We see the impossible: a star among the vertices of Cassiopeia begins blazing like a pyre. Its radiance matches that of gleaming Venus. A “new star” we call it, though centuries later we’ll learn the event indicates a stellar death. If we are to believe our eyes, we have learned that the heavens are not changeless. The ancient meanings drawn between the stars hung above our terrestrial cradle like a spectral mobile, and by this light it fell to the ground. Look again. The stars are the same, but different: burning, spinning, bulging, moving, failing, like everything beneath the moon. Now we grasp the total dominion of nature. The matter cremated in those distant suns is the same flesh sloughing off our bones.

For The Baffler, I wrote about Harald Voetmann’s novel, Sublunar (2023)

Image Credits: NASA, New Directions