent than I am while she tries to explain what it is she does, why she does it and what drives her onwards.”

This book is packed with literary allusions, and with Chanda’s strongly expressed political perspectives – not everyone appreciated this. “I am not really enjoying this book, to be honest. I prefer straightforward scientific information and explanations,” wrote Lowenna, while Katita2026 found that Chanda’s politics and her subjective takes intruded on the physics a little too much. “Dr. Prescod-Weinstein is an incredible storyteller. I absolutely love how she brings the cold, intimidating world of astrophysics right down to earth. Explaining cosmic inflation through a TR-808 drum machine, or bringing Missy Elliott and Wu-Tang Clan into a physics book, is just brilliant science communication,” wrote Katita. But “as much as I’m enjoying the read, I find myself struggling when she tries to make the physics fit her politics”.

This was a question picked over with great sensitivity by book club members. “I do agree that some of the connections are bit forced, but I think the author is trying to show not only how physics says that the universe is, but also how she from a particular background visualises that,” wrote Alan_P. “We all bring our own experiences and backgrounds to any field of knowledge and view things through that prism – she’s just giving us her prism. She many times explains the sheer wonder and joy that she experiences as a physicist, and that this is finding out about an objective reality.” DavidCl felt similarly: “The explanations are peppered with her personal viewpoints and politics but that’s ok because her passion and occasionally sweary outbursts are all part of painting a compelling picture.”

All in all, I think this was a (challenging) hit with book club members – on to the next one.

When you make a purchase via the links on this page, we receive a commission.

Theoretical physicist and New Scientist columnist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein takes a deep dive into particle physics in her new book The Edge of Space-Time. She joined the New Scientist Book Club to talk about the weirdness of the quantum world, why she included so much poetry in her book – and why the importance of physics shouldn’t be filtered through its contribution to the economy.

Emily St. John Mandel, Pan Macmillan

It is always a big deal when Emily St. John Mandel, the much-feted author of Station Eleven and Sea of Tranquillity, has a new novel out, and her latest doesn’t disappoint.

Exit Party is a parallel-universe story that flits backwards and forwards in time, from character to character, and eventually between worlds. It is as elegant and brilliantly executed as her fans have grown to expect, a book where every detail matters. I will give only the general set-up in this review, so no need to fear spoilers.

We begin in California, 2031. The US has been torn apart by war, but the curfew in Los Angeles has just been lifted. Our main protagonist, Ari, and her roommate Gloria plan to go to a party. (I read this very early section a few times before sticking with it, so if you find yourself in the same situation, know that it’s worth pushing on.)

Ari has just spent 20 years in prison for taking out a hit on someone, and she is very keen to party, but Gloria is reluctant to leave home when it comes to it. She shows signs of PTSD and mentions another party where a bomb went off. Eventually the two get to the party, and find the house full of flowers and the host, Kareem, warm and welcoming. At first, everything feels magical and exciting, but later something goes badly wrong, in ways that will take years for Ari to unravel.

“There were extra people,” is how a guest at the party explains it. Yes, there are too many people at the party. At one point, Ari realises a woman is there in two completely different outfits; are they twins? The next day, Kareem is missing, having vanished entirely.

Exit Party is as elegant and brilliantly executed as fans have grown to expect

Exit Party‘s structure is unusual, playing with time and points of view as your understanding of what is really going on deepens. St. John Mandel’s plotting skills and ability to build character quickly mean that the book never loses its dramatic intensity and forward propulsion as we make our leaps in time and viewpoint.

Thinking over the book, once I had finished it, I was struck by how much St. John Mandel was able to explore through her two-worlds structure, in what isn’t a long book. We get to imagine how different a person might be if life dealt them a different hand, or if they lived in a different world, a world also broken but in a very different way, perhaps. We also get to ponder how, without witnesses to sections of our life, we can end up in a different world without having to cross between universes. Oh, and so much more. It is a wonderfully thoughtful book.

Novels by St. John Mandel are usually described as speculative or dystopian fiction. This one also counts as old-fashioned sci-fi, I guess, because of the parallel universes, but there is close to zero science, because how people cross between worlds isn’t the point. This is about fate, courage, character and destiny, through the prism of parallel worlds.

A key facet of the book is also that Ari has premonitions, where she (sort of) knows what is going to happen next. Again, a science-free zone, but it makes for great entertainment.

My only bone to pick is that I never bought Ari’s full backstory. We are meant to believe that this canny, well-prepared, criminally savvy and basically OK woman, who also happens to experience strong premonitions, would take out a clumsy hit on one of her very few close relatives. Hmmm.

Anyway, that aside, bravo to Emily St. John Mandel, an absolute force in modern fiction.

Emily also recommends…

TV

Fringe
Created by J. J. Abrams, Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, This five-season TV show was uneven on many levels, to say the least. However it was also a bold and at times wildly creative exploration of parallel universes, with moments of absolute genius.

Emily H. Wilson is the author of the Sumerians series (Inanna, Gilgamesh and Ninshubar, all published by Titan) and she is currently working on her first sci-fi novel. She is a former editor of New Scientist and you can follow her on Instagram @emilyhwilson1.

When you make a purchase via the links on this page, we receive a commission.

If I could go back in time and tell my younger self something about life as a theoretical physicist, I might say: mind the gap between what’s exciting about physics and what the job actually is. My new book, , was born in part out of thinking about the physical questions that get pushed to the margins in professional physics. Big-picture questions like, what is the material nature of space? What is a quantum theory of time? It is very difficult to build a professional life working on these questions – even as books tout them as the most exciting ones in the universe.

I was recruited into the world of physics by the Errol Morris documentary about Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time. Eventually, I read Hawking’s book of the same name and my impression of a working life in physics was that, for the most part, physicists think big thoughts about wonders of the universe every day.

Free newsletter

Sign up to Book Club

Sign up to newsletter

Today, I’m a tenured professor of physics at a major research institution, and a lot of my job is sending emails about bureaucratic things, like asking whether anyone can tell me the policy that is governing changes that the university is making to my grant. On a good day, I get to have conversations about science with the postdoctoral fellows I employ in my research group – but that’s not every day. And in either case, the kind of research that we can get grant funding to do is quite limited. The sort of work Hawking did on the nature of time is financially out of reach for most physicists, a situation that is getting worse as the UK and the US both slash and burn basic science budgets.

The Edge of Space-Time was born in this gap between what we say science is and the reality of living it. I began it at a moment of transition. I had just been awarded tenure, which, in the US, historically has meant my position is permanent, and I am free to research whatever interests me without worrying about being fired. At the moment my tenure became official, I was thinking about what I had given up to get there, the strategic choices I had made.

I gave up working on quantum gravity, for example, both because of racism I experienced as a PhD student and because the job prospects weren’t good. I never took a class where we were asked to think deeply about time, space and the fundamental nature of space-time. Mostly, I learned to calculate and pursue questions that were broadly agreeable to the physics community, like understanding the nature of dark matter. And while I think these questions are important and interesting, they live at a kind of margin that physicists are pushed to by economic and social forces that determine which questions we can be paid to pursue and which we won’t be.

When I began working on the book in 2023, I was in the midst of a five-year stint working in US science policy, alongside colleagues from around the world (mostly the UK, Europe and Canada). As I learned more about the politics of science at the government level, it became clear to me that particle physics and cosmology were in trouble. Politicians were no longer sold on the fundamental importance of our research and didn’t see how it was beneficial to the capitalist economy or the military, which historically is how that support has been rationalised. The cultural arguments – that a well-cultured civilisation does things like try to understand the universe – didn’t seem impactful at all. And the general public, struggling with climate change and economies that don’t serve the 99 per cent, couldn’t see how we had anything to add.

I could see that we were about to be on the margins in a new way. And so The Edge of Space-Time became not just a return to my roots and the big-picture questions that once drove me, it also became a plea: don’t let me be the last of my kind. The cuts that are being made to science in the UK and the US right now seem like a political problem that is easily remedied, but it is more complicated than that. Even one year where there is a gap in funding means we haemorrhage workers who may never return. As those researchers leave, they take with them knowledge. Because the sciences work through apprenticeship, if there is no senior instructor to pass on knowledge, it doesn’t matter if there is money and an apprentice waiting in the wings.

With The Edge of Space-Time, I take readers on a journey through huge questions, like why does my favourite physics experiment foist the structures of quantum physics on us? And will we ever know what space-time really is, or is it always just going to be a useful mathematical construct that allows us to calculate motion in environments where gravity plays a significant role, like near black holes?

While thinking through the physics, I also try to make the case for why any healthy democracy needs people who live at the edge of what is known and what is unknown – the keepers of these cosmic stories that have fascinated humans for millennia. I make the case that, like poetry, physics gives us a viewpoint on the universe that we need because it is our ancestral inheritance. I also argue that spending time with what feels strange about physics can help prepare us to better reckon with difficult political questions.

Given the crises we face – genocides, climate change, attacks on transgender people – we need our critical faculties now more than ever. Thinking a bit about the various edges of space-time, like black holes and cosmic event horizons, can help us build the better world we need.

by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein (Canongate Books) is the September read for the New Scientist Book Club. Sign up for the club here, and join the discussion on Discord .

When you make a purchase via the links on this page, we receive a commission.

sε wo werε fi na wosan kɔfa a, yεnkyi

it is not incorrect to go back and get what you forgot

—Akan proverb

We are called to go back and get the history of space-time. And who am I to argue with the ancestors?

Even so, I do. Science in this society is often done for the wrong rea­sons, I find myself telling them. And they remind me that because it’s my job to study the origin and evolution of the universe and every­thing inside it, I know there is a location in space-time where the uni­verse became transparent to light: the first place where light could fly free. The ancestors insist: This is a story that I have learned so I could tell it to others. To do cosmology—to study the beginning and evolu­tion of space, time, and matter—is to be a griot, a keeper of stories and history. To do cosmology is to go back and get the beginning, to map out the future.

So: Quite nearly at the beginning, the universe said let there be light. And particles of light—photons—all of them traveling at the speed of light, the fastest in the universe, couldn’t get very far. They were stuck in a plasma stew where they constantly bumped into par­ticles, especially electrons, which swallowed their energy and spat it out in the form of new photons and other particles.

Humanity has only been aware of this cosmic light for eighty-two years. It has been there almost since the beginning of everything and has been traveling for nearly 14 billion years. It was there when the universe was cool enough for atoms to form. It was with the sun when it was just a cloud of gas, and it was there when the sun’s hydrogen ignited with fusion, turning the sun into a star. It was there when the leftovers from the gas cloud condensed into planet Earth. And it was there when carbon-based life forms evolved into apes.

Free newsletter

Sign up to Book Club

Sign up to newsletter

This light is a cosmic edge: We cannot look past it because at any time earlier than that, the photons were trapped, unable to get out. And this edge is a reminder that physics is a way of gaining deep insight into the universe, one we can add to the variety of overlapping forms of knowing that we have long used. To understand this bound­ary, and how we have come to know about it, is to deepen our rela­tionship with ourselves and the universe around us in a very specific and beautiful way. We should embrace it, for ourselves, and for future generations, because it is our history—and who are we to argue with the ancestors?

…

The book you are reading is about the queer, poetic wonder that is our universe and what we gain when we look at it from the margins. It is my version of what historian Aimé Dafon Sègla calls cosmovi­sions, a response to the question of why we should bother trying to get beyond the edges of human knowledge about the physical universe. The Edge of Space-Time is part of a larger tradition that includes not just scientists but also artists. People like jazz percussionist, artist, and technologist Milford Graves, who used percussion, sound, and observations of praying mantises and plant growth to understand a phenomenon he termed “cosmic energy.” Graves, a maker working in a long tradition of Black artists, was not formally trained as a scien­tist, and “cosmic energy” sounds a little like mystic talk. But when I listened to him describe his ideas in the documentary Milford Graves Full Mantis, I heard a familiar sensibility about how matter is linked with and through space-time, a relationship that takes center stage in this book.

As a set of knowledges and techniques, physics provides a path­way toward answering the same questions Graves asked about the fundamental nature of our cosmos and the relationship between matter, energy, and space-time. It allows us to specify in great detail the relationship between photons and the plants in Graves’s garden which transformed the photons into living particles. It is another entry point to what plant biologist and Black feminist theorist of intersectionality in science Beronda L. Montgomery calls lessons from plants.

When it’s at its best, physics is a kind of poetry, a story about the cosmos that is made from metaphors—and a producer of metaphors in its own right. We often analyze the world through metaphor, and I believe that seeing the universe through the perspective offered by physics strengthens our ability to understand what work metaphors are doing on us and how we might wield them. It is in this sense that physics works on us like poetry: a perspective on the world that provides insights not available to us elsewhere. This helps us under­stand why we should bother with it. We should bother with physics because it is, in part, how we as a species learn to use our minds. We should learn and teach poetry, physics, algebra, and other abstract ideas because they train us to think in symbolic and figurative terms. The same goes for calculus and quantum mechanics. And if we can­not learn to think in and through the abstract and the symbolic, then we are pliable. We are sitting ducks for the fascists and authoritarians who will use us for their ends, and their ends are ultimately catastro­phe for the rest of us. That’s always been true, and it always will be.

In a world where genocides (plural) can be live-streamed and still continue unabated, it is hard to imagine that society could be oth­erwise when what is broken about it feels so total and, in the case of the families shattered and lives lost, so final. I don’t think cosmology by itself can save the world. Even so, I believe in the ways that people experience a connection to the cosmos as nourishing. And I believe in preparing for the better world that is coming.

This is an extract from by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein (Canongate Books), the September read for the New Scientist Book Club. Sign up for the club here, and join the discussion on Discord .

When you make a purchase via the links on this page, we receive a commission.