Cosmic Wonder: Halley’s Comet and Humankind
Ashley Benham-Yazdani
Walker Books

The author/illustrator personifies the comet in her third person telling, which follows the comet, portrayed as a shiny sphere with a long flowing tail, on its recurring visits to planet Earth, chronicling its visitations which occur ‘about every seventy-six Earth years’ beginning millennia ago and ending with a mention of 2061 when the comet is next due to return to an Earth, shaped largely by the actions of humans alive today. This reminded me of T.S. Eliot’s lines ‘Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future,/And time future contained in time past.’

We’re told that ‘one kind of creature began to live differently.’ and scenes show humans of various races changing over time, but all, having looked skywards, telling one another tales of the ‘broom star’ up above. These visits, they recorded in various ways using ink, clay and words.

From afar, the comet witnesses times of war and times of peace, and notices a multiplicity of human feelings, the most powerful being that of ‘boundless love’.

After many hundreds of visits, humans name the comet Halley’s Comet after an astronomer, Edmond Halley. Earth continues to fill with ever more humans and what the comet sees in 1986 are two children walking along a beach below a neon lighted industrial city, belching out filthy smoke.

What the comet sees too are space probes surrounding it; they leave it to continue orbiting around an earth described as ‘small and vast all at once / holding so much life and such great promise’, with dreams of what the next visit might show. One only hopes that what it discovers on its 2061 visit is not an Earth ruined by our failure to address the environmental damage we are causing.

At every turn of the page, Ashley Benham-Yazdani’s luminescent, mixed media illustrations show the soft-edged comet shooting across an inky wash sky and gorgeous scenes of the happenings on Earth through the ages.

This is a truly thought-provoking precis of human history from an unusual perspective that makes it all the more powerful. Back matter includes further historical details and an author’s note that speaks to every reader.