I first discovered Chris Hadfield, like many, from his out-of-this-world YouTube music video, Space Oddity. In it, a guitar soars down a space station hallway like a CGI special effect. Chris was on the International Space Station, singing, spinning his guitar weightlessly. He followed this up with an equally amazing space duet with the Bare Naked Ladies. I went on to read Chris’s autobiography, An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth, and I found him to be inspirational. If you’re read my latest story, Bernard’s Dream, you’ll recognize that Ava gives James a signed copy of An Astronaut’s Guide when he’s in the hospital. It was my small homage to the book.
Every reader brings a certain expectation to what he hopes a book contains. Some see glitzy covers with spaceships and conjure up exciting battles. Others know their author's expertise and want stories filled with technical marvels and accuracy. What to expect from a commander of the International Space Station who writes 70s era NASA fiction? I hoped, as I stared at the cover, that I would get scenes where I was the astronaut reclined in my capsule seat, a massive Saturn V rock underneath me, with the Mission Control countdown ticking in my headset. I wanted to know what it was like to feel the gees and the kick of stage separation, or the clumsy low-gravity bounce of a first moon step. Would the story deliver this implicit promise?
The Apollo Murders delivers exactly that, following a group of astronauts and mission planners on a fictional Apollo 18 Moon voyage (in real life, Apollo 17 was the final mission). The Apollo 18 mission is more of a military adventure, with plenty of U.S./Soviet Union Cold War conflict fueling its plot. Chris Hadfield does an excellent job of crafting a small, focused cast of astronauts, controllers, and Russian agents, placing them in claustrophobic situations where everyone has reason to distrust each other. Are there murders? Indeed, there is quite a body count by the story's end, although most deaths are from combat. And there is, surprisingly, combat. Armed space stations and pistols squirreled away in spacesuits. Spacewalkers trying to fight their way onto each other's ships. Bodies buried on the moon. It's not, say, Moonraker’s level of space mayhem, but there are small struggles peppered throughout the story’s second half.
1979’s James Bond flick, Moonraker, going all-in on the final Bond-villain lair assault. No worries - The Apollo Murders reigns in its battles and keeps them small and plausible
At first, I thought the weapons seemed out of place in a 1970s historical space fiction piece, until I read the afterword about the real-life events that inspired the story. Those events included actual armed space stations and cosmonauts with pistols.
The Apollo Murders has splashes of Apollo 13, First Man, and Space Cowboys written in a style reminiscent of Tom Clancy.
2000’s Space Cowboys. Although the Apollo Murders’ mayhem is lower-key than this, scenes like this will seem familiar
1995’s Apollo 13, with a famous creative problem-solving scene involving duct tape and carbon scrubbers. The vibe of the Apollo Murders is closest to this scene.
2018’s First Man, giving you a taste of the physicality of space flight
When you read a Clancy story, a fighter pilot doesn't just fire a missile; instead, the prose zooms in on the connection of the fire button sending its signal traveling down through wires, igniting the missile's rocket motor, clamps releasing, and radar guidance engaging. Hadfield's prose is like this. When an astronaut flips a switch, we'll know exactly the sequence of events that follows. At times, it's a brilliant enhancement. A harrowing helicopter crash details the fatal consequences of a pilot's simple movement on a flight stick pulling a critical linkage loose. I felt a pit in my stomach as the logical and deadly sequence of events unfolded, the prose following the pilot’s desperate attempts during the subsequent spin and crash. This scene worked so well because the reader knew the pilot was going to die before the pilot did, and watching it unfold was like watching an accident you were powerless to stop. At other times, the omniscient technical view can get in the way of some scenes’ pacing. The plot itself is a push and pull between the U.S. and Soviet Union, both of whom want something on the moon. The conclusion of the book is very action movie-ish and also has a certain Tom Clancy vibe to it.
I listened to the audiobook narrated by Ray Porter. Ray’s narration was fantastic, slipping effortlessly into different character’s voices, accents, and even Russian dialogue as needed. Procedural stories with professionals executing technical tasks can be challenging to write, as character’s personalities may not emerge when uttering “check” and “go”statements, but Ray does an excellent job giving each person his own vocal mannerisms, so you always know who is speaking. The audiobook is fifteen hours, and I enjoyed listening to it on my daily commutes.
The Apollo Murders was a treat. If you loved movies like Apollo 13 or books like Tom Clancy’s The Hunt for Red October, this book is for you. It’s a great mix of insight into what a moon mission is like coupled with dashes of an action/adventure movie. I hope there’s more books like it in the future from Chris Hadfield.