See You in the Cosmos

See You in the Cosmos is a 2017 epistolary "Bildungsroman" novel by Chinese-American author Jack Cheng. It is his first juvenile book and his second book. Written in the style of a transcription, it follows astronomy-loving pre-teen Alex Petroski as he embarks on a journey to understand the life of his late father, whilst recording sounds on his iPod to launch it to space for extraterrestrial beings.
Cheng composed the initial idea for the novel in 2012, after seeing a photo of the "Pale Blue Dot", intertwined with remembrance of an episode of "Radiolab". He was also inspired by a road trip he took in 2013. Although it was published as a juvenile book, Cheng did not write the manuscript for young readers: he incorporated adult or sensitive content throughout, such as sex, violence, and mental illness.
The novel received a generally positive reception upon its release, as well as several accolades. Many reviewers praised the style of narrative, as well as Alex's character, regarded to be memorable and resonating, although the epistolary style is noted to have some consequences. The audiobook version of the novel was saluted for its naturalness and faithfulness to the written version.
Background.
Jack (born Yuan) Cheng was born in Shanghai, China, in around 1984, and immigrated to Troy, Michigan, when he was five, with his younger brother. After a failed attempt to enter the University of Michigan Business School, he attended classes about communications, and went to New York City in 1998 for an advertising internship. He also became a copywriter there. Feeling that he "was losing this artistic, entrepreneurial drive", he moved to the freelance industry in late 2008.
In 2013, after releasing his debut novel "These Days", a romance novel based on Cheng's experience as a Midwestern tech worker based in New York, with funds from Kickstarter, he started writing "See You in the Cosmos". He got the idea for the novel in 2012 at his parents' house during a Thanksgiving gathering. His brother's room had "Pale Blue Dot", a 1990 photograph of Earth from 6 billion kilometers away taken by "Voyager 1", on his shelf. Seeing the photograph reminded him of an episode of "Radiolab" about the photograph. The next day, he instantly had the idea of the novel in his head and worked on it immediately. He also cited "ambient sound" as one of the bases of the story. Cheng recalled via WUOM that part of the novel was based on a road trip he took in the Southwestern United States in mid-2013, where he mimicked his late father who once took a Greyhound Lines service from Los Angeles to Detroit, wanting to know the full story of his family "and how I came to be where I am".
As the novel included elements detailing social work and child protective services, Cheng stated in the novel's acknowledgment section that he researched the topic with the help of several friends. He also credited various people for "guiding me through unfamiliar territory, and for helping peel open the layers to find what the book was really about".
Although he is an Asian-American, Cheng did not create the novel on the basis of Asian-American representation. He said: "I think we’re still at the beginning where in America the stories written by Asian Americans form only a tiny part of their experience [of growing up in America]. There are other experiences where our 'Asian-ness' doesn't necessarily have a significant role in the story, and "See You in the Cosmos" is one example". He hoped that minority writers dilute their idea scope to a wider range than just their ethnicity.
Throughout the writing process, Cheng did not have any insights on what the novel's target demographic would be, saying that "It was more the story seemed interesting and the character happened to be eleven". After submitting the manuscript to his literary agent, Barcelonan Jessica Craig, she told Cheng that this should be submitted as a young adult novel, and copyedited it to make it more friendly towards the 10–14 age range. Quantitatively, not many further edits were done; however, there are still some: Cheng thought of the manuscript as a "lucid dream", where after witnessing it he then "go back and make sense of it". Cheng compared the novel, having been a juvenile book but with adult themes, with works like "The Little Prince" and "Spirited Away", which "have these qualities of meaning one thing for a kid and then have this depth and complexity for the adult".
Plot.
11-year-old European-Filipino-American Alexander Petroski lives in fictional Rockview, Colorado, with his mother. His brother, 24-year old Ronnie, is in Los Angeles to work as a sports agent. Alex also has a puppy, Carl Sagan (taken from the name of his idol astrophysicist). Alex has an iPod spray-painted in gold, on which he has been busy recording various audio to recreate the Voyager Golden Record, and launch his homemade rocket, "Voyager 3", at the Southwest High-Altitude Rocket Festival (SHARF).
Alex embarks with Carl Sagan to travel to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where the festival is located. Befriended on the train, martial arts master Zed, who after taking a vow of silence only communicates with a chalkboard, brings him to SHARF, where his roommate friend Steve will be launching a rocket, which their roommate Nathan designed. Miserably, Alex's rocket crashed seconds after launch. Luckily, his iPod is not damaged.
Alex receives an Ancestry.com email that his dad, Joseph David Petroski, is located in Las Vegas, Nevada. Having little knowledge of his dad, Alex begs Steve to drive him there; Ronnie permits, and Steve accepts. At Vegas, Carl Sagan goes missing; the search for him prompts Alex to find his dad and ask for help. Alex asks a woman named Terra if Joseph David Petroski is around; it is revealed that Terra is Joseph's daughter, and that she is Alex's half-sister. Terra was born to Joseph and his first wife Donna, and after Joseph's death, Donna moved on to another man, Howard. Alex and Terra got along quickly, mostly due to Alex's ardent attitude.
They go to Los Angeles with Zed and Steve. Steve plans to confess his feelings for Terra (although he has a girlfriend), but seeing Nathan talking with Terra led him to believe that they are in a relationship, and an argument ensues. After punching Nathan, Steve belittles Alex, saying that creating a working rocket requires time, money, and teamwork. Alex passes out, and Terra cuts Steve off from Alex, sadly leaving Zed and Nathan.
Terra brings Alex home. Upon their arrival, Alex's mother is not present. Alex climbs up a ladder to look if his mother is around the house, but he collapses and is hospitalized. When Alex is discharged, everyone but him learns that Alex's mother, Karen, has long suffered from schizophrenia. After days of uncertainty, Ronnie reveals it to Alex. He also reveals that Joseph was an abusive husband, however Karen's disorder camouflaged his malice and considered him a good man. He traveled frequently for work, where he got intimate with Donna and made Terra. Joseph later died in an accident. Painted by her disorder, she grieved: placing Joseph's remains in her room and acting cold-blooded. Still enraged, Ronnie threw the ashes away at a construction site. Viewing it as a cursed town, Ronnie left Rockview and pursued his own life.
Social worker Juanita is tasked to decide whether foster care will be in Alex's best interest, but Ronnie rejects this, saying that he will stay in Rockview with Alex. Alex, Ronnie, and Terra gather and enjoy times together. Alex is invited by space organization CivSpace, which has been hearing about Alex's story, to witness the fictional Cloud 9 rocket carrying a satellite to Mars from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. As the rocket lifts, Alex realizes that through the love and help of others, his dream of lifting "Voyager 3" up will come true.
Style and themes.
The epistolary novel is written in the style of a transcription of audio recordings from an iPod. Each chapter is prefixed "New Recording" and suffixed with a numeral; in total, there are 52 recordings. Below the chapter header, the recording's duration is written. These recordings were described to be recorded along with the novel's plot. Due to the weaknesses of auto-transcription, there are no quotations in speeches.
According to a review in "Children's Literature Association Quarterly", an academic journal published by the Johns Hopkins University Press, the core themes of "See You in the Cosmos" are "correspondence and care". After encapsulating the novel's narrative, it concludes that "Reading Alex's missives [...] gives us insight into a child's desire for connection, the value of correspondence (in whatever form it takes), and the potential for the things that we write and say today to inform the understandings of future audiences. Just as significantly, they reveal the importance of having our dreams supported by those around us".
Publication history.
"See You in the Cosmos" was released at Detroit's Pages Bookshop on February 28, 2017. The "Detroit Free Press" observed that 40 guests came to the gathering, where Cheng also read several excerpts from the book. During its national release, it was shipped to every English-speaking nation according to Cheng, with the German edition released the following week, and the French and Spanish editions later that year.
At the same time, a six-hour audiobook version of the novel was published by Penguin Books, which also published the written version alongside Dial Books (US) and Puffin Books (UK). The audiobook stars Kivlighan de Montebello as Alex, Brittany Pressley as Terra, Graham Halstead as Steve, Michael Crouch as Ronnie, and Jason Culp as Zed, with additional narration provided by Thérèse Plummer, Susan Bennett, Dan Bittner, Pete Larkin, and Courtney Shaw.
Reception.
Written version.
The "enticing" and "heartwarming" "See You in the Cosmos", regarded a "Sweet, quirky road story sparkles with warmth and wisdom" by Darienne Stewart of Common Sense Media (who gave the novel five out of five stars), received generally positive reviews, lauded as "sweet [and] soulful" of a debut, with glimmers of poignancy and humor. The novel was also said to make good use of foreshadowing, which "keep readers turning the pages in suspense". It was listed by various review outlets as one of the best children's or Middle Grade books.
Numerous reviewers such as "Entertainment Weekly" (who gave the novel a B+), "The Chicago Tribune", and "Book Riot" found Alex's stubborn yet optimistic personality that colors the novel as to how the novel astounds them, making it "Riveting, inspiring, and sometimes hilarious". "Meghan Cox Gurdon, writing for "The Wall Street Journal", reckoned that "Some readers ages 10–15 may find that Alex's star-struck naiveté gets a bit grating, but those who don't will discover much that rewards in Jack Cheng's life-embracing, stream-of-consciousness tale of family lost and found". Alex is regarded to have a memorable and resonating bundle of emotions; "The New York Times Book Review" Natalie Standiford elaborated, "If extraterrestrials ever did find his Golden iPod, they would think Earthlings were wonderful."
The transcript style of narrative is also praised by many, remarked "a brilliant, refreshing structure": "An odd medium that sounds like it would be confusing but really works". It is seen as a subtle trick to transition between its quirky and deep moments, as well as an effective tool to indulge readers into the characters' misery. Critics thinks that it blends well with Alex's childishly-mature attitude: "a propulsive stream-of-conscious dive into Alex's life". Standiford wrote that the transcript, being from a first-person point of view and told to an imagined audience of extraterrestrial life, "intercut with the voices of others when Alex is unable to record—makes up the entire text of [the novel] a strategy that works beautifully thanks to the charm, directness and subtle emotion of Alex’s voice". Deborah Stevenson of "The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books", however, noted that the space the transcript takes—exacerbated by the many plot elements in play—causes the vital subplot of the loss of Carl Sagan untouched. Broadly, she also find the style to be "dauntingly torrential".
Audiobook.
"AudioFile" praised Kivlighan de Montebello for embodying the character of Alex, as well as being "engaging". The audiobook's episodic narrative is also said to "make it easy to suspend disbelief and renders this an altogether captivating listening experience." Meanwhile, "Booklist" wrote that the style of the novel "is a natural fit for an audiobook, and the narrators hit it out of the park." The magazine's Ashley Young praised the cast, as well as the audiobook's use of sound effects.
Future.
Cheng said that he has no plans to create a sequel, but does not stand firm on it. He also said that he has been negotiating with the film industry for a film adaptation, "but that's still a long ways from it being a movie you can watch". During the COVID-19 pandemic, Cheng posted YouTube videos of him reading chapters from "See You in the Cosmos" to guide those on remote learning.