Light From Other Stars

Author: Erika Swyler
Genre: Science Fiction
Publisher: Bloomsbury 2019

It was 1986.  Eleven year old Nedda was an eccentric child who had only one close friend in her class.  They lived in a small town very close to Cape Canaveral, Florida.

On January 28, the whole class was watching a television that was cart-weeled into the class, anticipating to see a successful launch of the space shuttle Challenger.  There is a teacher, just like her teacher, who is going to go up in the shuttle.  The final countdown had begun.  Ten … Nine … eight …  A spitball sent by a kid sitting behind her struck Nedda on her cheek.  three …, two … one … She ignored the first spitball but when the second one struck, she turned and called him a “c**t”.   The shuttle lifted from the base.  But the whole class heard the word.  Her teacher turned and shouted “Nedda Susanne Papas”, all three parts of her name.  Nedda’s face went read, but before she could protest, a loud pop came from the television.  Instantaneously, everybody’s attention shifted from the foul word to the disaster unfolding on the screen.

Nedda’s parents hadn’t seen eye to eye ever since they had a stillborn child.  They hid this fact from Nedda who was only about a year old at the time.  Nedda’s father, a physicist, spent most of his time building a machine that could prolong the life of Nedda.  Her mother, a chemist, used a her knoledge of chemicals to invent recipes for new cakes and sweets.  Nedda’s father’s machine was designed to create a bubble universe in which the progress of time can be controlled.  When the machine was set in motion on January 28, on the same day the Challenger broke apart, a monkey got stuck in a bubble in which time remained constant, Nedda’s friend got stuck in a bubble where time got accelerated, and Nedda’s father got stuck in a cyclic bubble in which his life span was two hours and seventeen minutes in any given cycle.

Nedda’s mother had no choice but to read the notebooks left behind by Nedda’s father, and try to figure out a way to rescue Nedd’a father and Nedda’s friend from their bubbles.

Where is the science in this story?  Here is the summary. (from page 168.)

“Bubble.  Needle.  Pop.  Entropy.  Pulse.  Heat.  Cold.  Clouds.  Rubber.  Entropy.  Black eye.  Soap.  Water.  Soap.  Entropy.  Water.  Soap.  Water.  Air.  Soap.  Entropy.”

Get it?

Apparently, the author got the idea for this story from the “super-fluid spacetime” proposed by Stefano Liberati and Luca Maccione.

The author is a good writer, and it is a very good story if you can gloss-over the “science” of this science fiction.