"…Set sometime in the near future, when our search for life beyond the Solar System has come to its inevitable fruition, [Bewilderment] tells the story of a thirty-nine-year-old astrobiologist and his neurodivergent, frightened, boundlessly courageous nine-year-old son, searching together for other worlds and instead discovering how to reworld ours with meaning.
Radiating from their quest is a luminous invitation to live up to our nature not as creatures consumed by "the black hole of the self," as Powers so perfectly puts it in his talk, but as living empathy machines and portable cosmoses of possibility, whose planetary story is yet unwritten…
As the father searches for other worlds, he is savaged by despair at humanity's catastrophic mismanagement of this one, haunted by the growing sense that we couldn't possibly be good interplanetary emissaries until we have become good stewards of our own home planet. But each time he hits rock bottom, he bounces back up — as we all do, as we all must in order to go on living — with rekindled faith in what we are capable of…"
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