- Osborn, Stephanie.
Burnout.
Kingsport, TN: Twilight Times Books, 2009.
ISBN 978-1-60619-200-9.
-
At the conclusion of its STS-281 mission, during re-entry across
the southern U.S. toward a landing at Kennedy Space Center, space
shuttle orbiter Atlantis breaks up. Debris falls in
the Gulf of Mexico. There are no survivors. Prior to the
disaster Mission Control received no telemetry or communications
from the crew indicating any kind of problem. Determination of
the probable cause will have to await reconstruction of the
orbiter from the recovered debris and analysis of the on-board
flight operations recorder if and when it is recovered. Astronaut
Emmett “Crash” Murphy, whose friend “Jet” Jackson
was commander of the mission, is appointed a member of the
investigation, focusing on the entry phase.
Hardly has the investigation begun when Murphy begins to discover
that something is seriously amiss. Unexplained damage to the
orbiter's structure is discovered and then the person who
pointed it out to him is killed in a freak accident and the
component disappears from the reconstruction hangar. The autopsies
of the crew reveal unexplained discrepancies with their medical
records. The recorder's tape of cockpit conversation inexplicably
goes blank at the moment the re-entry begins, before any anomaly
occurred. As he begins to dig deeper, he becomes the target of
forces unknown who appear willing to murder anybody who looks
too closely into the details of the tragedy.
This is the starting point for an adventure and mystery which
sometimes seems not just like an episode of “The X-Files”,
but two or more seasons packed into one novel. We have a
radio astronomer tracking down a mysterious signal from the heavens; a
shadowy group of fixers pursuing those who ask too many questions or
learn too much; Area 51; a vast underground base and tunnel system
which has been kept entirely secret; strange goings-on in the New
Mexico desert in the summer of 1947; a cabal of senior military
officers from around the world, including putative adversaries;
Native American and Australian aborigine legends; hot sex scenes;
a near-omniscient and -omnipotent Australian spook agency;
reverse-engineering captured technologies; secret aerospace craft with
“impossible” propulsion technology; and—wait for
it— …but you can guess, can't you?
The author is a veteran of more than twenty years in civilian
and military space programs, including working as a payload flight
controller in Mission Control on shuttle missions. Characters
associated with NASA speak in the acronym-laden jargon of their
clan, which is explained in a glossary at the end. This was
the author's first novel. It was essentially complete when the
space shuttle orbiter Columbia was lost in a re-entry
accident in 2003 which superficially resembles that which befalls
Atlantis here. In the aftermath of the disaster, she
decided to put the manuscript aside for a while, eventually finishing
it in 2006, with almost no changes due to what had been learned from
the Columbia accident investigation. It was finally
published in 2009.
Since then she has retired from the space business and published
almost two dozen novels, works of nonfiction, and contributions
to other works. Her Displaced Detective
(January 2015) series is a masterful and highly entertaining
addition to the Sherlock Holmes literature. She has become known
as a prolific and talented writer, working in multiple genres.
Everybody has to start somewhere, and it's not unusual for authors'
first outings not to come up to the standard of those written
after they hit their stride. That is the case here. Veteran
editors, reading a manuscript by a first time author, often
counsel, “There's way too much going on here. Focus
on one or two central themes and stretch the rest out over your
next five or six books.” That was my reaction to this
novel. It's not awful, by any means, but it lacks the
polish and compelling narrative of her subsequent work.
I read the Kindle edition which, at this
writing, is a bargain at less than US$ 1. The production values
of the book are mediocre. It looks like a typewritten manuscript
turned directly into a book. Body copy is set ragged right, and
typewriter conventions are used throughout: straight quote marks
instead of opening and closing quotes, two adjacent hyphens instead of
em dashes, and four adjacent centred asterisks used as section
breaks. I don't know if the typography is improved in the paperback
version; I'm not about to spend twenty bucks to find out.
November 2016 