Tag: apollo missions

Book Review: Phases of Gravity – by Dan Simmons

On By Norbert HauptIn Books, One Star3 Comments

Phases of GravityI read this book because I found it in one of my many boxes. This is the first book by Dan Simmons I have read, and probably the last one.

First published in 1989, a few years after the space shuttle Challenger catastrophe, Phases of Gravity is a speculative fiction novel – not science fiction, like the book cover and jacket text might suggest.

Richard Baedecker is a former Apollo astronaut who walked on the moon 16 years before the story unfolds. His crewmates were Dan Muldorff and Tom Gavin, two more fictional astronauts. It’s not clear which mission they were on, but it sounds like Apollo 14 or 15, thereabouts. There is mention of real astronauts, like Armstrong, Aldrin and many others that we remember from the Apollo program.

Dan Simmons must know astronauts since he can describe their lifestyles and attitudes quite well. His descriptions work and paint a fairly clear picture of what is happening. But that’s the only good thing about this book.

Baedecker is clearly in a mid-life crisis, and the story is full of stereotypical behavior of a 50-year-old man whose glory days are 16 years in the past. What do you do for an encore after you walk on the moon?

He comes home and drifts. He gives speeches, but he doesn’t care about the content or the audiences. He wants a Corvette. He travels to India to visit his son in an ashram. He tried to repair the relationship with his son that has suffered a lifetime of neglect. He has a tryst with a long-legged girl half his age that does not like to wear a bra. He visits a fellow astronaut who also never got a grip on his life and became a born-again Christian evangelist to escape the void. He goes on road trips to nowhere. He chases the girl and we wonder what she sees in him. He flies an old helicopter even though he hates flying helicopters.

All this is told without any discernible plot. Nothing really happens in this book. The timeline is messy. The story flashes back to the time when he trained for the Apollo mission. We are on the Apollo mission. We are in the present. We are a few years back. There is no good pattern to how the timeline flows, and I found myself often confused as the reader when I had to figure out, from one paragraph to the next, where and when Baedecker was now in this scene.

The structure of the novel does not work. The protagonist is a washed out middle-aged guy with nothing to live for and nothing interesting going for himself, trying to live off the four days on the moon a long time ago. Perhaps this is the plight of the moonwalkers. I don’t know.

But even if it’s real, even if Apollo astronauts didn’t know what to do with their lives after they returned, it does not a story make.

Rating: *

Book Review: Voyage – by Stephen Baxter

On By Norbert HauptIn Books (not finished reading), Science Fiction2 Comments

Published in 1997, Baxter’s Voyage is an alternate history novel. It chronicles a time of space exploration in the United States between the early days of the space program in the late 1950ies, through 1986. President Kennedy survived the assassination attempt in November of 1963, albeit confined to a wheelchair. Johnson succeeded him because he was medically disabled, but Kennedy continued to provide vision and motivation to the people and the government regarding the space program, and sending manned missions to Mars. In Voyage, we follow real historic characters, like Neil Armstrong, Nixon, Agnew and many contributors in the space program, interspersed with fictional characters, like Natalie York, the first woman to set foot on Mars.

In the 766 page novel, Baxter does an excellent job developing the characters and creating a plausible story and a possible approach to a manned mission to Mars in the decade of the eighties.  Indeed, this was Nixon’s plan when we succeeded in landing on the moon.

Here is a link to information about von Braun’s plans and proposals to the Nixon Administration in August 1969, right on the heels of the successful first moon landing. This site also shows some good concept drawings of the technology required to accomplish the plans.

The story in Voyage follows this von Braun and Nixon plan in concept and elaborates on it.

Baxter has researched the topics extensively. He describes details of the Apollo missions and technical minutiae that make it hard to believe he was not himself an astronaut on these missions. He takes us right on the missions, and we participate, sometimes white knuckled, in daring feats in spacecraft, real or imagined.

I didn’t finish reading this book. In fact, I only read the first 10% or so, then skimmed around in the middle and read the end. I did this not because the story didn’t captivate me. I am intensely interested in the space program – and the lack thereof right now. I just decided there were too many books on my reading shelf that needed attention, and I didn’t want to divert my time into fictional stories of an age now long past, musing about what might have been.