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Posted 20 hours ago

The Apollo Murders: 1

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The story follows Kaz Zemeckis, a former test pilot who goes to work with the Apollo 18 crew for their upcoming Moon mission.

I mean, I just need to know enough to understand the story; I'm not actually using this as a manual to pilot an aircraft or to build one, you know?

At the end of the book, I was surprised that most of the characters, except for the fictional Kaz, were real people, and the Russian spy satellite and their moon rover were actually in place at the time. Chris Hadfield captures the fierce G-forces of launch, the frozen loneliness of space, and the fear of holding on to the outside of a spacecraft orbiting the Earth at 17,000 miles per hour as only someone who has experienced all of these things in real life can. For non-history buffs like myself, the Apollo 18 was never launched in real life, due to budgetary constraints and the cold war.

Especially that “you can have emotions on your own time" ethos that seems to govern the space program. Claudia doesn’t remember what happened to her and she doesn’t want to talk to anybody: not her sister, who is about to have a baby, not her music producer father, not a counsellor. Classified satellite launches are one thing, but a classified human mission to the Moon is something else; alas, there’s no reporter character trying to piece together what’s going on, or going wrong. For starters, we’re told from the jump that Apollo 18 is a military mission that is going to be a secret.The Cold War was full of near-tragic circumstances, but this could have significantly shifted the course of history, if not fiction. If I had been asked what I thought about “The Apollo Murders” when I was half way through the first section “To the Moon”, I would have said “Meh”, too technical, too many acronyms! Hadfield uses his space experience to good purpose in this thriller, a superb blend of fact and fiction set in the midst of the Cold War.

That evening gave us readers an incredible insight and understanding of the spatial Cold War era at the time.

I also question that NOBODY in this story ever brings up a legal, political, or ethical concern that the US is essentially going into space to sabotage Soviet property. Hence Apollo 18 becomes a military intelligence operation albeit maintaining a token science objective for the public. At times, the author employs inventive imagery, for instance: “An enormous, brooding dragon, about to belch fire and hurl itself up off the pad, into the blue of the Florida sky.

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