- Whittington, Mark R.
Children of Apollo.
Bloomington, IN: Xlibris, 2002.
ISBN 978-1-4010-4592-0.
-
This is a brilliant concept and well-executed (albeit with some
irritating flaws I will discuss below). This novel is
within the genre of “alternative history” and, conforming
to the rules, takes a single counterfactual event as the point of
departure for a recounting of the 1970s as I, and I suspect many others,
expected that decade to play out at its dawn. It is
a celebration of what might have been, and what we have lost compared to
the future we chose not to pursue.
In the novel's timeline, an obscure CIA analyst writes a memo about the
impact Soviet efforts to beat the U.S. to the Moon are having upon the
Soviet military budget and economy, and this memo makes it to the
desk of President Nixon shortly after the landing of
Apollo 11. Nixon is persuaded by his senior advisors that
continuing and expanding the Apollo and follow-on programs (whose funding
had been in decline since 1966) would be a relatively inexpensive way
to, at the least, divert funds which would otherwise go to Soviet military
and troublemaking around the world and, at the best, bankrupt their economy
because an ideology which proclaimed itself the “wave of the
future” could not acquiesce to living under a “capitalist
Moon”.
Nixon and his staff craft a plan thoroughly worthy of the
“Tricky Dick” moniker
he so detested, and launch a program largely
modelled upon the
1969
Space Task Group report, with the addition of transitioning the space shuttle
recommended in the report to competitive procurement of transportation services
from the private sector. This sets off the kind of steady, yet sustainable,
expansion of the human presence into space that von Braun always envisioned.
At the same time, it forces the Soviets, the Luddite caucus in Congress,
and the burgeoning environmental movement into a corner, and they're
motivated to desperate measures to bring an end to what some view as
destiny but they see as disaster.
For those interested in space who lived through the 1970s and saw
dream after dream dashed, downscoped, or deferred, this is a
delightful and well-crafted exploration of how it could have been.
Readers too young to remember the 1970s may miss a number of
the oblique references to personalities and events of that
regrettable decade.
The Kindle edition is perfectly readable,
reasonably inexpensive, but sloppily produced. A number of words are
run together and hyphenated words in the print edition not joined.
Something funny appears to have happened in translating passages in
italics into the electronic edition—I can't quite figure out
what, but I'm sure the author didn't intend parts of words to
be set in italics. In addition there are a number of errors in both
the print and Kindle editions which would have been caught by a
sharp-eyed copy editor. I understand that this is a self-published
work, but there are many space buffs (including this one) who would
have been happy to review the manuscript and check it for both
typographical and factual errors.
April 2011 