Space Rover

Stewart Lawrence Sinclair is a writer and journalist based in New York. He has been published in Guernica Magazine, Literary Hub, 3:AM Magazine, The Millions, Avidly: A Channel of the Los Angeles Review of Books, and the New Orleans Review, among others. He is the author of Juggling (2023) and is originally from Ventura, California.

Moving nimbly from the moon to Mars, from the depths of the Atlantic to a nuclear reactor, Stewart Lawrence Sinclair artfully traces a history of amazing mechanical rovers through the Cold War, the Chernobyl disaster, the 9/11 attack, and his own upbringing near NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Instigated by the discovery of old photos after a devastating wildfire, Space Rover clears an astutely unpredictable and philosophical path from Sinclair’s boyhood in Southern California through a rich cultural history of mechanical wanderers. Space Rover is an auspicious call for – and at times, a solemn caution against – wandering. What a thought-provoking exploration of the purposeful meandering that humans and their mechanized, roving proxies do!

• PART I1. Moonscapes 2. Author’s Note 3. Moonbeams 4. Splendid Terror 5. California Stars 6. Autopia7. Drive 8. Barriers 9. Alienation 10. Must Man Explore 11. Head-on Collisions Intermezzo12. Moonwalkers PART II13. Close Encounters 14. Vital Signs 15. Pathfinders 16. Sojourners 17. Mad Scientists 18. Ruins 19. Deniers 20. Lifeboats21. Mentor 22. The Rover at the End of the World 23. Eulogy AcknowledgmentsBibliographyIndex