Feedback is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and more

Bloons and doubloons

This edition of Feedback is an exercise in time travel – in that every item is something from absolutely ages ago that we somehow missed. We would feel guilty, but it is the summer holidays (in the northern hemisphere, anyway) and many readers will have half an eye on their errant children, so we thought we could get away with it.

So, cast your minds back to 2008. This, obviously, was the year of the 20th Canadian Conference on Computational Geometry, . A large amount of research was at this conference, but reporter Matthew Sparkes recently stumbled across a by Erik Demaine, Martin Demaine and Vi Hart. It presents “a general mathematical and algorithmic theory for balloon-twisting structures”.

If you didn’t grasp that, allow us to clarify: it’s about the geometry of balloon animals. The authors develop a mathematical framework that allows them to calculate how many balloons you need to generate a particular shape, whether it is a dog (one) or some complicated polyhedron like a dodecahedron (10). These, naturally, are referred to as “Platonic balloons”.

Throughout the paper, the authors use the term “bloon” to refer to a mathematical entity equivalent to a balloon. Feedback wasn’t clear why this neologism was necessary, until we realised that they were therefore able to refer to a balloon of twice the usual length as a “doubloon”.

Curious to know what the authors had been up to since, Feedback went a-searching. Hart became a science populariser on YouTube, then a senior manager at Microsoft. Meanwhile, Martin and Erik are father-and-son researchers and artists, both fascinated by the mathematics of folding.

Erik, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has been in New Ů��С��Ƶ a lot. Recent papers include “” and ““. More from Erik, please.

Testing times

Continuing on the topic of being very late to things, reader Derek Long flagged a paper from 2018, “ and major trauma when jumping from aircraft: randomized controlled trial”. It reports on a study called “PArticipation in RAndomized trials Compromised by widely Held beliefs aboUt lack of Treatment Equipoise (PARACHUTE)”.

(Side note: that is a truly excellent scientific acronym. We haven’t had any of those in a while.)

The problem posed is one of evidence. “Parachutes are routinely used to prevent death or major traumatic injury among individuals jumping from aircraft. However, evidence supporting the efficacy of parachutes is weak and guideline recommendations for their use are principally based on biological plausibility and expert opinion.” If readers haven’t yet twigged: the paper is satirical, poking fun at the idea that even the most common-sense interventions should be tested in a full randomised controlled trial.

As the authors write: “In seminal work published in the BMJ in 2003, a systematic search by Smith and Pell for randomized clinical trials evaluating the efficacy of parachutes during gravitational challenge yielded no published studies.”

Feedback actually ran across that back in 2004. The authors noted they were “unable to identify any randomised controlled trials of parachute intervention” and suggested that “everyone might benefit if the most radical protagonists of evidence based medicine organised and participated in a double blind, randomised, placebo controlled, crossover trial of the parachute”. Oof.

Fifteen years later, they did do a trial. This showed that “parachute use did not significantly reduce death or major injury”, with the slight caveat that “the trial was only able to enroll participants on small stationary aircraft on the ground”. This was helpfully illustrated by a photo of one of the participants jumping, parachute-less, out of a grounded plane. As the authors say: “Our findings should give momentary pause to experts who advocate for routine use of parachutes for jumps from aircraft in recreational or military settings.”

Witty Zwicky

Some concepts can’t be traced back to their origins. One such is the spherical cow joke, which illustrates the difficulties of working with highly simplified and abstract models of complicated, real-world situations. It involves a physicist who figures out how to improve productivity on a dairy farm, but their solution only works for spherical cows in a vacuum. Nobody seems to know who came up with this: the oldest references place it , but the origin stories are all vague and one reference the cows with chickens.

However, another sphere-based physicist joke seems to be older. Feedback has just learned, many decades after the fact, about an insult deployed by Fritz Zwicky, who, in the 1930s, produced some of the first evidence for dark matter. A noted curmudgeon, Zwicky was fond of referring to people he disliked as “spherical bastards”. Such a person is a bastard no matter which way you look at them.

Feedback will be using that from now on. But we also want to know the etymology (if that is quite the term) of spherical bastards, chickens and cows. Any insights welcome.

Got a story for Feedback?

You can send stories to Feedback by email at feedback@newscientist.com. Please include your home address. This week’s and past Feedbacks can be seen on our website.

This has to be the strangest August ever, with climate-changed weather making itself felt all over the place. It is also strange because new books are in short supply. That said, the shelves are by no means bare. We have books to recommend to you on everything from octopus ethics and designing the universe to endometriosis and talking to computers. So, whatever you end up doing to refresh and recharge, we’ve got the book for you.

by Daniel Lieberman 

Meaty palaeo? Going veggie or vegan? Eating Mediterranean? Fasting, intermittently or otherwise? Low or high carbs? Enough – before we all lose the plot! Enter Daniel Lieberman, an evolutionary anthropologist at Harvard University who, says his publisher, “tackles this confusion head on with his trademark blend of lively storytelling and myth-busting science”.

As you would expect, Lieberman draws on evolutionary biology, anthropology and physiology to figure out how we are going so wrong. He travels all the way back, moving from what humans evolved to eat through to how fire, farming and industrialisation transformed our diets, and right up to today as we learn how to combine all that history with rigorous medical science. It will be fascinating to see what former New Ů��С��Ƶ staffer Chris Simms makes of it in our review, to be published shortly.

by Jonathan Loh

To know where we are headed, it can help to have a reasonable grasp of where we have been. So, will some big-picture thinking from an independent scholar help? Jonathan Loh’s publishers call his book Life Story a “panoramic history of life, revealing the forces that have shaped our world – and could shape it again”. We move through the rise of Homo sapiens, from foragers to farmers, from the Bronze Age to the industrial revolution, through “hidden patterns linking genetics and language, organisms and states, ecosystems and economies, mass extinctions and civilisational collapse”.

Humans may dominate the planet, but, as machine intelligence gathers pace, is that supremacy only a phase? Loh is a biologist who has worked as a consultant to organisations such the United Nations Environment Programme and WWF on the conservation of biological and cultural diversity, so he should be well placed to build a deep chronicle of the past and lay out his big idea: culture as a form of life. What would that mean in terms of an AI future? We shall see…  

by Xiaochang Li

The idea of talking to machines has been an enduring human fantasy. Divination Engines is a bit of a wild card: author Xiaochang Li, an assistant professor in the department of communication at Stanford University in California, shows her readers how that dream “both fueled the demand for data and set the stage for today’s generative AI”. Sneak peaks reveal a book that is no easy read (brace for technical details), but one in which Li manages to explain the origins of what we call natural language processing, as well as the 20^th-century debates between computer scientists, linguists and communication engineers that shaped today’s technology.

She sets out to show how computer speech recognition advanced technology by de-emphasising linguistic meaning in favour of statistical prediction – that is, how researchers gradually abandoned systems that tried to understand human language in favour of workarounds that just predicted patterns in speech and text data. The rest is, as they say, history… and that’s before we even mention search engines, spam filters, content managers and the like. All this comes at the cost of needing more and more new data – forever! This will be a tough read for many of us, but one that’s worth the effort. Oh, and Kate Crawford, author of Atlas of AI, calls the book “a landmark in the critical history of artificial intelligence”.

by Catherine Heymans

No small ambition in this next book, either. Astrophysicist Catherine Heymans’s latest is, according to its subtitle, no less than a look at the “science of real and virtual worlds”. At its heart is that wonderful, death-defying question: could we be living in a computer simulation, and how would we even know? It all sounds fascinating, as Heymans, the astronomer royal for Scotland, takes us “on a humorous and mind-bending journey through the science of reality itself”.

From subatomic particles and the cosmic mysteries of dark matter to the secrets of the human senses, we are promised an exploration of “whether humanity could ever create a virtual universe as rich and diverse as our own – and what that means for our sense of self, free will and consciousness”. Not much going on here, then.

by Kulbhushansingh Suryawanshi

This is one for all of us who love silvery-grey snow leopards, those fabulous and elusive beasts, which live in the rugged mountains of central Asia, camouflaged against the rocks and cliffs. For the past 20 years, scientist, conservationist and mountaineer Kulbhushansingh (Kullu) Suryawanshi has studied them in the wild, exploring every aspect of their lives from habitat to prey to population – sometimes living for months in the world’s toughest, most remote environments. Suryawanshi, we are promised, has “pioneered new research that shines fresh light on these charismatic and vulnerable animals, showing how their fate is entangled with the local people and how their survival is central to preserving an austere, delicate ecosystem”.

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by Lani Watson

There is something wonderful about books with a single letter as their main title. Q (and here’s the subtitle so we know what we’re talking about: The hidden power of questions in a world that wants answers) is all about the art and science of asking questions, as the only creature on Earth that does so in any formal sense. But we’re trained to look for answers, not how to ask questions – so much so, says author Lani Watson, that we live in an answer-rich, question-poor world.

Yet, as the publishers remind us,” from doctors’ surgeries to courtrooms to dating, the ability to ask questions determines our experiences. In a world obsessed by answers, asking better questions is powerful.”

That sounds very wise, and we should be in good hands: Watson is a philosopher and honorary fellow at the University of Edinburgh, UK, as well as a former research fellow at the University of Oxford. Plug into what her publishers call a “captivating narrative from the death of Socrates to the age of AI”, and you will soon learn how to think about the questions you ask and the ones you don’t.

by Richard Schweid

With octopus blooms suddenly appearing in many places, journalist Richard Schweid and publisher University of North Carolina Press could hardly have hit on a more provocative subject. Billed as a “gripping, on-the-ground investigation into the global race to farm octopus and the ethical firestorm it has ignited”, there is clearly a lot to chew on as we explore the “ethics and future of growing the world’s most intelligent invertebrate”.

Among the issues is the fact that, in 2021, the London School of Economics recognised invertebrates such as cephalopods (octopus, cuttlefish, squid) and decapods (crayfish, crabs, lobsters) as capable of experiencing pain, distress and happiness, finding that high-welfare farming of them would therefore be impossible. But the enormous international demand for octopus meat continues to grow, even as wild octopus populations decline. Fishers in the UK’s south-west are already experiencing problems as the vast number of octopuses eat their typical high-value catch: adult lobsters, brown edible crabs, scallops and the like. What to do instead? Eat the octopuses? Apparently, recipes are proliferating… a dilemma indeed.

by Evelyn Scott

This is no less than an exposé of medical misogyny, says the publisher of what looks like a forthright book about endometriosis, A Bloody Scandal: How medicine fails women in pain. There should be a huge market for it, given the sheer number who experience it (it is often said that 1 in 10 women do, but the real figure is probably higher), often in silence and for decades.

Author Evelyn Scott weaves in her own experience of the condition: she was just a teenager when she first had the symptoms of endometriosis. She shares 15 years during which she endured constant, agonising pain – and hopeless ineptitude when seeking support, ranging from dismissals on the grounds of hysteria to misdiagnoses. She felt completely isolated, until she discovered all the other women experiencing the same condition. Powerful stuff and, many will argue, long overdue.

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August is traditionally a quiet month in publishing, and this one is no different. But there are still science-fiction gems to look forward to, including a fascist empire, courtesy of Richard Swan, and some scary Korean sea monsters from Kim Bo-young. I can also recommend M. John Harrison’s The End of Everything, published earlier this year but just longlisted for the Booker prize. It’s rare for sci-fi to make this prestigious literary longlist so that is a tribute to Harrison’s writing – as our sci-fi columnist Emily H. Wilson highlighted last month. And do join us at the New Ů��С��Ƶ Book Club, where we’re reading Peter Heller’s post-apocalyptic novel The Dog Stars, set after a superflu has wiped out most of humanity (and written well before covid-19). A Ridley Scott-directed film adaptation of it is about to be released, so we’re ahead of the crowd.

by Richard Swan

I hear good things about this one from Emily H. Wilson, who has a review forthcoming. It’s set in a fascist and galaxy-spanning empire, where Katherine Fuller’s husband has died, leaving her an immensely wealthy woman. Katherine is given the chance to buy a world, and create a better society – but will the empire let her make a democracy? It’s pitched by its publisher as Nineteen Eighty-Four meets The Man in the High Castle, which is enough to hook me.

by Kim Bo-young, translated by Sophie Bowman

I’m also really excited about this one, in which bodyguard Mu-young is heading to an isolated Korean seaside village with her niece when she learns that a huge earthquake has hit the region. She travels there regardless, but the earthquake unleashes an ancient plague, which turns those who catch it into “fishy monsters”. The village is locked down – and Mu-young is trapped. Perfect beach reading, perhaps?

by Tim Pratt

This space opera with a “touch of romance” follows graduate student Glenn and his girlfriend Vivy, a spy who has been tasked with stopping a rogue comet but finds herself also trying to find a stolen jewel that can destroy universes.

by C.A. Fletcher

I always love a post-apocalyptic story in which a few hardy souls are struggling to survive. As previously noted, we’re reading Peter Heller’s The Dog Stars in the New Ů��С��Ƶ Book Club this month, and it’s a prime example of the genre. In Fletcher’s intriguing-sounding take, humans have stopped being able to have children (shades of P. D. James’s The Children of Men, perhaps?), and Mouse and Cat are our indomitable duo living in an almost-empty world, 200 years on.

by Andrea Hairston

I rather like this title – and the story sounds fun, too. It’s a murder mystery set in the multiverse, in which Oona (a St Berdoodle, which I’m assuming is a type of dog) and her owner Zsuzsu are investigating the death of a local celebrity. Oona, it turns out, can travel between dimensions, and she knows the identity of the killer. We are also promised “conundrums” and “alien tricksters” from the publisher.

by Nicole Brooks

A “once-in-a-lifetime flood” hits Raven’s family home, and she finds herself trapped on the roof with her children, her dog and her stepmother, struggling to survive. The novel is set over 6 hours and sounds very nail-biting – more thriller-y than sci-fi perhaps, but it’s an exploration of the power of a changing nature, so I’m keen to read it.

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by W.H. Chizmar

Described as a post-apocalyptic horror survival novel by its publisher, and therefore ticking all my favourite boxes, this follows the fallout when a government project to transport matter across the universe brings back something alive – and dangerous. When this “something” is being transported (in a lorry – come on, people!), its lorry overturns and “unleashes an otherworldly horror upon an unsuspecting New England countryside”. Three years on, a man is trying to stay alive on the US’s now-deadly East Coast.

by Jodi Taylor

This is the latest Smallhope and Pennyroyal time-travelling adventure, and sees Lady Amelia Smallhope attempting to relax after she nearly died in the last book. However, she and Pennyroyal are targeted by someone with knowledge of the latter’s “murky past”, and further adventures ensue.

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I keep the Beast running, I keep the 100 low lead on tap, I foresee attacks. I am young enough, I am old enough. I used to love to fish for trout more than almost anything.

My name is Hig, one name. Big Hig if you need another.

If I ever woke up crying in the middle of a dream, and I’m not saying I did, it’s because the trout are gone, every one. Brookies, rainbows, browns, cutthroats, cutbows, everyone.

The tiger left, the elephant, the apes, the baboon, the cheetah. The titmouse, the frigate bird, the pelican (gray), the whale (gray), the collared dove. Sad but. Didn’t cry until the last trout swam upriver looking for maybe cooler water.

Melissa, my wife, was an old hippy. Not that old. She looked good. In this story she might have been Eve, but I’m not Adam. I am more like Cain. They didn’t have a brother like me.

Did you ever read the Bible? I mean sit down and read it like it was a book? Check out Lamentations. That’s where we’re at, pretty much. Pretty much lamenting. Pretty much pouring our hearts out like water. They said at the end it would get colder after it gets warmer.

Way colder. Still waiting. She’s a surprise this old earth, one big surprise after another since before she separated from the moon who circles and circles like the mate of a shot goose.

No more geese. A few. Last October I heard the old bleating after dusk and saw them, five against the cold bloodwashed blue over the ridge. Five all fall, I think, next April none.

I hand pump the 100 low lead aviation gas out of the old airport tank when the sun is not shining, and I have the truck too that was making the fuel delivery. More fuel than the Beast can burn in my lifetime if I keep my sorties local, which I plan to, I have to. She’s a small plane, a 1956 Cessna 182, really a beaut. Cream and blue. I’m figuring I’m dead before the Beast gives up the final ghost. I will buy the farm. Eighty acres of bottomland hay and corn in a country where there is still a cold stream coming out of the purple mountains full of brookies and cuts.

Before that I will make my roundtrips. Out and back.

*

I have a neighbor. One. Just us at a small country airport a few miles from the mountains. A training field where they built a bunch of houses for people who couldn’t sleep without their little planes, the way golfers live on a golf course. Bangley is the name on the registration of his old truck, which doesn’t run anymore. Bruce Bangley. I fished it out of the glove box looking for a tire pressure gauge I could take with me in the Beast. A Wheat Ridge address. I don’t call him that, though, what’s the point, there’s only two of us. Only us for at least a radius of eight miles, which is the distance of open prairie to the first juniper woods on the skirt of the mountain. I just say, Hey. Above the juniper is oak brush then black timber. Well, brown. Beetle killed and droughted. A lot of it standing dead now, just swaying like a thousand skeletons, sighing like a thousand ghosts, but not all. There are patches of green woods, and I am their biggest fan. I root for them out here on the plain. Go Go Go Grow Grow Grow! That’s our fight song. I yell it out the window as I fly low over. The green patches are_ spreading year by year. Life is tenacious if you give it one little bit of encouragement. I could swear they hear me. They wave back, wave their feathery arms back and forth down low by their sides, they remind me of women in kimonos. Tiny steps or no steps, wave wave hands at your sides.

I go up there on foot when I can. To the greener woods. Funny to say that: not like I have to clear my calendar. I go up to breathe. The different air. It’s dangerous, it’s an adrenalin rush I could do without. I have seen elk sign. Not so old. If there are still elk. Bangley says no way. Way, but. Never seen one. Seen plenty deer. I bring the .308 and I shoot a doe and I drag her back in the hull of a kayak which I sawed the deck off so it’s a sled. My green sled. The deer just stayed on with the rabbits and the rats. The cheat grass stayed on, I guess that’s enough.

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Before I go up there I fly it twice. One day, one night with the goggles. The goggles are pretty good at seeing down through trees if the trees aren’t too heavy. People make pulsing green shadows, even asleep. Better than not checking. Then I make a loop south and east, come back in from the north. Thirty miles out, at least a day for a traveler. That’s all open, all plains, sage and grass and rabbit brush and the old farms. The brown circles of fields like the footprint of a crutch fading into the prairie. Hedgerows and windbreaks, half the trees broken, blown over, a few still green by a seep or along a creek. Then I tell Bangley.

I cover the eight miles dragging the empty sled in two hours, then I am in cover. I can still move. It’s a long way back with a deer, though. Over open country. Bangley covers me from halfway out. We still have the handsets and they still recharge with the panels. Japanese built, good thing. Bangley has a .408 CheyTac sniper rifle set up on a platform he built. A rangefinder. My luck. A gun nut. A really mean gun nut. He says he can pot a man from a mile off. He has done. I’ve seen it more than once. Last summer he shot a girl who was chasing me across the open plain. A young girl, a scarecrow. I heard the shot, stopped, left the sled, went back. She was thrown back over a rock, a hole where her waist should have been, just about torn in half. Her chest was heaving, panting, her head twisted to the side, one black eye shiny and looking up at me, not fear, just like a question, burning, like of all things witnessed this one couldn’t be believed. Like that. Like fucking why?

That’s what I asked Bangley, fucking why.

She would have caught you.

So what? I had a gun, she had a little knife. To like protect her from me. She maybe wanted food.

Maybe. Maybe she’d slit your throat in the middle of the night.

I stared at him, his mind going that far, to the middle of the night, me and her. Jesus. My only neighbor. What can I say to Bangley? He has saved my bacon more times. Saving my bacon is his job. I have the plane, I am the eyes, he has the guns, he is the muscle. He knows I know he knows: he can’t fly, I don’t have the stomach for killing. Any other way probably just be one of us. Or none.

I also have Jasper, son of Daisy, which is the best last line of alarm.

So when we get sick of rabbits and sunfish from the pond, I get a deer. Mostly I just want to go up there. It feels like church, hallow and cool. The dead forest swaying and whispering, the green forest full of sighs. The musk smell of deer beds. The creeks where I always pray to see a trout. One fingerling. One big old survivor, his green shadow idling against the green shadows of the stones.

Eight miles of open ground to the mountain front, the first trees. That is our perimeter. Our safety zone. That is my job.

He can concentrate his firepower to the west that way. That’s how Bangley talks. Because it’s thirty miles out, high plains all other directions, more than a day’s walk, but just a couple of hours west to the first trees. The families are south ten miles but they don’t bother us. That’s what I call them. They are something like thirty Mennonites with a blood disease that hit after the flu. Like a plague but slow burning. Something like AIDS I think, maybe more contagious. The kids were born with it and it makes them all sick and weak and every year some die.

We have the perimeter. But if someone hid. In the old farmsteads. In the sage. The willows along a creek. Arroyos, too, with undercut banks. He asked me that once: how do I know. How do I know someone is not inside our perimeter, in all that empty country, hiding, waiting to attack us? But thing is I can see a lot. Not like the back of the hand, too simple, but like a book I have read and reread too many times to count, maybe like the Bible for some folks of old. I would know. A sentence out of place. A gap. Two periods where there should be one. I know.

I know, I think: if I am going to die – no If – it will be on one of these trips to the mountains. Crossing open ground with the full sled. Shot in the back with an arrow.

Bangley a long time ago gave me bulletproof, one of the vests in his arsenal. He has all kinds of shit. He said it’ll stop any handgun, an arrow, but with a rifle it depends, I better be lucky. I thought about that. We’re supposed to be the only two living souls but the families in at least hundreds of square miles, the only survivors, I better be lucky. So I wear the vest because it’s warm, but if it’s summer I mostly don’t. When I wear it, I feel like I’m waiting for something. Would I stand on a train platform and wait for a train that hasn’t come for months? Maybe. Sometimes this whole thing feels just like that.

This is an extract from by Peter Heller (Tinder Press), the August read for the New Ů��С��Ƶ 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.

was my first novel. It begins nine years after a super-flu pandemic kills off most of humanity. Hig lives with his old dog Jasper at a little country airport in Erie, north of Denver, Colorado, which he shares with a gun nut named Bangley who has been waiting for the apocalypse his whole life. Hig has lost his wife, who was pregnant with their first child, and all his friends, and he and Jasper fly a patrol every day in their 1956 Cessna searching for survivors.

When I sat down to write the book, I didn’t want to plot or outline. I had wanted to be a fiction writer since I was 11, but when I got out of college, I had to make a living and so I wrote for magazines. With every story I wrote I knew the ending, and I knew what was going to happen next, because it happened. It was journalism. Now, I didn’t want to know. I grew up as a kayaker and what I loved about running rivers was that if the stream had never been descended or described, you came around a tight bend in a canyon and there might be a waterfall, or a cougar drinking, or a flight of backlit swallows. I wanted the same thrill writing the novel. I wanted to launch onto a narrative current and follow it into wild new territory.

Also, poetry was my first love. The novels I adored were the most lyrical. Conrad at the height of his power, in the grips of a typhoon. Faulkner following the cadence of the words into the mind of a smitten cow. Welty describing a slow stream. They seemed to be as much about the music of the language as any story. I knew that I would have to be enamoured first, of the sound of my own language, and follow the song into the narrative.

I went to the coffee shop in my neighborhood in Denver and I sat down and told myself, “Don’t think, don’t think, just listen.” I wrote, “I keep the Beast running. I keep the 100 low lead on tap. I foresee attacks…” A few lines later, “My name is Hig, one name. Big Hig if you need another. If I ever woke up crying in the middle of a dream, and I’m not saying I did, it’s because the trout are gone, every one.”

I sat up. “Speak,” I murmured. “You are a fisherman, just like me.” And then it was as if Hig were on the other side of a campfire on an October night, with the wind blowing the flames around, telling me what had happened to him a few years before. I wrote in a white heat. I was constantly surprised, awed, devastated by what happened. I’d have tears dripping off my chin onto the coffee shop table and I knew the other patrons were thinking, “That poor sonofabitch is going through a bad divorce. Or his dog died.” But really, I was completely transported, and more thrilled than I’d ever been in my life.

Hig’s plane, the Beast, is one of the most prominent characters in the novel. Hig and I had a few stories about it to help fill out the novel. Once on a trip to kayak a wilderness river in Montana with one of my oldest friends, we got a ride to the river on a single engine Cessna into a remote backcountry airstrip. This was before I wrote the book. The pilot flew so close to the ridges I could see the elk tracks zigzagging in the snow. I was fascinated. I said, “Hey, how fast could I learn to fly like this? Could I do it for an article?”

The pilot was a cowboy in every sense, had a handlebar moustache and a brash manner. He said, “Gimme five grand and three weeks of your time and we’ll get her done!”

He was fired two weeks later for drinking on the job. But the chief pilot of the little airport was one of the greatest bush pilots alive, and he gave the thumbs up. Dave Hoerner had 30,000 hours flying wildlife biologists into the mountains to track grizzly bears and wolves. The most dangerous kind of flying. I went back up to Kalispell and flew three times a day and studied aviation books at night. I got my pilot’s license in 20 days. I bought a 1956 Cessna 182 single engine plane. The engine was timed out, meaning it had run so many hours I was required to rebuild it, but I thought I could nurse it along. It’s the same plane Hig flies, same colour, same tail number: N6333A. And I kept it in Hig’s hangar at the Erie airport. Soon after I bought the Beast, the engine died, right over the Continental Divide, and we had just enough altitude to glide home. In The Dog Stars, Hig flies past his point of no return looking for human connection.

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Eight years after I published the novel, on a cool day in March of 2020, Denver shut down for the Covid pandemic. I went fishing that afternoon in a state park south of town. There was no ranger at the gate, I just drove in. Eerie. No other fishermen parked in the gravel lot by the river. I waded into a lovely stretch that bends through a grove of old cottonwoods and began to cast. Alone, the way Hig does in the book. And the only fish feeding were white suckers. There were no trout that night, as in the novel. The sun settled on the ridge and the evening chilled and I got goosebumps, and not just from the temperature. I drove home up a large boulevard, the only car, and every business on either side of the road was shut.

The hair stood up on the back of my neck. It was as if Hig had transported into my world, or I into his. Again.

by Peter Heller (Tinder Press) is the August read for the New Ů��С��Ƶ 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.

Most people have experienced the disorientation of waking up and not knowing where they are.

So, imagine how it must be to open your eyes in a location that rivals anything conjured in a dream: the inside of the tiny Orion capsule where you are a member of an Artemis crew. Oh, and also, the moon outside is disconcertingly large.

No wonder then that, since the earliest days of space travel, careful thought has had to be given to how Mission Control awakens its crews. It also explains why the default alarm on a smartphone, brutal and devoid of anything pleasant, would probably be a bad idea.

The first known wake-up song played to astronauts was a (Hello Wally, sung by Jack Jones) to the Gemini 6 crew, Wally Schirra and Tom Stafford, in December 1965.

And so a tradition was born. There is now a music played to astronauts spanning decades of the parallel journeys of the space age and modern musical era. Many of the entries are spectacular but cliched songs like Elton John’s Rocket Man, David Bowie’s Space Oddity or Frank Sinatra’s Come Fly With Me.

But some are genuine surprises such as at least two appearances of Hawaiian War Chant, which, in spite of its name, would be surprisingly good to wake up to.

In the months since the world was captivated by Artemis II and its eminently lovable, relatable and inspiringly normal crew, I am still finding myself playing songs from their wake-up playlist, uploaded by .

One is even on high rotation as I walk my dog or do the dishes: In a Daydream by the Freddy Jones Band, which released the song in 1993. The Artemis II crew woke up to it on day three of their mission this year.

“When I wrote ‘In a Daydream,’ I was looking out a window on a rainy day in South Bend, imagining something beautiful,” says band member Marty Lloyd in a note accompanying a newly released of the piece. “Now, decades later, astronauts are listening to the song while looking out their windows at the beauty of space and Earth. It’s surreal how it’s all come full circle.”

I think the reason I enjoy the Artemis II playlist so much is that it says more about the crew as people, than them as astronauts. It was their partners and children, as well as they themselves, who chose the songs, and so classic astronaut hits on previous missions like Gonna Fly Now from the original Rocky and Come Fly With Me do not get a look in.

Instead, we get whimsy and youth and a sense of people who enjoy the same kind of music as us – the kind of regular humans who to work. I think the success of the mission is that the four astronauts made humanity feel like we, too, could be in that capsule.

Artemis II showed not just that we can aspire to great explorations but also that the best human endeavours begin with waking up better.