- Chiles, Patrick.
Farside.
Seattle: Amazon Digital Services, 2015.
ASIN B010WAE080.
-
Several years after the events chronicled in
Perigee (August 2012),
Arthur Hammond's Polaris AeroSpace Lines is operating routine
point-to-point suborbital passenger and freight service with
its Clippers, has expanded into orbital service with
Block II Clippers, and is on the threshold of opening up
service to the Moon with its “cycler” spacecraft
which loop continuously between the Earth and Moon. Clippers
rendezvous with the cyclers as they approach the Earth, transferring
crew, passengers, cargo, and consumables. Initial flights will be
limited to lunar orbit, but landing missions are envisioned for
the future.
In the first orbital mission, chartered to perform resource
exploration from lunar orbit, cycler Shepard is
planning to enter orbit with a burn which will, by the necessities
of orbital mechanics, have to occur on the far side of the Moon,
out of radio contact with the Earth. At Polaris mission control
in Denver, there is the usual tension as the clock ticks down toward
the time when Shepard is expected to emerge from behind
the Moon, safely in orbit. (If the burn did not occur, the ship would
appear before this time, still on a trajectory which would return it
to the Earth.) When the acquisition of signal time comes and goes
with no reply to calls and no telemetry, tension gives way to
anxiety. Did Shepard burn too long and crash on the
far side of the Moon? Did its engine explode and destroy the
ship? Did some type of total system failure completely disable
its communications?
On board Shepard, Captain Simon Poole is struggling to
survive after the disastrous events which occurred just moments after
the start of the lunar orbit insertion burn. Having taken refuge in
the small airlock after the expandable habitation module has deflated,
he has only meagre emergency rations to sustain him until a rescue
mission might reach him. And no way to signal Earth that he is alive.
What seems a terrible situation rapidly gets worse and more
enigmatic when an arrogant agent from Homeland Security
barges into Polaris and demands information about the passenger
and cargo manifest for the flight, Hammond is visited at home
by an unlikely caller, and a jarhead/special operator type
named Quinn shows them some darker than black intelligence
about their ship and “invites” them to NORAD
headquarters to be briefed in on an above top secret project.
So begins a nearish future techno-thriller in which the situations
are realistic, the characters interesting, the perils harrowing, and
the stakes could not be higher. The technologies are all plausible
extrapolations of those available at present, with no magic.
Government agencies behave as they do in the real world, which is to
say with usually good intentions leavened with mediocrity, incompetence,
scheming ambition, envy, and counter-productive secrecy and arrogance.
This novel is not going to be nominated for any awards by the
social justice warriors who have infiltrated the
science fiction writer and fan communities: the author understands
precisely who the enemies of civilisation and human destiny are,
forthrightly embodies them in his villains, and explains why
seemingly incompatible ideologies make common cause against the
values which have built the modern world. The story is one of problem
solving, adventure, survival, improvisation, and includes one of the
most unusual episodes of space combat in all of science fiction. It
would make a terrific movie.
For the most part, the author gets the details right. There are a few
outright goofs, such as seeing the Earth from the lunar far side (where it
is always below the horizon—that's why it's the far side);
some errors in orbital mechanics which will grate on players
of
Kerbal Space Program;
the deployed B-1B bomber is Mach 1.25, not Mach 2;
and I don't think there's any way the ships in
the story could have had sufficient delta-v to rendezvous with
a comet so far out the plane of the ecliptic. But I'm not going to
belabour these quibbles in what is a rip-roaring read. There is
a glossary of aerospace terms and acronyms at the end. Also included is
a teaser chapter for a forthcoming novel which I can't wait to read.
October 2015 