Archives par étiquette : VOYAGERS

VOYAGERS de Meg Charlton

As the world unravels under a mysterious signal, two childhood friends reunite to confront their shared past and the possibility of an extraterrestrial future.

VOYAGERS
by Meg Charlton
Harper, Winter 2026
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

Voyagers is the story of the lifelong friendship between Alex and Ana, narrated by Alex, now in his early 30’s. He’s a lawyer, lives a quiet life. And then the Signal – a narrow-band transmission broadcasting a sequence of pulses from somewhere near Pluto, for which no government claims responsibility – convinces the world that we’re about to make First Contact with aliens. Alex is primed to believe this: when he was 6 years old he went on vacation with his family to Palm Springs, met Ana (vacationing with her mother next door), and during a sleepover the two were abducted by aliens. Or at least, that’s what they told the rescuers who found them after their 36 hours missing, and the story they stuck to as they became minor child stars. As teenagers, their divergence in belief about what “really” happened severed their friendship.

Now, Alex realizes there’s no one he’d rather be with at the potential end of the world than Ana. She has made her living as an ‘experiencer advocate,’ leading retreats for those who’ve experienced extraterrestrial contact, and is coincidentally about to lead one in Palm Springs; Alex will go out to meet her. As the Signal grows louder and starts affecting electronics, grounds planes, and the world devolves into chaos, the two race to meet each other for one final reckoning to uncover what really happened to them as kids – and the reader learns whether there are “really” aliens out there. 

Meg Charlton is a writer and screenwriter based in New York City. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in VICE, Slate, The Yale Review, Atlas Obscura and Lux, and been anthologized in the collection Letter to a Stranger: Essays to the Ones Who Haunt Us. Her short fiction has been optioned for film and TV and is currently in development with 3 Arts Entertainment and S/B Films, represented by Alice Lawson and Jason Klorfein at Gersh. She received her MFA in fiction from Brooklyn College where she was the recipient of the Creative Writing Award. 

VOYAGERS de Lauren Fuge

Journeying through remote landscapes across the Earth and beyond, VOYAGERS seeks to understand how human exploration has driven us into the Anthropocene.

VOYAGERS:
Our Journey into the Anthropocene
by Lauren Fuge
Text Publishing (Australia), August 2024

At night, as I stargazed from my tiny tent, I’d hear the primal whalesong roll up along the ocean floor and onto the beach where I lay. The ethereal melodies seeped through my shivering skin, like a relic of an ancient time. I felt as if I was eavesdropping across millennia, the sound stirring some faint genetic memory deep inside me.
Come home.
Since the beginning of human history, we have been wanderers. Modern humans left Africa by 150,000 years ago, heading first to Asia and Europe, then Australia, the Americas, and finally—in an incredible feat of innovation and imagination—across the Pacific. Our explorations yielded great rewards: land and resources, food and knowledge. In every landscape we have explored, we have become a force of change. Humans are the dominant influence on the environment. And our surging population and insatiable industrial metabolism are outgunning the planet’s own forces: the sea is sucking at our doorsteps; the forests fall too quickly for us to hear. Still, we seek new seas to fish, new oil deposits to drill, new land to develop. A compelling blend of natural history, science and memoir, journeying from the dramatic fjords of British Columbia to the ancient geology of outback Australia to the shifting coastlines of Norway, VOYAGERS asks: What drives our urge to explore? How has it influenced our relationship with the planet? And, in the face of imminent environmental collapse, can we find in our voyaging history the tools to reimagine our future?

Lauren Fuge is an award-winning science writer. She has been a science journalist for Cosmos magazine and was awarded the 2022 UNSW Bragg Prize for Science Writing; her writing features regularly in the Best Australian Science Writing anthology. She is undertaking a PhD exploring creative forms of climate communication.