Mars

Since reading Helen Gordon’s The Meteorites, I keep catching myself in imaginary conversation with an Essex thatcher called Frederick Pratt. On 9 March 1923, he was working in a wheat field at Ashdon Hall Farm, near Saffron Walden, when he heard a strange ‘sissing’ sound and looked up to see ‘the earth fly up like water’. He later dug up, from a depth of two feet beneath the surface of the field, a stone weighing 1.27kg that had fallen from the sky. He took it to the police station, then on to the vicar, who shipped it off to the Natural History Museum. There we know it was classified as a stony chondrite meteorite, composed of feldspar, pyroxene and olivine, white specks of nickel iron and other oddments from which the solar system was formed 4.5 billion years ago.

This slender, gleaming novel depicts a day in the life of six astronauts at the International Space Station – but a day isn’t a day for a crew orbiting Earth at more than 17,000 miles an hour. Space ‘takes their 24 hours and throws 16 days and nights at them in return’. Weaving a line of philosophical enquiry through her luminous prose has become something of a trademark for Samantha Harvey, who probed the elasticity of time through a portrayal of Alzheimer’s disease in her prize-winning debut The Wilderness and, in All is Song, transported Socrates to the 21st century.

For many of us, Elon Musk is a hard man to like. He’s the richest man in the world (or second richest, as he and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos whirr back and forth in top spot), but acts online like a bratty teenager astonished by his own intelligence. He proposes underground tunnel networks as a transport solution for Miami (which is a swamp less than 10ft above sea level), moots takeovers of his companies with 420-themed weed jokes and hypes cryptocurrencies. Yet as you read Liftoff you can see what so many people find to admire in the man — at least for a while.