Buzz Aldrin wants the people of the world to see the Earth the way he did, first-hand from space. In his campaign to inspire space exploration, Aldrin drafted The Return (Forge, $25.95), his latest collaboration with novelist John Barnes.
Not at all an astronaut bio, the novel is a fictionalized account of how Aldrin sees the United States returning to the frontiers of space.
Aldrin’s concept for sending citizens into space is a believable one. First, send them one at a time. Select a journalist, an average joe and an über-celebrity for your first three flights, and the world will watch. Then, parlay the wave of interest (and funding) into new rocket technology and start sending more folks up.
The rest of the novel serves as a testing ground for this ambitious plan, with its biggest obstacle centering around a star-studded liability lawsuit. The general public has a higher demand for safety when the space shuttle’s passengers are not astronauts and when a civilian's safety is compromised in The Return, a massive lawsuit suit is the potentially crippling aftereffect.
Combine the legal drama with a little cloak-and-dagger politics, visionary space nostalgia and nuclear crisis, and you get a sense for how The Return carries its subject matter.
The story is told in the first person, with the voice alternating from character to character. The protagonists have childhood and familial ties, and while they grew distant over the years, their bond is tied by their love for space.
The main character, Scott Blackstone, is a former shuttle pilot who has taken a spot in the higher echelons of the aerospace industry. His dream is to get ordinary folks into space, first as "Citizen Observer" passengers on the space shuttle, and eventually as passengers on fleets of space transports. The key is using modified versions of U.S. industry rockets in novel configurations.
The concept is Aldrin’s brainchild, and in person he has made a
strong case for his designs for such vehicles. Based on largely existing technology, the reusable, multi-stage launch system would strive for that holiest grail of space travel, the affordable launch.
With current costs hovering around $10,000 per pound, this sort of innovation would be welcomed in the industry. Unfortunately, someone without much knowledge of aerospace will have trouble visualizing the technology -- Aldrin carries models of his sexy rockets on his book tours.
Just another industry?
Unfortunately, Aldrin's vision of a space-exploration renaissance gets surprisingly little coverage. With periods of high energy flight drama serving as occasional punctuation for the less engaging social drama on Earth, the work lacks the fast-paced excitement and mind-stretching concepts of other science fiction novels.
Perhaps the legal theme is an effort to bring space exploration down to earth.
"If we lose the lawsuit," says Thalia Pendergast, lawyer and divorced wife of the protagonist, "it proves that the whole dream was foolish, and space is for professionals the way that coal mines and operating rooms are for professionals, too dangerous to send people who don’t absolutely have to go, just another industry with a not-great safety record."
Yet because the book's main thrust is on trial law and politics, the story promoted as a "novel of the human adventure" comes across more as a novel of the human routine. The reader leaves with an understanding that the latest trip to an orbiting hotel, the Moon, or Mars may soon be within our grasp, but he or she will also take away a lingering hunger for excitement.
The Return is ultimately most effective at convincing us that we could use Aldrin’s concepts to get more people into space. Unfortunately, the only "why" provided is for the experience itself, and the novel does not effectively inspire this.
I hope that in a future installment the collaborators will focus more on what may be and less on how we might do it.
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