Oating the infinite can be one of the most rewarding and at the same time most unsettling activities. Lying on the grass of a meadow, without artificial pollution, you can feel like the astronaut who has gone out to carry out a maintenance operation on the ship, or like God on the day he set out to create the universe, or as the most insignificant of the beings from the most remote of worlds ...
Don't tell me it doesn't sound as wonderful as it is disturbing.
Hence, considering space as the setting for a novel already supposes an added value that can lead to a survival, or existentialist, or science fiction story and why not…, even love.
The problem is that as soon as we begin to read the matter, tragedy looms fiercely. Astronauts Carys and Max are left adrift, in a space that cradles them sinisterly between its black skirts.
That time is relative up there, we already know. The saga of the Odyssey in space by Arthur C. Clarke, which I recently reviewed, already abounded in that idea of a timeline, as we know it, shattered by an ether that understands little of the laws of a simple blue planet.
And yet Carys and Max know what their time is up there, in that black space of distant sparkles and without any clock to govern it.
They have oxygen for 90 minutes ... As good scientists do their calculations quickly and manage to elucidate that together they have no opportunity to return to the warm blue refuge that seems near and far at the same time.
Which of the two astronauts can have that opportunity? Why would one give up his last breath of life in favor of the other?
There are as many questions as there are answers in this novel. And they all have that something that makes it difficult to swallow saliva. And maybe next summer, when you lie down to see the celestial dome full of stars, you will look for someone else there ...
You can now buy the novel Touch the stars, Katie Khan's book, here: