Voyager: A Constellation of Memory by Chilean writer Nona Fernández is a meditation on memory, astronomy, neuroscience, family, political history and the fragility of human existence. Moving between the intimate and the cosmic, the book draws connections between the workings of the human brain and the vastness of the universe.
Fernández assembles her own constellation of memories, bringing together her mother’s fading recollections, Chile’s painful history and the disappeared who were executed and buried in the Atacama Desert during the Pinochet dictatorship, ancient myths through which humanity sought to understand the stars, the experience of grief and loss. She places these alongside the distant light of celestial bodies, exploring the relationship between human existence and the universe. Both human brain and the universe hold traces of the past, preserving fragments of what once existed.
Throughout the book, Fernández draws parallels between personal, collective and cosmic memory: the cosmic memory carried by starlight travelling across immense distances from the past; the inherited, collective memory encoded in our genes and passed down through generations, shaping the ways civilisations understand themselves; and the personal memories accumulated over the course of a lifetime. These ideas find a powerful echo in the Voyager space probes, launched to travel beyond our solar system, carrying fragments of human existence into the vastness of space.
At its heart, the book is an attempt to understand what remains when individual lives come to an end, when memories gradually fade, and when the people who once illuminated our world are no longer here.
The book takes its title from the two Voyager space probes launched by NASA in 1977. Their original mission was to observe the outer planets of our solar system, recording and transmitting fragments of information from the farthest reaches of space. In the book, the Voyager probes are an attempt to preserve something of humanity beyond the limits of our planet and perhaps even beyond the limits of our existence.
The starting point of the book is deeply personal. Fernández accompanies her ageing mother to neurological examinations after she begins experiencing fainting spells and memory loss caused by epilepsy. During one examination, her mother is asked to recall a happy moment in her life while her brain activity is being monitored. Looking at the images appearing on the screen, Fernández sees something resembling a night sky:
“What I see looks like a star scape… a neuronal circuit like the most complex stellar tapestry.”
As her mother recalls a cherished memory of Nona’s birth, different groups of neurons illuminate the screen, forming something resembling a constellation. Fernández is struck by the image of her mother carrying the image of an entire cosmos within her. Somewhere inside her brain, memories of a life lived are stored, waiting to be summoned. Each time we remember, a constellation of neurons lights up, briefly illuminating a fragment of our personal history.
The image of points of light on the monitor, representing neurons in her mother’s brain recalling the past, echoes the image of constellations in the night sky and the life cycles of stars. This becomes the book’s central metaphor, drawing a parallel between the human brain, memory and the universe.
“Glow of her memory, the constellation that lit up the moment she summoned it, the luminescent reflection of her own past.”
Fernández reflects on how much of our identity is held in these recollections. The ordinary days, familiar routines, conversations, upheavals and small moments of happiness accumulate throughout our lives, gradually becoming the archive through which we understand ourselves.
“We are made up of these everyday memories.”
“Each day and each night lived, year after year, with its full complement of activity and inactivity, upheavals and routines – continuous storing of all this is what translates into personal history. Our archive of memories is the closest thing we have to a record of identity. It’s the only clue to ourselves, the only way to figure ourselves out…. Everything collected in the kaleidoscope of our hypothalamus – speak for us… the accumulation is what we are made of.”
Memory is not only confined to the brain. Fernández travels to the Atacama Desert in northern Chile, one of the world’s most important places for stargazing where forty per cent of the world’s astronomical observation takes place. Its exceptionally clear skies make it possible to observe distant galaxies and stars with remarkable precision. She describes the desert as the planet’s most important portal for time travel.
Looking at the night sky, Fernandez reflects on the extraordinary fact that starlight allows us to see the past, giving her a vague sense of peace.
“…all those distant lights we see shining above our heads come from the past.”
The light reaching our eyes may have travelled for hundreds or thousands of years. Some of the stars we see might no longer exist. Their deaths have already occurred, but the news has not yet reached us. What appears in the sky is the light of something that may have disappeared long before we were born.
“The glow from the stars that may be dead or gone. Reports of their death have yet to reach us and what we see in the glimmer of a life possibly extinguished without our knowing it. Shafts of light freezing the past in our gaze, like family snapshots in a photograph album or the kaleidoscopic patterns of our own memory.”
Fernández draws a parallel between this cosmic phenomenon and the photographs we keep in family albums. Both preserve the light of a moment that has passed. A photograph brings back a fragment of someone’s life; a distant star brings us the light of a celestial body whose present existence we may never know.
“Lights from the past making a home in our present, lighting up the fearsome darkness like a beacon.”
There is something comforting in this idea. The past is not entirely lost. It continues to reach us in different forms, illuminating our present even when the original source has disappeared.
The Atacama Desert carries a terrible history. During Pinochet’s dictatorship, in 1973, twenty-six political prisoners were executed there by the Caravan of Death, a military death squad responsible for murdering political prisoners across Chile.
Fernandez becomes involved in a project to dedicate stars to the twenty-six victims, including Mario Argüelles Toro. The intention is to rename twenty-six stars after those who were murdered giving them names and a lasting presence in the universe. It would become a memorial unlike any other, a place where the stories of people whose lives were deliberately erased could be preserved in the night sky.
The same sky that witnessed their departure can now become a place of remembrance. It is an attempt to restore humanity to those who were reduced to numbers, disappeared from their families and denied the possibility of telling their own stories.
Mario is associated with the star HD 89353, and Fernández becomes the godmother of the star that will bear his name.
Fernandez also reflects on the relativity of time and its close relationship with the way we experience grief and loss. Violeta, Mario’s widow, spent decades searching for his remains in the Atacama Desert, alongside the mothers, wives and children of others who had disappeared under the Pinochet regime. In those years, she became so consumed by the search that she barely noticed herself turning 40, 50, 60 or even 70. The passage of time had become relative. It is like a beam of light travelling across the universe to reach us on Earth, carrying an image of the past, a snapshot of something that ceased to exist a long time ago.
Fernández draws a connection between Mario and Giordano Bruno, the sixteenth-century Italian philosopher who was executed for his ideas. She recalls the statue of Bruno in Campo de’ Fiori in Rome, where he was burned at the stake in 1600. Bruno challenged the prevailing understanding of the universe, arguing that the Earth was not its centre and that the universe was infinite, containing countless worlds. He also believed in the limitless possibilities of the human intellect and that à mind was the mirror of the cosmos.
Mario and Bruno lived centuries apart and on different continents, but both paid with their lives for thinking differently.
This parallel opens up a wider reflection on the importance of intellectual freedom, democracy and the ability to doubt, to disagree and to question established certainties . During the Chilean dictatorship, thousands of people were imprisoned, tortured and murdered because their ideas challenged the regime.
The book becomes an argument for curiosity and critical thinking, for mistrusting easy answers and constantly interrogating the world around us. We should remain exploratory probes, much like the Voyagers travelling through the universe.
There is an uncomfortable contradiction noted in human existence. We have evolved to write extraordinary poetry, compose beautiful music, study distant galaxies and send spacecraft beyond our solar system. And yet ignorance, cruelty and stupidity continue to flourish.
Fernández’s reflections on memory also extend beyond individual lives and political histories into the stories through which entire civilisations understand themselves. She considers the myths and foundational narratives that orient societies, the stories we inherit and repeat, and the ways in which they shape our understanding of the world. Every story has a point of view. Every account involves choices about what to include, what to omit and whose voices are allowed to be heard.
Collective memory is not always an accurate representation of the past. It can be distorted, manipulated or erased. This is particularly evident in societies like Chile emerging from dictatorship, where the struggle to preserve historical truth and democratic values becomes inseparable from the struggle for justice and reconciliation of the opposing views and beliefs.
Fernández also considers how early Babylonian, ancient Greek and indigenous societies observed the night sky and connected groups of stars into constellations, creating patterns that helped them navigate the darkness. These celestial maps were practical tools, helping people understand the movement of the sun, moon and stars, recognise the seasons and determine when to sow, hunt or gather. The stars became a way of making sense of the world and our place in it. Constellations have been used as a compass in the dark from the dawn of times.
She refers to the Selkʼnam language, native to the Indigenous Selkʼnam people of Isla Grande de Tierra del Fuego, in the southernmost part of South America. Through this reference, she draws attention to how the language expresses ideas of erasure and departure…
Fernandez pays attention to the constellation of Cancer with its 100 stars and its brightest star, Al Tarf, an orange giant situated approximately 290 light-years from Earth ànd 500 times bigger than the sun. Its light departed à long time ago making an endless voyage from the past to twinkle here to the place where Fernandez can see it above her eyes. It’s a bright cosmic postcard of a moment that ceased to exist but lives on in the glow to illuminate our present.
There is a beautiful passage in which Fernández considers the life cycle of stars which resembles the life cycle of living beings including humans. Stars are born from clouds of stellar dust, which gradually condense under gravity. Planets are formed from the remaining stellar dust. This is how Earth came to be. All life on our planet has been nourished by the energy of the Sun. We are literally made of stardust and we owe our existence to the birth of a star.
As stars age, they shed parts of themselves, returning their material to the universe. That material can eventually become part of new nebulae, new stars and new planetary systems. Stars are made from the remnants of earlier generations of stars. In this sense, the universe is an immense cycle of birth, transformation and renewal.
Then stars proceed from adolescence to maturity and to old age. They shed parts of themselves . They fall into dust. They are dispersed in space, forming other nebulae for the nurturing of new and future stars. Stars die and return part of their substance to the universe. Stars are born from the stellar dust of those that came before them. They shine in our present, carrying within them the remnants of hundreds of thousands of millions of cosmic generations. Much like our memories, they hold traces of what came before, allowing the past to live on in the present.
Fernández makes a similar connection when she considers the memories we inherit biologically. Our bodies contain an archive of genetic information, accumulated over hundreds of millions of years of evolution.
She describes this inherited memory as a library we carry inside ourselves:
“We are the sum total of hundreds of millions of years of evolution, and the memory of that process is part of us.”
“Our body’s memory is made up of infinite constellations. Some reside in the cerebral cortex, in full consciousness but others are hidden in fathomless places….. we are the sum total of hundreds of millions of years of evolution, and the memory of that process is part of us…. This library we carry inside us is the result of the genetic story our ancestors deposited in it. We bear in our bodies hundreds of millions of stories from the past, messages passed on through us unawares, constellations guiding us and accounting for our way of being.We are vessels of genetic memories.”
We are containers of memories. Our genetic code is a site of permanent memory, remembering is only part of what brain does. When our brains could no longer accommodate everything we wished to preserve, we developed ways of storing information outside ourselves. We began recording, writing, painting and creating objects that could outlive us. Books, photographs and works of art became extensions of our memories, allowing fragments of individual lives and entire civilisations to travel across time.
They are different forms of memory, but they share a common purpose to resist disappearance.
Remembering is not simply an act of looking backwards. It is also an act of preservation, a way of carrying something forward into the future. We inherit memories from those who came before us, consciously or otherwise, and we leave traces for those who will follow. Some of these traces are intimate and personal; others become part of a nation’s history or humanity’s collective memory. In this sense, remembering resembles the cosmic cycle of stellar birth, in which each generation carries traces of those that came before it.
The Voyager probes carried a golden record intended as a message to any extraterrestrial intelligence that might one day encounter them. Before their launch, NASA asked astronomer Carl Sagan to oversee the selection of its contents. The intention was to create a small representation of life and civilisation on Earth, a kind of memory capsule containing the best of humanity.
The record included music from different cultures and periods, from Bach, Mozart and Stravinsky to Senegalese drumming, Bulgarian folk songs and Peruvian music. It carried greetings in 55 languages, including ancient Sumerian, as well as sounds from nature, among them the calls of humpback whales. There were photographs depicting human beings, our planet and the diversity of life on Earth. Even the electrical activity of a human brain was recorded and translated into sound. In a sense, the Voyagers were entrusted with the task of explaining to the universe who we are, and what it means to be human.
They also transmitted one of the most extraordinary images ever taken of our planet: the famous Pale Blue Dot, photographed by Voyager 1 from billions of kilometres away. Earth appears as little more than a tiny speck suspended in a ray of sunlight. Seeing our world from such a distance is a humbling experience. Everything we have ever known, loved, created, fought over and destroyed exists within that almost imperceptible point of light.
Photography becomes particularly important in this reflection. A photograph is a fragment of the past, an attempt to preserve something that would otherwise disappear. Yet it is also an invitation to someone in the future to look at that fragment and imagine the life behind it. Fernández wonders what might happen in the mind of a stranger looking at one of her photographs long after she is gone. Perhaps, in that moment, something of her will be brought back to life. She will become a constellation in someone else’s memory.
We are all temporary travellers, carrying within us the light of countless lives that came before our own. And perhaps, like the stars, something of us will continue to shine long after we are gone.
I highly recommend this book.
