The Milky Way: An Autobiography of Our Galaxy (Grand Central Publishing) by Moiya McTier
Despite living inside it, a majority of people are not familiar with the galaxy we call home. In many cities, we can no longer even see the smudge of its stars spilling across the night sky. Moiya McTier, astrophysicist and folklore expert, sets out to right this situation in The Milky Way: An Autobiography of Our Galaxy, introducing us all to the galaxy – in its own words.
It’s an ambitious and wholly fresh take on science writing. Far more than just a nonfiction book about how space works, the “autobiography” is a narrative with a true character arc, for something so removed from human life that you might never have thought to anthropomorphise it in the first place. The Milky Way’s voice is unique and compelling, able to draw in any reader, whether or not they have prior interest in astronomy.
So, if a celestial body as mind-bogglingly expansive as the Milky Way actually talked to us, what would it say? In McTier’s world, it’s a snarky, self-righteous God-like figure. This is its opening line: “Take a look around you human. What do you see? Actually, don’t answer that. Why would I bother listening to you when I know you’ll get it wrong?” Soon after, it calls the reader a “vain, filthy animal” and our entire species “simple creatures”.
In the first few chapters, I longed for McTier’s soothing voice from the preface. The Milky Way was grating, condescending and unrelatable, constantly reminding us that we wouldn’t exist without it. At the same time, however, I wondered if the reader would take the Milky Way seriously if it spoke and thought like a human. Our galaxy is currently a spry 13.6 billion years old. It seems natural that it might suffer from an extreme case of the Overview Effect, where
astronauts who see Earth from above reconsider our small planet’s place in the Universe.
While the Milky Way’s lifetime is long, McTier tells its story in a quick-to-read 200-something pages, jam-packed with science. The Milky Way character leads us through the Big Bang and its own birth, giving us a detailed account of how galaxies are made, and also how astronomers have figured all this out. This is one of my favourite aspects of the book. The Milky Way often describes how humans came to know the stories it’s telling, and the part played by our toolkit of telescopes, from Gaia to Kepler and beyond. As an astronomer myself, I often wish that people knew more of what we astronomers actually do.
The “autobiography” goes on to tell us about our cosmic neighbourhood, known as the Local Group, introducing us to three nearby galactic pals: Larry (the Large Magellanic Cloud), Sammy (the Small Magellanic Cloud) and Trin (the Triangulum Galaxy). The Local Group has a vast zoo of different types of galaxies, from gorgeous spirals like next door Andromeda to weird, blobby irregulars. But of course, our narrator is most concerned with itself, and its distinct “body parts”. A fascinating part of the Milky Way’s body is the supermassive black hole at its centre. Pretty much every big galaxy has a black hole, one of the most mysterious objects in space – something so massive and dense that not even light, the fastest thing in the Universe, can escape its gravitational grip.
Often in science writing, black holes are described as devouring monsters, or eldritch horrors. In McTier’s book, the Milky Way’s black hole (nicknamed “Sarge”, for its scientific name Sagittarius A*) is instead described as a feeling that might be familiar to many readers: the seemingly inescapable tug of depression or negative thoughts. Sarge keeps trying to drag the Milky Way down, but the Milky Way won’t let it. For me, this felt like a turning point in my relationship with the character. The God-like galaxy reveals itself to be actually quite human, facing the challenges of what it means to be alive and feel despair.
Much like humans, it also wonders about its own death, explaining “what it really means for a galaxy – a massive, self-sustaining system with a disparate but coherent consciousness – to die.” The death of the Milky Way is entangled with the end of the entirety of the Universe, a complicated cosmological affair. There are a few ways the Universe may meet its demise, and the “correct” answer is still debated by scientists. But they all have one thing in common: it’s extremely hard to explain the details of these scenarios in layman’s terms. Yet McTier does a fantastic job, managing to explain quantum fields in a way that does not scare off the reader.
The science communication is extremely well executed, but there is also much more to this book. McTier has a PhD in astrophysics, but she also has a Harvard degree in folklore. Interwoven with the fascinating information on astronomy, the Milky Way tells us about the names that different Earth cultures have given to it, the stories told about its constellations, and (my personal favourite) how sci-fi and other “modern myths” reveal truths in turn about humanity. “Did you think myths were just things of the past?” the Milky Way asks. “Absolutely not. Humanity makes new myths every day about the things you want to have faith in . . . At their core, myths are stories that you capital B believe in, even if you know some (or all) of it to be false.”
Perhaps surprisingly, this cosmological “autobiography” is a deeply human book, exploring the intersections between myth and science while teaching the reader about our galaxy, the scientific process and more. We learn that the Milky Way does have a soft spot for humans, the weird and seemingly unique creatures that we are. And in the end, it even becomes a likeable pal: a friend watching over us from the skies, encouraging us to take care of each other and marvel in the discoveries our astronomers make. “Ask questions about the world around you and find real answers to them,” the galaxy instructs. “Decide you deserve better and fight to clean your sky of all kinds of pollution – trust me, I’m worth it.”
This piece is from the New Humanist winter 2022 edition. Subscribe here.
