Re: Rocket Men by Craig Nelson

On Jul 20, 12:20 pm, Sean O'Hara <seanoh...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
http://www.amazon.com/Rocket-Men-Epic-Story-First/dp/0670021032

Rocket Men is a rather preposterous novel about the United States
sending a space craft to the moon in 1969. The story begins with the
rocket on the launchpad, waiting for blast off, with brief
flashbacks to the launch prep, as the administrators make last
minute checks on mission readiness and the "astronauts" undergo
final training.

(The astronauts are named -- and I swear I'm not making this up --
Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. And "Buzz" isn't a nickname --
that's the character's legal name. Thankfully the third astronaut
isn't Al American. He's Michael Collins. Why Nelson would name a
character after a prominent member of the Irish Republican Army is
beyond me.)

Then, just before lift-off, the story goes into an extended
flashback. First comes a big infodump on the history of rocketry,
from Oberth, Goddard, and Tsiolkovsky, to the German development of
the V2. And this is where the book goes off the rails, launching
into an absurd conspiracy wherein the Nazi scientists flee from the
Red Army and seek asylum in America, where they're welcomed with
open arms. This introduces a bizarre subplot involving these former
Nazis settling in a small town in Alabama, where they establish
themselves as members of the community while working on new rocket
systems.

At the same time, the Soviets launch a bit of tinfoil into space
with a radio transmitter. They follow this up by launching a
crockpot with a dog inside, and cooking it on reentry. These feats,
combined with a perceived Soviet superiority in ballistic missiles,
prompt a young American President to brashly promise that the US
will place a man on the moon within ten years.

What follows would be, in a movie, a musical montage, as the
American space agency perfects the technology necessary and locates
the best-of-the-best to fly the ship. The book loops around on
itself as we finally get back to the launch and the mission proceeds.

And what a bizarre mission. Instead of building a ship that can go
from the Earth to the Moon, land, take-off and return to the Earth,
the US has built a vessel that will go into lunar orbit and then
launch a shuttle craft for the actual landing. Nelson offers some
technobabble about why this is a better design, but it never
entirely makes sense. To his credit, though, Nelson does make the
engineers dubious of the idea when it's first proposed, having them
point out all the flaws.

The upshot of this mission profile is that one of the astronauts --
Collins -- has to stay on the ship while the other two take the
shuttle to the surface. Exactly what Collins does while they're gone
is never explained. Sounds like the most boring job in the world --
the ship is too small for him to do much, and the computers are
absurdly weak, so he can't even play chess or solitaire.

The best part of the novel is the landing sequence, which features
several technical flaws that almost derail the mission. First, the
flight computer has insufficient RAM to deal with the sensor input
and keeps freezing up. Then, despite the best laid plans, the crew
finds their pre-picked landing site covered with boulders. Armstrong
has to use an enormous amount of fuel to stay aloft, only sighting a
flat piece of ground when he's within seconds of having to abort.
The scene strains credibility, but Nelson's writing makes it
exciting despite itself.

The actual time on the moon is rather anti-climactic. You'd think
something exciting would happen there, but no. No aliens, no
disasters, no Great Discoveries that change the way we see the
world. The biggest problem faced by the crew is that the touchdown
was so soft that it didn't trigger the shock-absorbers and retract
the landing struts. As such, there's a three foot gap between the
ladder and lunar surface. This renders Armstrong's first words on
the moon ironic -- "That's one small step for man, one giant leap
for mankind." (That's the exact quote -- you'd think an editor
would've caught the missing article in the first clause. As it
stands, the sentence doesn't make a lot of sense.) The other
challenges faced are pretty minor -- the top-soil (if you can call
it that) is so thin the astronauts have a hard time getting the flag
to stand up; Buzz describes a rock as looking like mica, which
pisses off the geologists at mission control.

The crew lifts off and makes an unremarkable rendezvous with the
mothership, followed by an uneventful return to Earth.

The characters are borderline cardboard -- everyone who works for
this NASA organization is an uber-professional expert who seems to
have stepped out of the 1950s. Nelson even mentions this, explaining
that the scientists, engineers and astronauts are so focused on
their jobs that they don't pay attention to the changing world
outside. The only exception is the, uh, let's say "feisty," Buzz.
One memorable scene has him arguing about whether he or Armstrong
should be the first on the surface. Unfortunately for him,
plot-logic dictates that the guy named Buzz must be the wacky
sidekick and Armstrong the jut-jawed hero. You just know that in the
movie, Armstrong would be played by Leslie Nielsen and Buzz by Earl
Holliman. Too bad there's no room for Anne Francis.

The book does well enough in depicting what space might really be
like, but this whole "mundane sci-fi" movement does nothing for me.
No Robbie the Robot, no sale.

--
Sean O'Hara <http://www.diogenes-sinope.blogspot.com>
New audio book: As Long as You Wish by John O'Keefe
<http://librivox.org/short-science-fiction-collection-010/>


....And, of course, having an actor write the book in the first place
strains credulity.

.

Relevant Pages

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