Event Horizon E-Book

Stephanie Nina Pitsirilos

• Herausgeber: WS
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 144

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

"Compelling scientific and emotional explorations that raise the question: What awaits us when we cross the line?"
—Kirkus Reviews

A squatting tenant in El Barrio refusing his landlord’s eviction offer while his nurse contemplates taking a nefarious offer of her own. Star jumping to the next constellation without the girl you love. Stopping a quantum mechanical fungoid Casanova who is ravaging the galaxy’s hearts and star maps.

Whether it be courage, resignation or lust that lead to a decision, one thing is certain: don’t buckle up because seatbelts don’t work here.

From the 2022 Chautauqua Janus Prize winner Stephanie Nina Pitsirilos comes a sci-fi, sensual, and literary debut short story collection and like her prize-winning story, “Jean”, genre and medium are not holding her back. Event Horizon: Stories of No Turning Back is a prose-driven collection of stories themed around the astrophysical phenomenon of black holes and their unforgiving boundaries of “no return”—their event horizons. What arises is a tantalizing question for characters grappling with cosmic decisions in their lives, whether in their living rooms, on space stations or exoplanets: what awaits on the other side of the “event horizon”? An array of celebrated artists help answer this through the sequential art of comics, canvas work, and photography.

The collection is introduced by comics, prose and astrophysics academia: Dr. Frederick Luis Aldama (Professor Latinx), the Jacob & Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities in the English Department at the University of Texas, Austin; Professor of Astronomy at Columbia University Dr. Marcel Agüeros; and Dr. Mariana Espinosa Aldama, Member of the Mathematical Modeling of Social Systems Department at the Research Institute on Applied Mathematics and Systems at UNAM.

6 prose stories with art. 3 short comics. 1 one-shot comic (25 pages). 3 academic letters of introduction. Original canvas work. Original photography throughout.

“...Pitsirilos has assembled an eclectic roster of creators from many different mediums, resulting in a work that is diverse in both forms and perspectives… All should prove a delight for SF aficionados.” –Kirkus Reviews

"...By having the courage to place Latinx feminist issues in space and in futuristic settings, Pitsirilos has lifted Latinx literature from the flat earth most of our fiction is set." –Ernesto Quiñonez, Author of Bodega Dreams

This book is like you being characters in THE EXPANSE reading bell hooks while sipping a drink at a bar in an asteroid belt with Neil DeGrasse Tyson next to you pointing out some intergalactic sh*t going down in the constellation next door, while your mom is calling you cosmic-collect to remind you of the reality ofyour messy life back on Earth as you feel the woman on the other side of you slowly running her crystal stiletto heel up your leg. 

ARTISTS: BlusterOne; Cyrus Amir Boquín; Karen S. Darboe; Cris Delara; Gabriela Downie; Aaron Guzman; Galen Ihlenfeldt; Kroniko; Rafael Romeo Magat; Seth Christian Martel; Eric Nguyen; Anton Oxenuk; Armando Ramirez; Tracy168.

Cover art by Karen S. Darboe of Magnus Arts. Book Design by Aaron Guzman.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

1. ILlustrationART BY ARMANDO RAMIREZ colors by galen ihlenfeldt

2. IntroductionsFrederick Luis Aldamamarcel AgÜeros Mariana Espinosa AldamaART BY aaron guzman

3. ANAtomy of a black hole ART BY eso

4. andromedaART BY seth Christian martelphotography by cyrus amir boquín

5. SPACE INVADERSART BY AARON GUZMAN photography by cyrus amir boquín

6. 51 SOLSTICEART BY RAFAEL ROMEO MAGATphotography by cyrus amir boquín

7. THE EVENT DON JUAN OF MYCELIAART BY Anton Oxenuk

8. IN THE NAME OF LOVEART BY ERIC NGUYENphotography by cyrus amir boquín

9. THE FOLDART BY CRIS DELARA

10. WATCH OUT FOR BLACK HOLESART BY TRACY 168

11. CAPICÚART BY AARON GUZMAN KLON LOGO BY KRONIKO

12. GUMERCINDA’S FLOWERPortrait photo BY UNKNOWNphotography by cyrus amir boquín

13. galaxies, black holes & horizons BY TRACY 168

14. ORTEEZ FUNERAL HOMEopening ART BY ANTON OXENUK STORY ART BY AARON GUZMANphotography by cyrus amir boquín

15. event horizon: spaghettification BY BLUSTERONE

16. EVENT HORIZON opening aRT BY CRIS DELARAstory art by armando ramirezphotography by cyrus amir boquín

17. PORTRAIT OF A WOMAN ART BY ANDROMEDA

18. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

19. twinup: Bluster ART BY blusterone

20. ARTIST BIOGRAPHIES

21. ADDITIONAL WORKS

22. MORE ON SINGULARITIES

Latinx Astronautical Cartographies and Cosmovisions: A forewordby frederick luis aldama

I end my graphic novel Labyrinths Borne with the protagonist, Luna “Cassie” Cassandra Coatlicue, waking from a dream within a dream. Here, Cassie sees a line of where her mind-body becomes infinite—a singularity whereby she reemerges as a recomposed collective of selves “full of new, strange sensations.” In this instant, Cassie’s reborn through labyrinths of the memories, images, and feelings of the multitudes.

Not even the cīcitlāltin—the stars—are a limit to where we can travel in our sci-fi. In this way, Latinx sci-fi bountifully opens us to new ways of perceiving, thinking, and feeling about our present and proximate world ripping apart at the seams. Latinx sci-fi, so gorgeously emblematized in Stephanie and her creative crew’s Event Horizon, powerfully opens us to new cosmovisions for ways to see the world as it is—and as mind-body cartographies for healing and making better our world tomorrow.

Sci-fi is that line of convergence where storytelling and science converge in ways that create an emergence of something at once recognizable and completely new. It frees our curiosity and imagination to shed those mind-forged manacles of a tellurian-bound realism where homage to the referential reigns supreme at the cost of denying the metaphoric.

It is our capacity to imagine one thing for another—and even to go far beyond the referential that propels us forward in our story and science. In limitless ways we can exercise our counterfactual capacities to see our present and past with new eyes, thoughts, feelings, and understanding. That can propel us into a future free of eco-crises, neo-imperialist militarized religious crusades, and pandemics of disease and loneliness.

Unfortunately, much of mainstream sci-fi falls far short of its limitless potentialities. Think of the proliferation of sci-fi films and shows on streaming platforms that do little other than amplify today’s barbarism. Their story worlds lack the very diversity of life that can and has worked together to create a positive, progressive planetary coexistence.

Fortunately, there are women-of-color sci-fi creatives such as Stephanie who punch holes through age-old destructive patterns of perceiving, imagining, and behaving. In this way Stephanie joins others that come readily to mind: Giannini Braschi, Carmen María Machado, Sabrina Vourvoulias, Julia Rios, Nalo Hopkins, Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond, Hasanthika Sirisena, S. L. Huang, Rosaura Sánchez, Beatrice Pita, Zoraida Córdova, Malka Older, N. K. Jemisin, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Rebecca Roanhorse, Nisi Shawl, Isabella Rios, and Octavia Butler.

Indeed, Stephanie and her creative crew’s admixes of eikon (image) with logos (word) create resplendent alchemical new worlds that open us to new models of desiring and creating mind-bodies. The careful juxtapositions of eikon and logos invite us to light-jump time-space dimensions, fall with sensations of rising, feel air with a thickened texture of water, and touch surfaces with heightened senses of hearing and taste.Event Horizon invites us to pass through seemingly impossible and implausible physical and psychological thresholds to future states with new expressions of curiosity, desire—nonbinary erotics of Brown mind-flesh that celebrate our planetary coexistence.Event Horizon’sstunning kaleidoscopic and alchemical admixtures of image and word build story worlds that radically open our mind-bodies to a future not weighed heavy by failures of the past but rather that guide us toward thrivance in our collective dreaming of Latinx futurities.

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Frederick Luis Aldama, aka Professor Latinx, is an award-winning author of over fifty fiction, comics, animation shorts, and scholarly books. He is an inductee of the National Cartoonist Society, Texas Institute of Letters, and Ohio State University’s ODI Hall of Fame. He is founder and director of the Latinx Pop Lab and holds the Jacob & Frances Sanger Mossiker chair in the Humanities at the University of Texas, Austin. His recent comics and books include The Absolutely (Almost) True Adventures of Max Rodriguez, Labyrinths Borne, Pyroclast, and The Steampunkera Chronicles. 

People Often Assume I Got Into Astronomy Because I Grew Up Wanting To Be an Astronautby Marcel Agüeros

A decade ago, when signing up random civilians for putative Mars missions was a thing, I read an interview with the retired cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman to fly in space. She was asked if she would sign up for a one-way trip to the red planet; none of the companies talking up these missions had any way to bring anyone back.

Tereshkova’s answer? “Of course.” I mean, she was closing in on eighty, and I doubt she even thought twice about it.

Let me tell you, whatever cloth that is, I’m not made of it. I’m terrified of space. It seemed pretty scary when I was an urban kid, yet to even experience the overwhelmingness of a truly dark sky, to come face-to-face with my cosmic insignificance. And now that I know a lot more about space, well, my terror is 100 percent warranted. It’s big, it’s cold, and it’s clearly not Marcel-friendly.

I’m good here, in my office, looking out from the top of my ergonomic chair at the vast expanses of my computer screens, trying to make sense of what’s happening out there from a nice, safe distance.

In fact, that’s what drew me to astronomy: the ability to be in the here and now, surrounded by life, feet solidly on the ground, and simultaneously out there, in the unforgiving void, engaged with scales in time and distance completely beyond our ability to experience directly.

It is one of humanity’s greatest achievements that we can have fact-based conversations about the Sun’s evolution from its birth 4.5 billion years ago to its death 5 billion years hence, or model the encounter in 3 to 4 billion years of our galaxy, the Milky Way, and its 200 billion stars and their 200 billion planets, and our neighbor, the Andromeda Galaxy, and its 200 billion stars and their 200 billion planets…and that’s just some of the easy, nearby stuff.

So what about black holes, then?

Well, indeed.

Listen, I run from black holes, and I suggest you do too. That way madness lies. My friend Gabe Perez-Giz has a YouTube video about black holes that’s been viewed 3 million times. In this highly scientific PBS production, Gabe shares the stage with a monkey and a (My Little) pony. Somehow, Gabe doesn’t end the video in a straitjacket, and I’m not sure why not.

But if we must: like many revolutionary concepts, black holes aren’t as new as you think they are. Two-hundred and fifty years ago, a British clergyman, John Michell, started playing with the idea of a massive object’s gravity being great enough to prevent even light from escaping it.

Rather than discard the idea as ridiculous, Michell asked, “How would we detect such an invisible object?” …And he correctly answered that if it were in orbit with another, visible object, that object’s movements would be enough to tell us much of what we want to know about the invisible one.

The 2020 Nobel Prize winner Andrea Ghez weighed Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, exactly this way.

Michell’s invisible object—he didn’t use the term “black hole,” which wasn’t coined until the 1960s—was more or less forgotten for about a century…only to reappear, rather unexpectedly, during World War I.

In 1915, Albert Einstein was in Berlin, putting the finishing touches on a new geometric definition of gravity. Conceived by Isaac Newton as an attractive force between masses, gravity became in general relativity the observed consequence of the interplay between massive objects and the curvature they cause in the spacetime around them.

That’s a mouthful, so try this: think of spacetime as an infinitely large trampoline covered with rolling balls. The balls tell the fabric of the trampoline how to bend: a lot when they’re bowling balls, a little when they’re Ping-Pong balls. And the trampoline tells the balls how to move: straight when the fabric is flat because there are no other balls around, and on more complicated paths when the fabric is curved because there are.

The Earth going around the Sun isn’t due to a force acting between the two. No, the Earth is moving straight through spacetime—except that its spacetime is curved because of the Sun’s mass so that the straight path has to turn into a closed, elliptical orbit.

Meanwhile, also in 1915 but out on the Russian front, another German Jewish physicist was writing research articles in his spare time. That physicist, Karl Schwarzschild, realized that in Einstein’s framework, any object smaller than some limiting size set by its mass would inevitably collapse on itself, forming an infinitely dense point known as a singularity.

This would curve spacetime to such an extent that nothing that got within a certain distance of the singularity—a boundary known as the event horizon—could reemerge. The trampoline’s surface is so curved by the mass of the collapsed object that you can’t climb out.

In fact, it’s even stranger than that. Being inside the event horizon is a lot like standing on the North Pole: sure, you can move in any direction, as long as that direction is south. Try as you might, inside the event horizon, every move you make takes you inward.

Schwarzschild published this very peculiar solution to Einstein’s equations and promptly died of an autoimmune disease he developed while soldiering. Einstein then spent a fair fraction of the next twenty years trying to disprove the physical existence of black holes. You can see why: he’s got this new, exciting theory of the universe, and the first thing someone does is punch a hole in it.

In fact, it took fifty years of theoretical and observational work for Schwarzschild singularities, as Einstein labeled them, to go from mathematical curiosities to accepted features of the cosmic landscape.

And today, you, dear reader, live in a world where black holes have actually been seen.

In 2019, a team of scientists who had been observing the galaxy Messier 87 for a decade published the first pictures of the supermassive black hole at its center. Six and half billion times the mass of the Sun, this black hole casts a shadow across the disk of hot gas that surrounds it, exactly as expected from general relativity.

In 2022, the same team followed this up by imaging Sagittarius A*, a mere four million times the mass of the Sun. To give you a sense of how challenging this is: as seen from Earth, the apparent size of Sagittarius A* is about that of a doughnut—sitting on the surface of the Moon.

If you haven’t seen those images, well, what are you waiting for? Go, and come back, and meet me in these stories. Come fast, come slow; at the event horizon it won’t matter. We’ll be waiting.

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Marcel Agüeros is a professor of astronomy at Columbia University. A native New Yorker and a Columbia alumnus, he received his PhD from the University of Washington in 2006, returned to Columbia as a National Science Foundation astronomy & astrophysics postdoctoral fellow that year, and joined the faculty in 2010. Marcel is an observer who enjoys tackling classic questions in stellar evolution and examining the environments that stars like the Sun create for their planets. In nearly thirty years of academic activism, he has also worked to make systemic changes that address the historic underrepresentation of women and minorities in science. In 2016, Marcel received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers from President Barack Obama for “his groundbreaking research in stellar astrophysics, and for his restless desire to ensure that minority students in sciences become tomorrow’s leaders.”

Inner and Outer Galaxies Mapping New Narrative Horizonsby Mariana Espinosa aldama

The Universe is not in thermal equilibrium. Massive explosions transfer energy during the death and birth of stars. Galaxies rotate, mostly driven by gigantic black holes that, despite their power, will not get to swallow up their hosts. Thermal equilibrium may have existed in the early Universe when light could not escape a sea of ions, but this delicate state was easily broken by an act of pure expansion. The velocity of this expansion might be faster than light, creating space beyond our reach.

The Universe has several horizons, spheres delimiting our capacities to send and receive information: the Hubble horizon, the particle horizon, the event horizon, the future horizon, the cosmological horizon. It’s no wonder the Universe is sometimes compared to a black hole, but inside out.

Much remains inaccessible to us.

We, ourselves, have boundaries—some of which can be expanded and crossed, while others exceed our escape velocity and may be beyond our imagination’s reach. Some wise researchers have stepped across the mind’s limiting thresholds, incorporating the subjective world in a sensible and unified theory, thinking of matter as swirls of spacetime generated by microscopic black holes.

Our brain may be not a machine that produces consciousness but a scanner that translates encoded information from the lattice of spacetime, interpreting pieces of an already existing consciousness. Jacobo Grinberg, a Mexican neuroscientist, explored the idea in the ’90s. He called it the “sintergic theory,” a neologistic blend of synthesis and energy.Grinberg mysteriously disappeared in December 1994, leaving behind a prolific collection of books, many of which I consider superb science fiction, alongside valuable reflections on shamanism, meditation, and metaphysics.

Stephen Wolfram envisions the Universe as a Turing machine, applying all possible rules everywhere and at all times. The ruliad, the space of all the rules, requires a transcript machine to interpret the available information in a specific way. Wolfram’s formal approach, the multiway system, treats many computational threads of time and requires a model for the observer to determine our current state. This proposal echoes Grinberg’s idea of a lattice, conceptualized as a spatial hyper-graph. Physical events are represented in multiway-state, causal graphs and branchial graphs, providing explanations for both quantum entanglement and general relativity. Wolfram’s physics project pushes the boundaries of scientific representation, proving valuable for advancements in mathematics, chemistry, biology, economics, and even neuroscience and the concept of consciousness.

In past decades, concepts like loops in discrete spacetime and strings in eleven dimensions were popular, suggesting multiverses connected by wormholes produced by black holes. Warp velocity became theoretically feasible, offering a method to travel faster than the speed of light by bending spacetime in an extraordinary attempt to escape our horizons, the destiny of emptiness and solitude.

Recently, dark energy has begun to dominate the Universe’s dynamics, causing an accelerated expansion that may eventually leave the Milky Way and Andromeda as the remaining galaxies, engaged in a colliding dance of rivers of stars and dark matter.

A fatal destiny with no possibility of turning back has driven us to seek escape and reach new boundaries. However, change may also come from introspection, as we reflect on our fundamental principles, question our values, and propose new alternatives. Outer space itself may be a black hole for humanity, as we have forgotten how to live with care and connectivity, including in regards to Earth’s most valuable assets, water and soil. We risk losing our sensibility to detecting vibes and synchronicities, just as we have lost the pleasure of knowing starry nights due to light pollution.

The most fatal of all horizons is not millions of millions of years away but just around the corner as we exhaust our resources, extinguish most animal and plant species, and scorch our rainforests. Wars will be fought over water. Migration will once again reshape the course of history. Under such conditions, we will seek refuge in the memory of the few moments of true passion we have encountered on our brief journey in this world. More and more, we will hunger for and need as nourishment stories of love, nostalgia, and wonder—stories like those that unfold in these pages, mapping new horizons.

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