Oomphel in the Sky

There are stories that dazzle by spectacle, and there are stories that endure by the quiet gravity of their questions. Oomphel in the Sky belongs wholly to the latter kind—a work of speculative imagination that is less concerned with machinery than with meaning, less with distance than with perspective. It is a tale that gazes outward into the immensities of space only to turn, with a deeper and more searching intensity, back toward the fragile, striving consciousness of man himself.

Set aga...