Book Review: The Apollo Murders

 

•  Author: Chris Hadfield

• Where I bought this book: The Book Loft, Columbus, Ohio 

• Why I bought this book: Hadfield played guitar and sang Bowie in space, so I gave the book a chance.

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    Gunfights in space! Mysterious holes on the moon! Communists literally hanging on to an American spacecraft orbiting Earth! A Russian lunar rover investigating the potential for nuclear power on the moon!

    And this is no far-fetched, Spaceman Spiff adventure in the far future. This is history.

    Well, an alternative history, with an extra Apollo mission landing on the moon with the idea to keep the Soviets in line -- with Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, and Leonid Brezhnev appearing in the background, and the CIA and KGB pulling and unwinding each other's strings.

    So it's not really history, but it could be. And Chris Hadfield -- retired Canadian astronaut, fighter pilot, former commander of the International Space Shuttle, a guy who has walked in space, and who sang a version of Space Oddity while in orbit around the Earth -- is just the guy who could pull it off.

    He does.

    This is a fun book. When you're able to look back on U.S.-Soviet relations and treat them as satire, you know you're having a good time. When you make plain ole trips to the moon, even spacewalks on the moon, seem tame by comparison, you've done a good job.

    But Hadfield also takes his science seriously, and does nothing that could be considered impossible. Yes, he sometimes gets carried away in the descriptions of flying and space flight, but I cut the guy a break -- he's actually been there, done that.

    In brief, Lieutenant Commander Kazimieras "Kaz" Zemeckis is a fighter pilot and wanna-be astronaut with one eye blown out when a bird got in the way of his plane. (Oops. So he can no longer fly in space.) But he knows everything about Apollo, so he gets to be in mission control, along with Al Shepard and a bunch of other real guys. (Lots of people and stuff is real in this book. It's all laid out in the end.)

    But Apollo 18 is part of the fiction. Hadfield sees it as an added mission to the moon, to do science and other things. But the Russians, who have a landed a rover on the moon and running it via a special satellite, are acting like they are up to something. So the Apollo crew are tasked with finding out what's really going on.

    A lot of other things are happening on Earth with the U.S flight crew, and when they go to space and discover the Soviet satellite actually has real live cosmonauts on it, things get dicey.

    But Hadfield holds it all together. The various real and imagined characters play well. When events threaten to overtake the American mission, Hadfield reels them back in. 

    It's a good balancing act. An exciting thriller, without the thriller problems that induce eye-rolling and a please-get-this-over-with feeling. Hadfield writes tightly and plots nicely.

    It's not Bowie in space, but it's just as cool.