Have you ever wanted to land on a comet? Imagine exploring its shadowy underworld just as the sun is awakening its inner ‘dragon’. Next month, Space Cat Press transports you right there with another immersive collection of poetry and prose by SCP’s poet and co-editor, Siobhan Logan. Her latest title celebrates the ground-breaking ESA Rosetta mission of 2004-16, which sent a spacecraft 1 billion km away to probe a comet’s oldest secrets. And the book will be launched in September at the British Science Festival 2022.
Siobhan Logan & Nebula painting by Loz Atkinson.
Credit: Ambrose Musiyiwa
For this blog, Logan takes us behind the scenes to explore the inspiration for her Rosetta book. On the opening page, she recalls how ESA’s voyage took her on an imaginative journey of her own.
‘For me, ESA’s Rosetta mission was a voyage that played out virtually in webspace. An obsession that hung on the daily tweets and weekly blogs of an aluminium avatar. It was the European Space Agency’s social media that lured me in… Back in November 2014, I watched ESA’s lander-craft, Philae, hurl itself at the fast-moving comet. Not since childhood, when NASA televised grainy pictures of astronauts on a cratered Moon, had I been so enthralled. Yet this new space mission was unfolding on the other side of our solar system. And this time it was a robot, not a man, that took the first step onto a comet’s surface.’
Preface, ROSETTA: Voyage to a Comet’s Underworld
Impressed as she was by the engineering and scientific ambition, it was ESA’s use of ancient Egyptian mythology to name the spacecraft and the comet’s regions, that caught Logan’s eye. She saw the potential to narrate ESA’s voyage through poems that leaned into the fantastic and mythical. Logan’s ‘Book of Hours’ has developed through multiple incarnations since 2014. From scroll to spoken word event to hyperspace adventure. Now Space Cat’s ebook version interleaves an extended poem sequence with new prose material. Here’s an example of one of the ‘spells’ Logan casts. It connects the descent of ESA’s lander craft Philae onto the comet’s surface with the journey of dead souls through the Egyptian underworld, Du’at:
Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko
Credits: ESA/Rosetta/NAVCAM – CC BY-SA IGO 3.0
9 Du’at 15th Nov. 2014 'I'm tired,' you twitter a tin foil chick alone in the dark and packets of data dispatched you burrow into the hide of a frozen mammoth haunch; dormant not extinct, you're descending by robotic barque into an underworld cyberspace where a lab-coated Anubis will weigh your feather heart.
We’re hugely excited to be launching this book at next month’s British Science Festival with a special performance. Rosetta – Voyage to a Comet’s Underworld! will be presented on the evening of Friday 16th September at the Manhattan 34 Cellar Bar in Leicester. It will be the first set of Two Spoken Word Voyages into Poetry from 6pm onwards. More details to follow in next month’s blog but Logan plans an interactive show that will rekindle the thrill of ESA’s comet adventure. ‘What’s not to love about a space mission that delivers more drama, danger and comebacks than a sci-fi franchise?’ she adds. You can book tickets for this FREE event via the festival website.
https://spacecatpress.co.uk/authors/siobhan-logan/
Rosetta – ESA’s comet chaser – Follow ESA’s mission to Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko
ESA – Philae landing: touchdown highlights
Space Cat Press 