Celestial Lights by Cecile Pin (Holt) ~Janet Brown

Would you choose to become immortalized in history if it meant you would be separated from everyone you love for ten years, without human contact of any kind except for the three people who go with you? For Oliver Ines, the answer comes easily. He says yes.

A solitary child who has grown up feeling separated from the rest of the world, Oliver has two touchstones. One is a little girl who pulls him into her backyard search for cicadas and becomes his one friend until she moves away, never to return. The other comes through a rare conversation with his father who tells him he should work to become a mechanical engineer. Although the description of the job is prosaic, Oliver seizes upon it as a way to be "a builder of dreams."

A professor later tells Oliver that he sees him as a man who will sacrifice many things to realize his ambitions. When he's rediscovered by the cicada hunter, they marry and have a child. However the professor's assessment proves to be true. Oliver is given the chance to work for a plutocratic visionary who wants to conquer the universe. An earlier attempt led to failure when one of his spacecraft vanished into some unknown galaxy. Determined to achieve his dream, he hires Oliver to spearhead the building of an improved version of the doomed project. Then he gives Oliver the chance to make the dream materialize by becoming the commander of this new expedition, to reach the moon of Jupiter known as Europa and come back to Earth with samples taken from its surface.

Suddenly the man whose ambition was to build dreams is given the chance to become an essential part of what he has built. No matter that his mother is dying of cancer, his wife is in the midst of her own career, and their young son will be on the cusp of adulthood by the time this mission returns to Earth, Oliver accepts the offer.

Cecile Pin's first novel, Wandering Souls, (Asia by the Book, May 2023) told the story of a very different sort of voyage, a fictionalized account of her mother's journey from Vietnam to the safety of a new home, an odyssey as imperiled as Oliver's space journey. But Pin's mother and grandparents were driven by survival as a family while Oliver abandons his. 

His story alternates with entries he makes in the personal log that he keeps while rocketing through space. Through those pieces from his journal. Pin reveals the starkly impersonal spirit of their writer. While this is a novel of the exploration of outer space, it's equally a journey into the heart of darkness that lies within one man's soul. 

In his quest to become part of history, Oliver succumbs to a tragic flaw, the sin of hubris. His decision to override his craft's navigational auto-pilot turns him into a modern-day version of Captain Ahab, endangering the success of his mission and the fate of his crew.

Cecile Pin has written a novel that has more in common with Camus' The Stranger than it does with Samantha Harvey's lyric account of space travel in Orbital (Asia by the Book, December, 2025). As bleak as it is original, this book is a stunning achievement that carries a dark warning, along with echoes of “Be careful of what you wish for.”.