Back to the Moon

Anita Gates

[Hickham's] boyish, eager idealism is showing again in his first try at fiction, and it's charmingly contagious..... [O]ne of the strengths of this readable, diverting novel is that the reader isn't absolutely sure who's good and who's bad until very near the end....Hickam is also adept at false scares...and nifty plot twists....This is not great literature, but it is about great dreams. Being reminded of them is a little like revisiting the New Frontier.
— The New York Times Book Review \ \ \ \ \ \

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

From the informed imagination of the author of Rocket Boys: A Memoir (finalist for an NBCC Award; made into the movie October Sky), Hickham's fanciful debut novel reads like an Indiana Jones adventure-in-space. It's 2002 on Cedar Key, Fla., and former NASA engineer Jack Medaris's high-tech company makes plans to send a rocket to the moon. The mission is to bring back a quantity of the rare isotope helium-3 to power a reactor that will supply the earth with clean fusion energy for centuries to come. When the space vehicle is destroyed by shadowy conspirators, Jack decides to "legally" hijack the space shuttle Columbia. Just before Columbia takes off on its meticulously planned orbit mission, the renegade astronauts attempt to displace the scheduled crew, an unlikely all-female bunch Hickam has rendered ridiculous by portraying them as catfighting shrews. In the fracas, Jack's veteran shuttle pilot is fatally wounded and the Native American prima donna Penny High Eagle--a gorgeous celebrity biologist, bestselling author and the object of contempt from the original female crew--winds up in space with Jack. With romance blossoming in zero gravity, international forces collide as a sinister fossil-fuel consortium conspires to destroy the shuttle. Onetime NASA-engineer Hickam packs his narrative with complicated space-program minutiae, risking his readers' comprehension of the wild plot. Riddled with space jargon acronyms (LEM, EVA, etc.), the cosmic romp both enthralls and numbs. But as Hickam's tale heats up, the reader's tenacity pays off, and the rocket ride achieves high velocity. Major ad/promo; author tour. (June) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

It's the year 2002. No more moonshots. Cape Canaveral has been abandoned. The U.S. president is about to sign the World Energy Treaty outlawing nuclear power and thus dooming future space travel. A renegade scientist highjacks a space shuttle and pilots it to the moon, where there is a rare isotope of helium that, combined with seawater, generates cheap, clean fusion power. Sound familiar? We're back in the world of Fifties sf by authors like Heinlein, Clarke, and Asimov. Hickam, a former NASA scientist and author of the acclaimed memoir Rocket Boys, has written this sweet novel of high-spirited adventure--of guys and gals in space--with a decidedly upbeat message. "This rocket flies on dreams," says the hero. You better believe it! Recommended. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 2/15/99.]--David Keymer, California State Univ., Stanislaus Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Anita Gates

[Hickham's] boyish, eager idealism is showing again in his first try at fiction, and it's charmingly contagious..... [O]ne of the strengths of this readable, diverting novel is that the reader isn't absolutely sure who's good and who's bad until very near the end....Hickam is also adept at false scares...and nifty plot twists....This is not great literature, but it is about great dreams. Being reminded of them is a little like revisiting the New Frontier.
— The New York Times Book Review

Kirkus Reviews

Former NASA engineer and author of Rocket Boys (1998), the coming-of-age story that became the movie October Sky, tries his hand at a thriller. In 2002, NASA's operations are pretty ho-hum, at least from the point of view of the widowed Jack Medaris, a former astronaut who's bored with the low-orbit missions of the shuttles and feels that the promise of Apollo has been betrayed. Jack is working on a project called "Prometheus" with a brilliant physicist named Isaac Perlman. Prometheus is a robot miner destined for the moon, but Perlman has an even more ambitious design: to create fusion, using the element helium-3, which is in short supply on earth but abundant on the moon. Widespread use of fusion to generate power on earth would ensure a land rush to the moon and finally enable humankind's move into space. Although there's plenty of funding for all this from a group called Millennium, they are also saboteurs of the project, since in truth the Millennials are Luddites who oppose space flight. The plot thickens when Jack is visiting the Cape on the day of the last launch of the shuttle Columbia. Jacks divines that something is wrong with the launch and boards the great ship in an attempt to save the day. Then he finds himself bound for the moon, along with the all-female crew and his love interest, a famous reporter. This, too, is the work of the Millennials. Their somewhat confused purpose unravels, however, and Jack is able to dramatize the grand benefits of space flight, introduce the clean-fusion process to an energy-hungry, polluted world, and find true love as well. Hickam is a clunky writer, but his vast knowledge of the politics and hardware of spacefaring shines through,filling the reader with hope that marvelous things still await us.