Music of the Spheres

By Stephen Parrish

Music of the Spheres is a mathematical fantasy about the circular inhabitants of the planet Corona struggling with avarice, apathy, and allegiance while questioning the shape of their world. Readers are assumed to have a knowledge of pre-calc math.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lascaux Books
• Release date: Jul 18, 2022
• ISBN: 9781734496611

Book preview

Music of the Spheres

by

Stephen Parrish

Copyright 2020 Stephen Parrish. All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction, in whole or part, in any form.

ISBN: 978-1-7344966-1-1

Cover design by Wendy Russ. Cover art by Janice Phelps Williams, Memory Circles #10, mixed media, 2018.

Lascaux Books

www.lascauxbooks.com

Pythagoras or his followers believed that we should be able to calculate the orbits of the heavenly bodies (which the Greeks pictured as carried round the earth on crystal spheres) by relating them to the musical intervals. They felt that all the regularities in nature are musical; the movements of the heavens were, for them, the music of the spheres. —Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man

*

For Sarah

who is around 530 nm on the electromagnetic spectrum.

My designation is Yellow-D4#. My friends call me Goldie, and you can too. Like everyone else in Corona, I rotate about my center point.

Now you know everything essential about me: my pitch, D4#, is in the middle of the range, my diameter is 46, and my color is buried in the spectrum. I’m the circle who generally gets overlooked in a crowd. So maybe it’s best I be the one to tell the story.

First, a little about my world, Corona. My clan consists of all the D# pitches. There are seven families in the clan, numbered D1# to D7#.