Science & Technology - Fiction, Space Exploration - Fiction, Other Science Fiction Categories

Phases Of Gravity

Name: Phases Of Gravity
Author: Dan Simmons
ISBN: 9780759254411

by Dan Simmons

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Overview

Richard Baedecker thinks his greatest challenge was walking on the moon, but then he meets a mysterious woman who shows him his past. Join Baedecker as he comes to grips with the son and wife he lost in his passion for space exploration, his forgotten childhood and the loss he experienced during the death-flight of the Challenger. The most difficult exploration of his life is not the cold, rocky crevices of the moon, but the warm interior of his heart. Brilliant and beautifully written, PHASES OF GRAVITY is a masterpiece about love and loss that transports readers far beyond the confines of space and time.

Richard Baedecker once walked on the moon, but everything the ex-astronaut has ever done seems only a simulation, a preparation for something bigger. Vivid, compelling and brilliantly written, this is an exploration of the human heart and a journey through regions more remote than the moon. Original.

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Editorials

Publishers Weekly

Hugo-winner Simmons (Black Hills) shifts away from genre literature in this quiet masterpiece, first published in 1989. Richard Baedecker, a divorced former astronaut who walked on the moon, has hit a professional and personal low by the late ’80s. He still mourns the Challenger disaster, hates his mediocre civilian job, and can’t connect with his grown son. When he visits his son in India, Baedecker falls in love with his son’s friend Maggie, who shows him around the country and later meets him while climbing a mountain in Colorado. His travels, which take him to his Illinois birthplace and a colleague’s funeral in rural Oregon, are interspersed with flashbacks to his days at NASA, and Simmons switches perspective with a deft touch, keeping the reader off guard without ever undercutting his narrative. Fans of Simmons’s science fiction might be surprised to find him writing a mainstream novel informed by spiritualism and a hint of magic, but the story is still as good as anything Simmons has delivered. (Jan. 2012)