Peter Heller's The Dog Stars: Read the Excerpt
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- Peter Heller's post-apocalyptic novel The Dog Stars is the August selection for the New Scientist Book Club, published by Tinder Press.
- The novel follows protagonist Hig, who flies a 1956 Cessna 182 called "the Beast" over a Colorado landscape emptied of trout, tigers, elephants, and most bird species.
- Hig's only neighbor Bangley carries a .408 CheyTac sniper rifle and once shot a girl chasing Hig across the plain because she "would have caught you," prompting Hig to ask "fucking why."
- Hig drags deer carcasses back to camp in a kayak hull sawed into a sled and expects to die "shot in the back with an arrow" crossing the eight miles of open ground to the mountains.
- Heller's world includes a community of roughly thirty Mennonites to the south afflicted by a slow-burning blood disease "something like AIDS" that kills their children year by year.
Why it matters: This New Scientist Book Club pick offers science readers a literary novel meditating on extinction, violence, and survival; Heller pairs Hig's reconnaissance flights with gut-punch moral reckonings, like shooting a starving girl because she might have caught him, giving the excerpt weight beyond typical book club fare.
