Jupiter Magnified

A novella.

Jupiter, magnified so as to fill half the sky, appears in the night sky suddenly. All the world sees it. From that night onwards, life continues as best it can under this sublime and overwhelming apparition in the heavens. People everywhere struggle to come to terms with what the apparition means, with how it can have happened. Is it portent of the end of the world? Or something more positive, something magical? Is it a freak of physics, or is it a message – and if so, how can it be decoded? For Stina Ekman, a frustrated poet and e-zine editor, this extraordinary omen seems to promise fearful and exotic changes for her blocked life.

Stina's narrative recounts the impact of this inexplicable event upon an ordinary life. All her life she has been fascinated by light and the effects of light on life; this enormous new fact in the sky forces her to confront the routines into which her life has fallen, the silence which has infected her poetry, the possibilities of existence itself.

This complex novella interrogates the way symbol and image govern our lives; the ways in which we attempt to bring meaning to the things with which life presents us; the balance we strive for between purity and admixture. It is an exploration the ways poetry, science and fiction might interact.