NEW EDEN

Tipirneni’s debut SF novel examines the repercussions after a small team of researchers communicates with a representative of an advanced alien species.

Joshua Andrews, a young University of California, Berkeley, physicist, follows in the footsteps of a late, secretive academic who had a breakthrough in the field of quantum entanglement involving particles that behave identically even when separated by vast distances. There’s a good deal of deep physics talk about these “spookyons” (“The amount of deflection was correlated with how aligned the bar magnet’s poles were with the magnetic field it traveled through”), and it turns out that two captured spookyons, properly wired, enable real-time two-way communication between any two points in the universe. Joshua, along with religious Scientific American journalist Rachael Miller and computer genius Vinod Bhakti, discovers that aliens are already sending general hails using this technology. The trio respond and find themselves communicating with a seemingly benign, slang-using entity calling itself Seth. Of course, the United States government, including paranoid military authorities, initiates a lockdown on the project. Up to this point, the book dwells in the general neighborhood of Carl Sagan’s popular novel Contact (1985), and Tipirneni’s snappy characterizations and wow-factor science compete well with Sagan’s. The author effectively increases the stakes with Seth’s sudden request to experience Earth firsthand—as much as spookyon technical workarounds will allow—and, as the extraterrestrial becomes a celebrity, even Joshua suspects that Seth may be hiding something vital. A late-blooming Covid-19–like pandemic plot complication is a bit convenient in rushing things along, but it does lead to a satisfying conclusion that doesn’t end things with an expected cliffhanger. The novel’s exceptionally compelling cosmology (“Information is everything”) is one of its many rewards.

A brainy first-contact tale that makes well-traveled territory feel fresh again.