UFO — Amazon's best November nonfiction!
It’s November, which means my new book on UFOs, aliens, and the search for extraterrestrial life comes out in less than two weeks. We’ve just gotten finished copies, and I think it’s turned out to be a really fun book. But you don’t just have to take my word for it—Amazon yesterday named it one of the best nonfiction books coming out this month:
I promise I’m going to send just two emails this month about the book launch, but I wanted to let you know about a couple upcoming events related to the book:
This weekend, I’m speaking Sunday afternoon at the Chicago Humanities Festival, with Harvard astronomy professor Avi Loeb—who actually is a character in my book and so I’m really excited to meet in person—about “Life Beyond Earth.”
Then, on Sunday, November 19th, I’m speaking at Politics & Prose in Washington, D.C. — their Connecticut Avenue store — where I’ll be interviewed by the Washington Post’s great David Ignatius, himself a national security columnist and wonderful spy novelist. (Seriously, I think his book SIRO is one of the best and most true spy novels I’ve ever read.)
If you’re in either city, I’d love to see you at the book talks (and there will be some more events to come in 2024). Beyond those in-person events, I’ll be doing some radio, TV, and “print” interviews this month, which I’ll share more about later.
Lastly, if you’d like to preorder a (signed!) copy of UFO, we made up some fun, special challenge coins to accompany every signed book from Phoenix Books, the local independent bookstore in my hometown of Burlington, Vermont. Preorders matter a great deal in the book world, and it’s always great to support the indie bookstore world, so if you’re excited to dive into UFO, please order and support Phoenix Books.
This book, as you might expect, is the strangest and weirdest topic I’ve ever tackled as a writer—there’s a lot of science and astronomy involved that was very new to me—but at its core it’s not really a story about aliens. It’s a story about us. As I quote Carl Sagan in the introduction, “In a very real sense this search for extraterrestrial intelligence is a search for a cosmic context for mankind, a search for who we are, where we have come from, and what possibilities there are for our future—in a universe vaster both in extent and duration than our forefathers ever dreamed of.”
I hope you’ll come along with me for this journey. I promise: This book and topic isn’t what you think it is.
GMG