Resena: Eighty years ago, the hunt for a mysterious Planet X culminated in the discovery of Pluto. Lying beyond Neptune in the Solar System, the orb was named after the Greek god of the underworld and became part of our family of nine planets. In 2006, having completed just one-third of an orbit around the Sun since its detection, Pluto was declared a mere 'dwarf planet', an interloper from deep space, and was cast out of that family.
Percival's Planet is novelist Michael Byers's fictionalized history of the discovery. Interweaving real people and events with imagined ones in a pastiche of the United States in the late 1920s, he tells the (real) tale of Planet X — an unseen planet at the Solar System's edge that had been predicted by wealthy businessman-turned-astronomer Percival Lowell to explain anomalies in the orbits of Neptune and Uranus. Into the search for the putative planet steps Clyde Tombaugh, working at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, which Lowell had endowed. After Tombaugh's efforts pay off, Planet X is renamed Pluto by a schoolgirl who wins a competition. Tombaugh's story of serendipity frames the novel. A farmer's son from Kansas, he was a skilled technician and a self-taught maker of telescopes. In the novel, he shares the stage with a bewildering array of characters, from Harvard astronomers to fading boxers, confused heirs and beautiful women, both sane and insane. All these actors orbit ever closer to the Lowell Observatory, perturbing each other more and more until they collide. Byers's portrayal of the United States on the cusp of the Great Depression is meticulous; glimpses of inner dialogue and period details help build an immersive world.

The true story of Pluto's discovery is here, but it is slow to come to the fore...

Idioma: INGLES
Categoría: Lengua y Literatura, Narrativa

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