by Roberto TrottaA World Without Stars

NEW DEALS

A WORLD WITHOUT STARS How the Night Sky Made Us Who We Are ROBERTO TROTTA

Praise for THE EDGE OF THE SKY

A master storyteller – FOREIGN POLICY

A poetic primer on the universe – BRAIN PICKINGS

An astrophysicist’s reappraisal of humanity’s history that takes readers on a wonder-filled journey to discover the human connection with our cosmic environment.

Imagine looking up to the sky on a dark night and seeing... nothing. Imagine Earth permanently shrouded in clouds – a thick blanket of dark grey clouds, blotting out even the face of the Sun during the day and that of the full Moon at night. Imagine a star-starved civilization struggling to take hold with our ancestral connection to the sky severed.

The night sky makes us feel small and insignificant, yet proud of our ability to marvel at it and to decrypt its mysteries. Beyond the stars, at the beginning of time, at the origin of the Universe, religion and science meet and collide. Amazingly, these indifferent pinpricks of light inspired the highest expressions of human creativity: beauty and meaning, courage and hope, sprung from remote balls of gas burning away in the coldness of space. We are stardust imbued with the longing to understand where we come from and to sing what we cannot comprehend.

Thousands of years ago, the sky was a constant companion to our forebears. The rhythm of their lives revolved around the stars. Not so today: for most of us the night sky is largely lost in the glow of artificial lighting. We hardly bother to look at the sky any more, and when we do there is little for us to see. Even professional astronomers study the Universe by staring at screens rather than through eyepieces. We have lost our intimate relationship with the Universe.

In A WORLD WITHOUT STARS, Roberto Trotta explores the surprisingly deep influence of astronomical phenomena in shaping the trajectory of human history. From mythology, religion, farming and the creative arts, to mathematics, astronomy, technology and pop culture, he reveals how the very fabric of who we are has been shaped by our ability to see the stars. What’s more, by daring us to imagine other worlds without stars – from lifeforms beneath the icy crust of distant moons, to the prospect of pure energy beings emerging in a dark, cold, empty Universe – he impresses on us just how special and important our own view of the cosmos is.

After reading this book, you will never look at the night sky in the same way as before. For we are made by stars, in many more ways than we ever imagined.

ROBERTO TROTTA is a professor of astro-statistics at Imperial College London, director of Imperial’s Centre for Languages, Culture and Communication and a visiting professor of cosmology at Gresham College, London. He has published more than 50 scientific papers, contributed to two books and received numerous awards for his research work and science communication activities. His first book for the public, THE EDGE OF THE SKY (Basic Books, 2014), explains the Universe using only the most common 1,000 words in English, and was widely acclaimed. He lives in London with his wife and their two young children.

Agent: Peter Tallack

Publisher: Basic Books Delivery: October 2020 Publication: Autumn 2021 Status: Proposal Length: 90,000–100,000 words

FORTHCOMING TITLES

KEEP CALM AND LOG ON Your Handbook For Surviving the Digital Revolution GILLIAN ‘GUS’ ANDREWS

Empowering, practical, and profound, Andrews has written the survival manual for our age – Finn Brunton, Associate Professor, Department of Media, Culture and Communication, New York University, and author of DIGITAL CASH

A fine collection of digital age skills we all need to equip ourselves with in order to survive and thrive in a world swimming with information – Dan Gillmor, Cofounder, ASU News Co/Lab, Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, Arizona State University

How to survive the digital revolution without getting trampled: your guide to online mindfulness, digital self-empowerment, cybersecurity, creepy ads, trustworthy information, and more.

Feeling overwhelmed by an avalanche of online content? Anxious about identity theft? Unsettled by the proliferation of fake news? Welcome to the digital revolution. Wait – wasn’t the digital revolution supposed to make our lives better? It was going to be fun and put the world at our fingertips. What happened? KEEP CALM AND LOG ON is a survival handbook that will help you achieve online mindfulness and overcome online helplessness – the feeling that tech is out of your control.

Taking a cue from the famous Second World War morale-boosting slogan ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’, Gus Andrews shows us how to adapt the techniques our ancestors used to survive hard times, so we can live our best lives online. She explains why media and technology stress us out and offers empowering tools for coping. Mindfulness practices can help us stay calm and conserve our attention purposefully. She shares the secret of understanding our own opinions’ ‘family trees’ to identify misleading ‘fake news’. She provides tips for unplugging occasionally, overcoming feelings that we are ‘bad at technology’ and taking charge of our security and privacy. She explains how social media algorithms keep us from information we need and why creepy ads seem to follow us online. Most importantly, she urges us to work to rebuild the trust in our communities that the internet has broken.

GILLIAN ‘GUS’ ANDREWS has an unusual background as both a hacker and an educator. A graduate of Teachers College, Columbia University and former Google Academic Research Fellow, she has been tracking warnings about digital privacy and security issues for over a decade and is the creator of ‘The Media Show’, an award-winning YouTube series that shares media and digital-literacy insights with a young adult audience. In her work for ThoughtWorks, Second Life, Simply Secure and the Open Internet Tools project, she has helped developers make systems easier for everyday people to use. She has taught media literacy and digital media skills at Marist College and was a former panelist on the digital-rights radio show ‘Off The Hook’ and an organizer of the Hackers On Planet Earth conference. In addition to academic articles in Fibreculture Journal, E-Learning and Digital Media and the Teachers College Record, she has written popular pieces for Salon.com, the Village Voice, .net magazine, ReadWriteWeb and io9 and has been anthologized in Bitch magazine’s tenth anniversary collection ‘Bitchfest’.

Agent: Jeff Shreve

Publisher: MIT Press Publication: 7 April 2020 Status: Proofs Length: 408 pages

All rights available excluding World English Language (MIT Press)