Penny Lane’s The Voyagers created a contextual suggestion which (falsely) narrates a visual metaphor that she was born on the spacecraft. This initial metaphor is sequenced with a love story of the two people related to the Voyagers project, so that she can connect the identity of her own pursuit of love with theirs.

The narrative connection between her birth and the voyagers take off allows for this. Solidified as she says “They’ll probably be the only evidence that we ever existed”, the odd essayistic construction primarily suggests that the “we” is belonging to Lane and a people on the ship, which immediately after is followed by a description of the Voyagers project. Clarifying the details of the “we” pronoun. This is particularly interesting because in the context of the actual Voyagers project, her part in humanity cannot exist on the disc because she wasn’t born until a year after its departure from earth.

Lane then says “A valentine, dedicated to the tiny chance that in some distant time and place, we might make contact.” Which is another funny duel context. One for the literal contact of aliens and humans, the other representing Annie Druyan and Carl Sagan’s love affair. Which really is interesting because it creates a sense of selfishness. This entire space project isn’t for humanity’s hope of finding another life form, but for the marriage of Druyan and Sagan. Which goes really well with the tenderness of the story’s tone, contrasted with the brutal facts. Carl Sagan was married, but despite he knew he was in love, over the phone. Then after the voyagers take off they got married. A cold story of love, that Lane chooses to possibly show her own cold feelings towards love.

The narrator shifts to her spouse, and the story of how they come together. It’s interesting because she’s redeeming the Voyagers for being used selfishly in the Sagan love story and turns it into something that can be used to understand anyone’s pursuit of love, specifically Lane’s own. Lane ultimately suggests through the Voyagers that if nothing is ever found in space and we know it, maybe we should look closer to home. Then she gets more metaphorical and talks about how “thousands of millions of years from now, long after our Sun burns the Earth into nothing, the Voyagers will still be out there” sort of saying our capacity to love genuinely (as human beings) will pass on and is timeless. “We have to know in order to love. We have to risk everything. We have to open ourselves up—to contact – even with the possibility of disaster”.