- Brennan, Gerald.
Island of Clouds.
Chicago: Tortoise Books, 2017.
ISBN 978-0-9860922-9-9.
-
This is the third book, and the first full-length novel,
in the author's “Altered Space” series of alternative
histories of the cold war space race. Each stand-alone story
explores a space mission which did not take place, but could
have, given the technology and political circumstances at
the time. The first, Zero Phase
(October 2016),
asks what might have happened had Apollo 13's service module
oxygen tank waited to explode until after the lunar module
had landed on the Moon. The present book describes a manned
Venus fly-by mission performed in 1972 using modified Apollo
hardware launched by a single Saturn V.
“But, wait…”, you exclaim, ”that's
crazy!” Why would you put a crew of three
at risk for a mission lasting a full year for just a few
minutes of close-range fly-by of a planet whose surface is
completely obscured by thick clouds? Far from Earth, any
failure of their life support systems, spacecraft systems,
a medical emergency, or any number of other mishaps could
kill them; they'd be racking up a radiation dose
from cosmic rays and solar particle emissions every day in
the mission; and the inexorable laws of orbital mechanics
would provide them no option to come home early if something
went wrong.
Well, crazy it may have been, but in the mid-1960s,
precisely
such a mission was the subject of serious study by NASA and
its contractors as a part of the
Apollo
Applications Program planned to follow the Apollo lunar
landings. Here is a
detailed
study of a manned Venus flyby [PDF] by NASA contractor
Bellcomm, Inc. from February 1967. In addition to observing
Venus during the brief fly-by, the astronauts would deploy
multiple robotic probes which would explore the atmosphere
and surface of Venus and relay their findings either via the
manned spacecraft or directly to Earth.
It was still crazy. For a tiny fraction of the cost of a Saturn
V, Apollo spacecraft, and all the modifications and new development
to support such a long-term mission, and at no risk to humans,
an armada of robotic probes could have been launched on smaller,
far less expensive rockets such as Delta, Atlas, and Titan, which
would have returned all of the science proposed for the manned
fly-by and more. But in the mid-sixties, with NASA's budget
reaching 4% of all federal spending, a level by that metric
eight times higher than in recent years, NASA was
“feeling its oats” and planning as if the good times
were just going to roll on forever.
In this novel, they did. After his re-election in 1968, where
Richard Nixon and George Wallace split the opposition vote,
and the triumphant Moon landing by Ed White and Buzz Aldrin,
President Johnson opts to keep the momentum of Apollo going
and uses his legendary skills in getting what he wants from
Congress to secure the funds for a Venus fly-by in 1972. Deke
Slayton chooses his best friend, just back from the Moon,
Alan Shepard, to command the mission, with the second man
on the Moon Buzz Aldrin and astronaut-medical doctor Joe Kerwin
filling out the crew. Aldrin is sorely disappointed at not
being given command, but accepts the assignment for the
adventure and opportunity to get back into the game after the
post flight let-down of returning from the Moon to a desk job.
The mission in the novel is largely based upon the NASA
plans from the 1960s with a few modifications to simplify
the story (for example, the plan to re-fit the empty
third stage of the Saturn V booster as living quarters
for the journey, as was also considered in planning for
Skylab, is replaced here by a newly-developed
habitation module launched by the Saturn V in place of the
lunar module). There are lots of other little departures
from the timeline in our reality, many just to remind the reader
that this is a parallel universe.
After the mission gets underway, a number of
challenges confront the crew: the mission
hardware, space environment, one other, and the folks back
on Earth. The growing communication delay as the distance
increases from Earth poses difficulties no manned spaceflight
crew have had to deal with before. And then, one of those
things that can happen in space (and could have occurred on
any of the Apollo lunar missions) happens, and the crew
is confronted by existential problems on multiple fronts,
must make difficult and unpleasant decisions, and draw on
their own resources and ingenuity and courage to survive.
This is a completely plausible story which, had a few things
gone the other way, could have happened in the 1970s. The
story is narrated by Buzz Aldrin, which kind of lets you
know at least he got back from the mission. The characters
are believable, consistent with what we know of their counterparts
in our reality, and behave as you'd expect from such consummate
professionals under stress. I have to say, however,
as somebody who has occasionally
committed science
fiction, that I would be uncomfortable writing a story
in which characters based upon and bearing the names of those
of people in the real world, two of whom are alive at this
writing, have their characters and personal lives bared to the
extent they are in this fiction. In the first book in the
series, Zero Phase, Apollo 13 commander James Lovell,
whose fictional incarnation narrates the story, read and
endorsed the manuscript before publication. I was hoping to
find a similar note in this novel, but it wasn't there.
These are public figures, and there's nothing unethical or
improper about having figures based upon them in an
alternative history narrative behaving as the author wishes,
and the story works very well. I'm just saying I wouldn't
have done it that way without clearing it with the individuals
involved.
The Kindle edition is free to Kindle
Unlimited subscribers.
July 2019 