Singer Distance

by Ethan Chatagnier

Overview

An NPR, The Millions, and PopSugar Best Book of 2022

A Vulture, Tor.com, LitHub, Philadelphia Inquirer, Debutiful, DailyHive, Gizmodo, and ALTA Journal Best Book of Fall

CALIBA Golden Poppy Award Winner

“Surprising, captivating, surpassingly intelligent.”—Kevin Brockmeier, author of The Ghost Variations 

For fans of Station Eleven and Light from Other Stars, Ethan Chatagnier’s propulsive, genre-bending debut novel asks: what happens when we discover intelligent life just next door? And what does it really mean to know we’re not alone in the universe?

The odds of the planet next door hosting intelligent life are—that’s not luck. That’s a miracle. It means something.

In December 1960, Crystal Singer, her boyfriend Rick, and three other MIT grad students take a cross-country road trip from Boston to Arizona to paint a message in the desert. Mars has been silent for thirty years, since the last time Earth solved one of the mathematical proofs the Martian civilization carved onto its surface. The latest proof, which seems to assert contradictory truths about distance, has resisted human understanding for decades. Crystal thinks she’s solved it, and Rick is intent on putting her answer to the test—if he can keep her from cracking under the pressure on the way. But Crystal’s disappearance after the experiment will set him on a different path than he expected, forever changing the distance between them.

Filled with mystery and wonder, Ethan Chatagnier’s Singer Distance is a novel about ambition, loneliness, exploration, and love—about how far we’re willing to go to communicate with a distant civilization, and the great lengths we’ll travel to connect with each other here on Earth.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781953534439
Publisher:	Tin House Books
Publication date:	10/18/2022
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	619,862
Product dimensions:	8.60(w) x 5.60(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Ethan Chatagnier’s stories have appeared in the Kenyon Review, Georgia Review, and New England Review, and been listed as notable in The Best American Short Stories. A Pushcart Prize winner, he is the author of the story collection Warnings from the Future and lives in Fresno, California, with his family.

Editorial Reviews

★ 08/22/2022

Chatagnier’s soaring debut novel (after the collection Warnings from the Future) centers on a group of five MIT grad students who head west in their attempt to contact extraterrestrial beings. In the early 1960s, Rick and his girlfriend Crystal, along with three friends Ronnie, Otis, and Priya, spend their Christmas traveling along Route 66. Crystal’s father, an academic statistician, told her stories when she was a little girl about Mars and the mathematical messages rumored in the early 1920s to have been carved into its surface in response to contact attempts. After scrutiny, she thinks she has solved the mystery of the latest Martian mathematical message and attempts to respond by planting flags in the Arizona desert. When lovestruck Rick realizes Crystal has gone missing, he searches for clues to her whereabouts and ends up looking for her in California. Chatagnier does an excellent job channeling the hippie students’ grit, joy, and constant self-awareness. Rick, describing the group in his narration, says they’re “dirty as beggars but we were grinning,” and he offers enriching development of all the characters as Rick incrementally solves the mystery of Crystal’s whereabouts. The elements of astronomy, numerology, love, and the possibility of extraterrestrial life are structured perfectly as each of the five commit to their “long-shot missions and desperate hopes.” Readers are in for a memorable adventure. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

"Ethan Chatagnier’s Singer Distance is one of the rarest and best kinds of novels: a truly thrilling story driven by big ideas and bold writing, whose gripping mysteries only deepen as the plot thickens. You won’t see the stars and the planets above the same way once you’ve experienced this unforgettable book. You won’t look at our Earth the same way either."

Matt Bell

"Resonant and beguiling."

Ken Kalfus

"A novel of twin obsessions. . . . romantically attracted to the discovery of a new mathematical system for understanding intimacy and communication."

The Wall Street Journal

"Richly drawn and explores a heartfelt perspective on the theme of connection."

PopSugar

"Absorbing. . . . Timeless. . . . a beautiful musing on science and philosophy and how to measure physical and emotional distance."

Historical Novel Society

"Blending mathematics, theoretical physics, philosophy, and passion, Chatagnier has concocted a compelling science fiction yarn that will also appeal to general fiction readers."

Booklist

"Clever."

Vulture

"Imaginative and brainy, this is a beautifully written book about one of my favorite subjects: extraordinary possibilities."

Karen Thompson Walker

"At once intimate and universal. . . . Uses artfully sketched characters to explore the difficulties of meaningful connection—not just with far-away planets, but also with each other. If you are a huge fan of Erica Swyler’s Light from Other Stars, be sure to give this one a go."

Mystery Scene Magazine

"The best kind of literary sci-fi, the kind of novel that makes the reader appreciate the mystery and beauty of our little, infinite universe."

The Millions

"Exquisite. . . . Its turns are both intelligent and magical, and its surprises are heartbreaking and boundary-testing. . . . The most arresting science fiction novel in recent memory."

Starred Review Foreword Reviews

"Captivating. . . . perfectly blends genres throughout the page-turning plot."

Debutiful

"Entrancing. . . . Chatagnier writes with a real compassion and sensitivity—this is a love story at its heart, one that’s both beautiful and unforgettable."

NPR

10/04/2022

DEBUT Following the story collection Warnings from the Future, Pushcart Prize winner Chatagnier sets his debut novel in an alternative past, with Earth discovering in the early 20th century that Mars is inhabited. Communication with the Martians begins with monumental-scale writing in the desert, set afire, and the exchange of similar luminescent writing from the surface of Mars. These exchanges progress, all in mathematics, until the latest Martian math problems confound Earth. Cut to 1960, the novel's present day, when a hapless band of MIT grad students go to the desert to illustrate a proof, a solution to one of the Martian problems, by one of their brilliant members, Crystal. The group of five, led by Crystal's boyfriend Rick, use a van and agricultural equipment to draw the message to the Martians. They all become instant celebrities when the Martians respond with yet another math challenge. Rick and Crystal are in love but are then separated for 13 years, during which Rick discovers what Crystal has been hiding, leading to a different direction in communication with the Martians. VERDICT A compelling bildungsroman, set in a fictional past, that examines the interplay of obsession and personal relationships and reads like Jaroslav Kalfar's Spaceman of Bohemia meets Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow in its intersection of alternate space history, alien life, and singing.—Henry Bankhead

Library Journal

2022-07-27
A math genius figures out how to communicate with Martians but not with the earthlings who love her.

In Chatagnier’s debut novel, humans have been exchanging messages with Martians since 1894 by carving giant symbols into the Earth’s surface, filling the grooves with petroleum, and setting them on fire at the exact moment of Mars’ opposition. The first message earthlings sent was three parallel lines, which the Martians answered with four parallel lines of their own. In subsequent oppositions, the Martians used a Socratic system of quizzes to teach humans the Martian notational system and increasingly sophisticated mathematics until nobody alive on Earth was smart enough to solve the extraterrestrial puzzles except Einstein, and finally not even he could. Then the Martians fell silent for decades, ignoring our puny attempts at communication. As the novel begins, in the winter of 1960, five MIT math grad students are driving west to dig Martian notation into the Arizona desert in time for the next opposition. The group comprises the narrator, Rick Hayworth; his girlfriend, Crystal Singer, the genius whose formula they’re planning to beam to Mars; and two other men and one other woman. Chatagnier describes the scenery of the American past with lyrical zest, but he doesn’t seem to have devoted much effort to imagining or researching what people’s lives were like back then. In his fantasy version of the novel’s timeline, unlike the same period on actual Earth, women, including women of color, are allowed to be mathematicians and scientists just like men. Women in his novel run telescopes and are professors at prestigious universities in more than token numbers. (In contrast, for example, in the real world it wasn’t until 1959 that MIT appointed the first woman to its science faculty, and from 1965 to 1975, less than 5% of the graduate students in the MIT physics department were women.) After the Martians respond to Crystal’s message, she buries herself deeper and deeper in her research, ultimately vanishing from Rick’s life and public view. Her disappearance sets the scene for the novel’s exploration of the difficulties of truly understanding the self and others. Chatagnier expresses this theme in descriptions of Crystal’s research: “Her voice came into my mind…I heard her say: Light-years of distance separate us even from ourselves.” For all the charm of these wistful musings, the plot makes little sense. (How has Crystal been supporting herself? Why hasn’t some reporter found her long ago?) And the novel’s ultimate revelation, when it comes, is a cliché.

Lyrical writing and a suspenseful story fall apart when anachronisms and lazy plotting undermine them.

Kirkus Reviews

"Chatagnier is a beautiful writer. . . . This is a wondrous reading experience, a thoughtful and provocative encounter with literary artistry that is to be savored."

Locus

"An achingly beautiful look at living in the shadow of genius, science, math, and loving the difficult to love. Chatagnier looks at the sky and people with equal wonder, and the result is deeply moving. Singer Distance is a book for readers of Sagan, lovers of paradoxes, anyone who has ever looked up. This truly gorgeous novel will live with me for a long time."

Erika Swyler

"Entrancing. . . . Chatagnier writes with a real compassion and sensitivity—this is a love story at its heart, one that’s both beautiful and unforgettable."

NPR Books

"Atmospheric. . . . an exploration of ambition, loneliness, and love."

DailyHive

"Fascinating. . . . One remarkable feature of this wonderful novel is its cinematic atmosphere. . . . [Chatagnier’s] infectious imagination is sure to appeal to many readers."

Las Vegas Review of Books

"An inventive and heartfelt novel about the search to understand both the universe and ourselves. The best sort of mystery, one with big ideas at its center."

Kate Hope Day

"A worthy addition to books that revisit the past with some property of the natural world fundamentally altered, like several Ted Chiang stories [and] Catherynne M. Valente’s Radiance."

Tor.com

"Singer Distance is a surprising, captivating, surpassingly intelligent novel, and I mean it as a great compliment when I say that I'm not quite sure where it came from. The narrator who leads us through its pages insists that he is one of the world’s carpenters rather than one of its architects, but the reality that surrounds him is extraordinary, and so too, therefore, is his story. On the macroscale, it’s a story about the interpersonal pathways that connect one planet to another and the interplanetary gaps that separate one heart from another; on the microscale, about what it feels like to occupy a single life, and how difficult it is to tell, when you’re in the middle of it, whether that life is being wasted or fulfilled."

Kevin Brockmeier

"Singer Distance pulled me in from the very first page. I fell in love with the characters—who are full of mettle, vitality, and human chaos—and the audacity of the book's alternate history, wherein contact has been made with a civilization on Mars, but that contact leaves humanity with more questions than answers about the nature of the universe. This book is a love song to our desire for understanding, the scientific drive for progress, and the thread of faith that runs through both. An outstanding debut novel."

Adrienne Celt

"Nifty. . . . Singer Distance feels like a recent, character-driven indie film in the vein of Safety Not Guaranteed or Seeking a Friend for the End of the World."

Philadelphia Inquirer