Equilateral — Ken Kalfus

It's the late nineteenth century, and British astronomer Sanford Thayer has won international funding for his scheme to excavate an equilateral triangle, three hundred miles to a side, from the remote wastes of Egypt's Western Desert. Nine hundred thousand Arab fellahin have been put to work on the project, even though they can't understand Thayer's obsessive purpose. They don't believe him when he says his perfect triangle will be visible to the highly evolved beings who inhabit the planet Mars, signaling the existence of civilization on Earth. Political and religious dissent rumbles through the camps. There's also a triangle of another sort-a romantic one, involving Thayer's secretary, who's committed to the man and his vision, and the mysterious servant girl he covets without sharing a common language. In the wind-blasted, lonely, fever-dream outpost known only as Point A, we plumb the depths of self-delusion and folly that comprise Thayer's characteristically human enterprise.

Illustrated throughout with black-and-white astronomical diagrams, EQUILATERAL is an elegant intellectual comedy that's extravagant in its conception and intimately focused on the implications of empire, colonization, and what we expect from contact with “the other.”