by Lorraine Boissoneault

More than a decade ago, before getting swept into the maelstrom of high school, I went through a star-gazing phase. A Girl Scout summer camp program for astronomy was followed by nights on the deck of our sailboat, staring at the sky to identify constellations and other planets in our Solar System. One summer night while out on Lake Erie, the sky was so clear that the Milky Way was a vibrant white swathe splashed across the darkness. 

In more recent years, my nighttime musings have been marred by the light pollution over Chicago. But I still headed out to watch the lunar eclipse this past May, and have been thrilled to meet with an astrophysicist neighbor and use his telescope to spot nebulae. No matter where I am in the world or in my life, the night sky is enchanting. 

That’s something I share with Moiya McTier, a science communicator who brings her love of folklore and astrophysics to her new book, The Milky Way: An Autobiography of Our Galaxy. We talked about bringing fictional inspiration into complicated science, the dream of uniting science and the humanities, and all the ways that learning about the Milky Way can make us better humans.

Your book is exactly as described—the story of the Milky Way, as told by the galaxy itself. It’s such a good example of what nonfiction can do because it’s an interesting mix of intense science and also mythology and also a fun voice. Why did you decide to go for the autobiography voice?

There were a lot of reasons that all happened at once, and when I look back it’s difficult to put it in a linear fashion. I had just finished reading this book called The Raven Tower by Anne Leckie. It’s told from the perspective of a sentient rock god character and I was interested in this perspective from something I normally think of as very still and passive in the environment. So I was already in the mindset of doing something from a weird perspective. 

When my agent and I decided to write a book about the Milky Way instead of other space things, which we did because I was writing my PhD dissertation on the Milky Way, I realized that so many books had been written about the Milky Way before. I figured the best person to add a lot to that story is the Milky Way. That gave me the opportunity to bring in these more fictional elements, because I’ve always loved fiction more than nonfiction.

There were so many good moments of the Milky Way judging the humans who are reading this book, which makes perfect sense for an almost omniscient entity. I saw in the acknowledgements that you mention your cat as one source of inspiration for the voice. Were there other things that you drew on to develop the Milky Way’s voice?

That was a big part of the initial writing process. I spent a long time with my editor trying to figure out what the voice should be. We thought of a lot of different things. Maybe frat-bro-y to get that irreverence and total disrespect for humanity, but that seemed too harsh. We thought maybe elder statesperson who has a lot of authority in their voice and feels superior to everyone it’s talking to. Then I started thinking about the history of the Milky Way and what it has been through in its “life,” right? And realized it didn’t make much sense for that to be the personality that would emerge when it’s this galaxy that has spent so much of its time alone, pouring its figurative heart into the task of making these stars and seeing them fail over and over again. 

When I dug deep into what I wanted to do with this book, which was let the science inspire the fictional aspects, the kind of depressed-but-slightly-recovered-and-feeling-very-superior voice just popped out. I don’t know if you have a cat, but that’s definitely the aura they emit.

I also really liked that you brought aspects of mythology in alongside the story of the Milky Way and astronomical sciences. I liked that the Milky Way presents them as kind of equally valid to the more advanced science and things we would think of as “true and factual.” Do you have a favorite myth about the stars?

I love so many of them. I think that the myth I tell in the book about the Khoisan girl who throws embers in the sky to light her way home—something about that imagery has stuck with me since I first read it a few years ago. I also find it interesting the ways it gets incorporated into our afterlife myths. I love how many cultures have put the road to the afterlife in the stars, like Xibalba, the Mayan afterlife myth. There are so many examples of cultures who thought the stars are the eyes of your dead ancestors watching over you or that the stars are the final resting place for the souls of your ancestors. 

It did make sense for me to also talk about the myths and give them the same legitimacy as science; the Milky Way is telling its story, but it’s also telling the story of human understanding of the Milky Way. And to humans, the understanding of space started with mythology.

So for the Milky Way, it’s this sense of being watched by others and how that perception of what they’re seeing changes over time. But that doesn’t change you, the Milky Way, it just changes what they think or how they think.

Both. There was this preapproved list of double majors at Harvard, and for some reason mythology and astronomy were not on that list. I had to do some negotiating with both departments. They happened to be two of the smallest at the school and I leveraged their small size against them, saying, “Neither of you can afford to lose anyone, so let me study both of you.” 

But I do feel like it’s getting better now. I talk to a lot of young astronomers in undergrad or early grad school who are passionate about writing, who are passionate about art. They complement each other really well when you know how to look for the points that connect them.

I’m a better scientist because I studied folklore and the stories people told and the way we communicate with each other as humans. And I’m a better folklorist because I studied science and I understand the process of rigorously trying to understand something. It sounds so cliché as a physicist to say I understand the whole universe. But I understand a lot of the universe and how it works on the most basic scale, and I think that helps me understand humans and the world around us. Our folklore is just a reflection of the world around us and how we interact with it. 

I can see how that understanding of communication comes out in your writing. One of my favorite metaphors that you used was how the speed of the universe cooling would be the equivalent of the sun freezing in three days. It’s such a striking image that it helps with grasping this process happening on a scale so unfathomably large. Are there any details that you felt were especially challenging to break down in a way that a general audience would understand?

I love this question and I love the example you brought up because I did have several conversations with my editor about that point. I knew these huge timescales, billions of years, wouldn’t make sense to humans. We don’t exist or have to think on those timescales ever. So I wanted to break it down into seconds, but we had to go through a few different iterations before my editor thought it worked. What you see is the final result of being very explicit: instead of years, we’re talking about seconds, but still translating that to days and years. So it was making that very clear and trying to come up with these comparisons that people would recognize.

I really wanted to get across the point that galaxies are moving in a lot of different directions and for a lot of reasons. We’re moving towards Andromeda and they’re moving towards us. Local Group, our galaxy cluster, is moving towards the Big Attractor. And everything in the universe is expanding because of dark energy. I wanted to get that point across. I just had to bring in a lot of external characters and motivations for the Milky Way to be moving through the universe. 

Do you find when you’re talking to people, trying to help the public come along and understand the science of the stars and the galaxy, that they can grasp these things fairly easily? Or does it take a lot of work to bring them along?

It depends on what I’m trying to explain. Exoplanets are what I’ve found to be the easiest concept to get across because we all live on a planet. We know the basics of what it means to be a planet orbiting a star. But when I get into the motion of stars around the galaxy, or the formation and evolution of stars or black holes—people tend to be interested in black holes, less so the dynamics of stars. They do have a hard time grasping those concepts because they’re a lot more complicated and things we don’t interact with in our daily lives. When was the last time you touched a black hole? But you’re touching a planet right now. 

That’s not to say that I don’t think people can grasp these things. I think it just takes more work and time on the part of the science communicator. I can cover exoplanets in five minutes and they’d walk away with some new cool fun knowledge. I think I’d have to talk to someone for ten minutes about star evolution. And they would still walk away with some fun cool knowledge. It’s just a matter of putting more effort in. 

Why do you, the writer (and not the voice of the Milky Way) think it’s important for people to know more about our galaxy? 

A lot of reasons. One, I think it’s a valuable perspective. I spend a lot of my time thinking about things from the perspective of the Milky Way and not just because of this book; I did that during my research, too. Having a big perspective in terms of space and time, it makes me less of a jerk. I can understand the bigger picture because I’ve spent the time thinking about that bigger picture. I would hope people studying astronomy get that. I hope it gives them a sense of connection to everyone else who is alive and everyone else who has ever studied astronomy, because it really is just one sky. I was in Morocco last week and it feels like a totally different part of the world, but it’s the same sky and that’s incredible.

I think there are some practical, critical-thinking things we get from studying astronomy: navigation, time keeping. And when you think about the way constellations in our sky work—why can you see Orion during some parts of the year and not others—it gives you a better starting point to think through the process of these different spheres rotating. Earth rotating, the sun rotating, us going around the sun. I feel like that’s a good exercise for people’s brains, thinking about astronomy and these numbers in an abstract way.

I’ve always thought of astronomy as one of the more romantic fields of science because it’s the stars and the constellations. Everyone has looked at the stars or the moon at some point and that feeling you get when you see how big space is— Astronomy feels so beautiful, but it can also teach us so much about science in general.

I call it a gateway science. It can pull people in and make you want more.

---

Dr. Moiya McTier is an astrophysicist, folklorist, and science communicator based in New York City. After graduating from Harvard as the first person in the school’s history to study both astronomy and mythology, Moiya earned her PhD in astrophysics at Columbia University where she was selected as a National Science Foundation research fellow. Moiya has consulted with companies like Disney and PBS on their fictional worlds, helped design exhibits for the New York Hall of Science, and given hundreds of talks about science around the globe (including features on MSNBC, NPR, and NowThis News). To combine her unique set of expertise, Moiya hosts and produces the Exolore podcast that explores fictional world-building through the lens of science. When she’s not researching space or imagining new worlds, Moiya can likely be found watching trashy reality tv with her cat, Kosmo.

Lorraine Boissoneault is a Chicago-based writer who covers science, history, and human rights in her journalism, and explores more fantastical worlds in her fiction. Previously the staff history writer for Smithsonian Magazine, she now writes for a wide number of publications. Her essays and reporting have been published by The New Yorker, The Atlantic, National Geographic, PassBlue, Great Lakes Now, and many other outlets. Her fiction has appeared in The Massachusetts Review and Catapult Magazine. Her first book, The Last Voyageurs, was a finalist for the Chicago Book of the Year Award. She has received grants and fellowships from the Society for Environmental Journalists, the National Tropical Botanical Garden, and the Institute for Journalism and Natural Resources. She has also appeared on documentaries and radio stations like the BBC to discuss American history.

Hypertext Magazine & Studio (HMS) publishes original, brave, and striking narratives of historically marginalized, emerging, and established writers online and in print. HMS empowers Chicago-area adults by teaching writing workshops that spark curiosity, empower creative expression, and promote self-advocacy. By welcoming a diversity of voices and communities, HMS celebrates the transformative power of story and inclusion.

We have earned a Platinum rating from Candid and are incredibly grateful to receive partial funding from National Endowment for the Arts, Illinois Humanities, Chicago DCASE, and Illinois Arts Council.

We could not do what we’re doing without individual donations. If independent publishing is important to you, PLEASE DONATE.