A Dance with Our Own Shadow: Ethan Chatagnier and Ken Kalfus in Conversation
The resonant and, for me personally beguiling, premise of Ethan Chatagnier‘s first novel, Singer Distance, is that a late nineteenth-century astronomer has carved a geometric sign in the Tunisian desert as a message to Mars that Earth harbors intelligent life. The Martians respond with a series of their own, more advanced symbols dug into their planet-wide desert. While Singer Distance vividly suggests how this interplanetary communication would have shaped twentieth-century mathematics, science, and history, Chatagnier focuses most deeply— most movingly—on the remote connections that may fail between human beings.
In his novel, the Mars-Earth conversation spurts and sputters too. Mars is apparently trying to teach Earth a higher form of mathematics through a series of geometric puzzles. Einstein and other whizzes get stumped and, with inadequate terrestrial replies, decades pass without messages from the Red Planet. When Singer Distance opens, in 1960, Earth has been ghosted for 27 years. Four MIT grad students are driving west. One of them, the brilliant Crystal Singer, thinks she has a solution to the latest brain-teaser. The friends, including Crystal’s boyfriend Rick, intend to paint the answer in the Arizona desert.
The Martians finally respond again, exciting the world, but with another math problem that divides the friends, including Crystal and Rick. Crystal’s study of the new Martian glyphs lifts her into the highest reaches of mathematics,
