Meet The Stargazer’s Embassy in July
Debi Moore
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Acclaimed American poet and author Eleanor Lerman has a new book heading our way in just a few more weeks titled The Stargazer’s Embassy, and given so many people’s fascination with alien abduction, we wanted to bring it to your attention. This unique, exquisitely rendered take on the clichéd “abduction” story is Lerman’s second foray into full-length literary science fiction, following the award-winning Radiomen (The Permanent Press, 2015).
A lifelong New Yorker and proud member of the Woodstock generation, in the heady 1970s Lerman became something of a cultural icon when her debut book of poetry, Armed Love, was deemed “double X” by The New York Times — society not yet being acclimated to a world where young women would write about sex, drugs, and rock & roll. As a Jewish woman in a same-sex marriage, Lerman has long been active in counterculture and on the barricades for civil rights; and much of her writing over the course of her career has been informed by her thoughts and feelings about love, civil disobedience, drugs, and homosexuality.
Now in her mid-sixties, Lerman’s focus has evolved, compelling her to use science fiction as a vehicle to confront the greater questions and realities of life and death.
“Not long ago, I found myself facing a catastrophic illness and grappling with the realization that a kind of curtain had been pulled back on my life,” Lerman reveals. “The experiences that had previously fueled my writing were fading into the past, and science fiction seemed like the only genre I could work with that would allow me to leave behind what were beginning to feel like mundane concerns of daily life and cross the border into the territory of God and death and the ideas that worry people who are getting older.”
“I believe, as Whitley Strieber has often said, that if aliens are visiting our world, we can’t possibly understand their motivations if we base our assumptions on our limited understanding of the universe,” she continues. “In my last book, Radiomen, I worked with the idea that both humans and others who inhabit the universe might be equally confused about who or what God is. In Stargazer’s I use a similar framework to explore the concept of how none of us can really conceive of our own death as being final.”
The novel arrives July 11th from Mayapple Press; click here to pre-order a copy from Amazon.
Synopsis:
The Stargazer’s Embassy explores the frightening phenomenon of alien abduction from a different point of view. In this story it is the aliens who seem fearful of Julia Glazer, the woman they are desperately trying to contact. Violent and despairing after the murder of the one person she loved, a psychiatrist who was studying abductees, Julia continues to rebuff the aliens until her relationships with others who have met “the things,” as she calls them, including a tattoo artist, a strange man who can take photographs with the power of his mind, and an abductee locked up in a mental hospital, force Julia deeper into direct alien contact and a confrontation about what death means to humans and aliens alike.
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