Over the weekend the pop culture website PopMatters excerpted a section of chapter 1 from The Day the World Discovered the Sun. 

“For reasons that were scientific and geopolitical—if not also theological—Venus transit expeditions had become paramount. Even if they meant traveling to a remote and frigid location like Siberia. Although Russian scientists were already preparing their own expeditions to observe the Venus transit, the French Academy of Sciences had secured Chappe an invitation to make his own competing measurements of the celestial event at Tobolsk. Entrée to the Russian empire, with the empress’s blessing no less, spurred Chappe and his party into the Siberian beyond.

For the next eight nights, however, Chappe would enjoy a warm bed in the comfort of one of the great cosmopolitan centers of Europe. His timing was propitious. New Year’s Day in imperial Vienna was like a red-carpeted runway, providing the excuse every monied house in the city needed to strut like a peacock in full fan….”