My Lady Selene

1962. The space race is heating up, and sixteen-year-old Al Marcusson is about to become the youngest astronaut ever to walk on the Moon. But Al carries a secret: his family lineage traces back to something ancient, something connected to the night sky in ways he doesn't yet understand. When he steps onto the lunar surface, the gray desolation transforms into something no training could have prepared him for: a luminous encounter with swans and the goddess Selene herself, the mythological queen of the Moon. In that impossible moment, Al offers his father's good luck charm and pleads for understanding, reaching across the gulf between human curiosity and divine mystery. What follows is a meditation on wonder, on what it means to be a species casting itself into the cosmos while still tethered to the oldest stories we tell. The Moon becomes both less and more than a rock: less because Al has touched something that makes scientific exploration feel small, more because he has glimpsed the enduring human need to make meaning from the stars. This is early sci-fi at its most poetic, a brief and strange book about a boy who looked into the face of myth and found something looking back.