The Big Idea: Alan Smale

 

When you have the chance to write a sequel, you do it… right? Well, for Alan Smale, the answer was not as straightforward as all that. Come find out why he hesitated at first to write Radiant Sky, and why now he’s glad he did.

ALAN SMALE:

So, to review: Radiant Sky is the sequel to Hot Moon, my alternate-Apollo novel published in 2022. Hot Moon was the book I always wanted to write, my “technothriller with heart,” set entirely on and around the Moon in 1979-80, in a different and very fun past where the US and the Soviets both have precarious bases on the lunar surface and the Space Race is still going strong. Vivian Carter, the commander of Apollo 32, gets herself caught up in the Cold War … in space.

A war that quickly turns hot, when her routine mission to bring a NASA Cargo Container to Columbia Station, an old-school Skylab in lunar orbit, comes under attack from a trio of Soviet Soyuz craft, in the world’s first and clunkiest space battle. Vivian and her crew are forced to abandon their planned follow-on exploratory mission to the volcanic Marius Hills region of the Moon and divert to Hadley Base, where they and the eighteen NASA astronauts already crewing that base will have to MacGyver/improvise weaponry from the raw materials around them to defend themselves against a second Soviet assault, this time on the lunar surface. And … matters go on from there.

As Radiant Sky begins, it’s now 1983, and the superpower confrontation has calmed into an irritable, blustering, and saber-rattling détente much like the one we experienced in our own timeline. By now there are two joint US-Soviet bases on the Moon, and the relevant technology has improved quite a bit. Such improvements are typical of what happened in the real Space Program(s), of course: just look at the increase in our capabilities over the course of Project Gemini, when we learned to spacewalk, rendezvous, and undertake extended spaceflights, though an amazing ten missions between March 1965 and November 1966. Or, look at the massive increase in the capabilities of Apollo 17 over those of Apollo 11 in just three years, plus the marathon exploits of the astronauts on Skylab (which are greatly underrated and under-appreciated, in my humble opinion).

Anyway: as we learn in the first pages of Radiant Sky, Vivian Carter is now commanding LGS-1, Lunar Geological Survey One, which will circumnavigate the Moon by way of both poles. “Carter’s convoy” consists of a MOLAB – Mobile Laboratory, a small silver pressurized truck – plus a Lunar Rover and one of those nifty lunar dirt bikes from the first book, with a crew of six. It’s at the same time a breathtaking journey of exploration, and a hardcore scientific sampling mission…


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Source: The Big Idea: Alan Smale

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