Red Moon
Published on Jul 12, 2009 at 2:50 pm.
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Filed under books, science fiction.
I’ve been very busy with extra projects at the college the last couple of weeks. However, I try to wind down at bed time by reading a chapter or two from a novel. The latest one has been Red Moon, by Michael Cassutt. Like the last book that I reviewed here, this one is a well researched and realistic novel.
The novel is written as if it is an interview by the author of a certain Russian engineer named Yuri Ribko. The author writes as if he is transcribing Ribko’s tale, sort of ghost writing Ribko’s autobiography. The story is set in the Soviet Union in the decades marking the height of the space race. Ribko is an engineering student who manages to get a job at Sergei Korolev’s bureau, the organization that built the rockets and spacecraft that competed with the United States’ NASA. Ribko tells of the political intrigue and difficulties facing the Soviet rocket scientists as they tried to work amidst the bureacratic nightmare of the Soviet Union to compete with the Americans.
The author has clearly researched the Soviet space program, and that lends realism to the events that he portrays. But, this is a novel, as is clear in the author’s acknowledgments. Ribko, his family, and the events surrounding them are fiction. Still, the story is well written and sounds authentic. In the novel, we find that Korolev was murdered, and the aircraft crash that killed Yuri Gagarin was the result of sabotage. The author then contends that many of the Soviet’s missteps that allowed Apollo to beat the Soviet Union to the Moon were the result of sabotage. I personally do not think that to be the case, but the novel is so well written and plausible sounding that I suppose it can cause those who are enthralled by conspiracy theories to accept the premise. But, this is a work of fiction.
Given that it is a fictional work that is intertwined with science and technology, I’m going to claim it for science fiction in my tags for this post. I really enjoyed the book, and I think that anyone who has any interest at all in the history of the space race would find it very entertaining and interesting. Cassutt, the author, has written a very well researched book, and he has set his characters among very real events that happened. I find such historical novels very interesting if well done, as is the case with this one.
-Astroprof
