Landfall is a story about sending a message through time. It starts when the FBI discovers a space capsule in the remote mountains of Alberta, Canada, that was assumed burned up thirty years earlier.

The story jumps back between what happened 30 years ago (roughly the present time of 2015 when the International Space Station is in orbit) and now (presumably about 2045) with the FBI trying to figure out what happened.

The book caught my attention because it’s about “time” messages. The author does a good job telling the story, but I found it so preposterous and incredible, that I had a hard time taking it seriously.

Fundamental to the plot is the need for an astronaut, in this case one of the protagonists, to surreptitiously get launched into space and dock with the ISS, and then take away an experiment, all without being “noticed” or stopped. It’s obviously not possible to launch a rocket into orbit with an astronaut on board without anyone noticing. But that kind of thing is exactly what is going on in this story. There is fundamentally nothing wrong with that, but it’s just too farfetched to make any sense.

The book reads easily and I finished it in a few days. But would I recommend it?

Nah.