Only the Astronauts | Ceridwen Dovey

_{My love, we need to talk.}

_{I’ve tried and tried to call you from the Tesla’s dashboard phone, but I haven’t had a clear connection in over six years. There’s nothing but a low buzzing in my earpiece, as if bees are building a hive under the hood of the car, your extravagant parting gift to me. Last night, or maybe it was the one before – out here time expands into perpetual night – I imagined I heard the brief ringtone of an incoming call. Yet when I answered there was only a charged silence on the other end of the line. Someone holding their breath, waiting for me to speak.}

First lines from the first story, ‘Starman’ which can be read online here.

Okay. I’ve been trying to catch up on my May reading reviews, so that I can move onto our annual 20 Books of Summer Winter reading project with a clean slate. This is my final one.

Only the Astronauts is a collection of short stories reminiscent of Dovey’s stunning, quirky debut collection, Only the Animals (2014) which I still find myself thinking and talking about ten years later. In the original collection we have ten tales told from the perspective of animals who were killed during different arenas of human conflict.

In this collection we have five tales told from the perspective of space junk – objects built by humans for other humans to use in space, but ultimately abandoned or forgotten after the humans returned to earth. Dovey breaths life into these manmade objects, creating stories about their space journey and about how they feel about the humans who created, used and left them behind.

As with Only the Animals, Dovey uses a number of sources for inspiration and provocation including Beyond: The astonishing story of the first human to leave our planat and journey into space by Stephen Walker, Carl Sagan; A Life by Keay Davidson, the ‘entire body of whimsical work’ by Italo Calvino as well as many, many discussions with Alice Gorman, an Australian space archaeologist. Dovey’s book is dedicated to her.

Gorman hosted a discussion with Dovey for Roaring Stories bookshop back in May where they enjoyed a wide-ranging chat about experimental fiction, how to create a “non-living narrator” and how even “hard” scientists anthropomorphise the objects they work with by giving them nicknames and genders. Dovey explained that she was interested in exploring the space inbetween human and humoid – the emotion that humans have for these space objects moving from hubris to sympathy as well as the wisdom and innocence of these manmade objects. She was curious to see how they might act and react when they were no longer obedient to humans.

Each story is a stand alone one, although there are some surprising and pleasing crossovers between stories. The first story Starman can be read on the Penguin website here. It tells the tale of Elon Musk’s Tesla Roadster that was sent into space in 2018 from the point of view of the mannequin, ‘Starman’, who is ‘driving’ the car as it orbits around the sun.

Requiem is set in 2031 on the eve of the last humans to leave the failing, ailing International Space Station (ISS). The story is told from the perspective of the ISS using anonymous diary/journal entries from various astronauts throughout its history. I found this particular tale to be deeply moving.

The Fallen Astronaut is about the 1971 sculpture of the same name left on the moon to commemorate the astronauts and cosmonauts who died for the sake of space exploration. The story is told from Neil Armstrong’s ‘spirit’ who has ‘taken up residence’ inside the sculpture (created by Paul Van Hoeydonck). He wonders ‘if all the dead astronauts get a turn in here’ to reflect on their lifetime of space travel, exploration and research. This is Dovey’s attempt to write about the landscape of the moon using a nature-writers lens.

It also turns out that this is not the only piece of art sculpture on the moon. I discovered that Jeff Koons has just sent a piece up there earlier this year, called Moon Phases.

We, the Tamponauts was pure fun. A play about the 100 tampons given to the first American female astronaut, Sally Ride, by her male colleagues for her five day trip into space. Told from the point of view of the one tampon to make it home again, Dovey playfully addresses the the panic of male scientists about female bodies in space and the apparent intrusion of the female body into serious science. Dovey describes this piece as ‘a fable with magical thinking’. In the Roaring Stories interview she talks about how space travel throws you back onto your body as never before, and how this sense of ‘no escape’ was experienced by female astronauts as liberating while male astronauts felt confronted.

The final story, Hackgold | Hacksilver is probably the most science fiction tale of the collection as we see life on Sedna inside the Oort Cloud from the perspective of one of the Golden Records sent into space by Carl Sagan.

I thoroughly enjoyed my time with these quirky, tender stories. It’s a genuine space oddity that astutely throws all our human greed, genius and generosity back across the galaxy, through the stratosphere and into our laps for us to reflect upon our humanity and our place in the universe.

Epigraph: Liliana Ursu, ‘Harmonica Mundi’

At the border between clay and star,
a narrow door
through which only we
could squeeze,
on a path of light.

Full poem with a 2013 translation by Mihaela Moscaliuc can be seen here.

Books and authors referenced:

• Invisible Cities | Italo Calvino
• Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy | Douglas Adams
• The Man Who Sold the Moon (short story) | Robert A. Heinlein
• The Call of Cthulhu | H.P. Lovecraft
• Nan Shepherd
• William Blake
• Vladimir Nabokov
• Rainer Marie Rilke
• Tian Wen/The Heavenly Questions | Qu Yuan
• Annie Dillard (PDF)
• The Pargiters | Virginia Woolf

Other Reading:

• The Sydney Review of Books | Telling Stories from the Perspectives of Objects, 20th February 2023
  • “He [Calvino] notes that Jorge Luis Borges overcame decades of writer’s block by pretending that ‘the book he wanted to write had already been written – written by someone else, some imaginary unknown author, working in a different language, a different culture – and then to describe, summarize, and review that imaginary book’.”
• Kill Your Darlings | Writing the Inner Lives of Space Objects, 9th November 2022

ISBN: 9781760896775
Imprint: Hamish Hamilton
Published: 7th May 2024
Format: Trade Paperback
Pages: 288
Dates Read: 23rd - 31st May 2024

_{This post was written in the area we now call the Blue Mountains within the Ngurra [Country] of the Dharug and Gundungurra peoples. This Reading Life recognises the continuous custodianship & connection to Country of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples for the lands, seas & skies on which we live. They are this nations first storytellers.}