British writer Samantha Harvey won the Booker Prize for fiction on Tuesday with Orbital, a short, wonder-filled novel set aboard the International Space Station. Harvey was awarded the £50,000 (US$64,000) prize for what she has called a “space pastoral” about six astronauts circling the Earth, which she began writing during Covid-19 lockdowns. The confined characters … Read more
The Booker Prize organisers announced the shortlist for the 2024 edition on Tuesday at Somerset House’s Portico Rooms in London. The shortlist includes five women and one man, making it the highest number of females ever shortlisted in its 55-year history. Authors from five countries were shortlisted alongside the first Dutch writer and the first … Read more
Last November, the Voyager 1 spacecraft began sending gibberish radio signals back to Earth. Engineers have now identified the problem, but trying to repair a 46-year-old device on a craft 24 billion kilometres from Earth is not easy. Voyager 1 and its twin Voyager 2 were both launched in 1977 on a reconnaissance mission to … Read more
