A House Between Earth and the Moon - A Novel

Informationen zum Autor Rebecca Scherm Klappentext “Inventive and thrilling. . . . I couldn’t put it down.” —Brit Bennett, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Vanishing Half “It’s a thrill to read this novel.” —Jia Tolentino, New York Times bestselling author of Trick Mirror The gripping story of one scientist in outer space, another who watches over him, the family left behind, and the lengths people will go to protect the people and planet they love For twenty years, Alex has believed that his gene-edited superalgae will slow and even reverse the effects of climate change. His obsession with his research has jeopardized his marriage, his relationships with his kids, and his own professional future. When the Son sisters, founders of the colossal tech company Sensus, offer him a chance to complete his research, he seizes the opportunity. The catch? His lab will be in outer space on Parallaxis, the first-ever luxury residential space station built for billionaires. Alex and six other scientists leave Earth and their loved ones to become Pioneers, the beta tenants of Parallaxis.   But Parallaxis is not the space palace they were sold. Day and night, the embittered crew builds the facility under pressure from Sensus, motivated by the promise that their families will join them. At home on Earth, much of the country is ablaze in wildfires and battered by storms. In Michigan, Alex’s teenage daughter, Mary Agnes, struggles through high school with the help of the ubiquitous Sensus phones implanted in everyone’s ears that archive each humiliation, and wishes she could go to Parallaxis with her father—but her mother will never allow it.   The Pioneers are the beta testers of another program, too: Sensus is designing an algorithm that will predict human behavior. Katherine Son hires Tess, a young social psychologist, to watch the experiment’s subjects through their phones—including not only the Pioneers, but Katherine’s sister, Rachel. Tess begins to develop an intimate, obsessive relationship with her subjects. When Tess and Rachel travel to Parallaxis, the controlled experiment begins to unravel.   Prescient and insightful, A House Between Earth and the Moon is at once a captivating epic about the machinations of big tech and a profoundly intimate meditation on the unmistakably human bonds that hold us together. Leseprobe 1. Alex had been in space for only six days when Carl Bouchet, who was a real astronaut, told him to put on his suit and go outside. To "go outside" the station was a procedure that Alex had practiced just twice during his summer of training, and that had been in a zero-gravity simulation chamber. Not the same at all. Carl had assured him then that this was emergency training, to be used only in the unlikely event that he needed their assistance. Maybe the others had been disappointed to hear that, but Alex had taken a deep, quiet breath of relief. He hadn't minded Carl's arrogance, in this context. It made him feel safe. "Me?" he asked Carl now. "What about Irma? Malik? They're probably more-" "They're coming, too. Battery refresh." Carl turned away, and when Alex hesitated, Carl turned back, right hand on his belt, where he wore two spools of retractable cording with clips at the end. He started to pull out a line and offered the end to Alex. "You want a tow?" he asked. "No, no," Alex said, and he pushed off the wall behind him to follow, pulling up Carl's training sessions in his phone's archive: training, Ground, space walk, "unlikely event." He was certain he remembered nothing. When he found it, he sped up the footage to 4x with captions. Two Carls, now: Carl-of-the-past instructed him, the footage like stained glass over the Carl who floated in front of him. That Carl slid open the door to the suit room. He turned around...

Product details

• Authors: Rebecca Scherm
• Publisher: Penguin Books USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 28.03.2023
• EAN: 9781101980125
• ISBN: 978-1-101-98012-5
• No. of pages: 400
• Dimensions: 139 mm x 212 mm x 23 mm
• Subject: Fiction > Narrative literature