The Tranquillity Alternative
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- £6.99
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- £6.99
Publisher Description
On mankind's last mission to the moon, a killer comes along for the ride
Since the first manned spaceflight in 1944, NASA has conquered the outer atmosphere, explored Mars, and placed nuclear missiles on the moon. But funding for interstellar adventures—military or otherwise—has dried up. Now, NASA is planning a final lunar mission to pack up the remnants of man's first extraterrestrial colony. The nuclear missiles are meant to be shot into the sun, but someone onboard the USS Conestoga would prefer to see them fired toward Earth.
The night before the mission launch, one of the astronauts is kidnapped from his hotel room and replaced with a surgically altered body double. By the time the other astronauts uncover the deception, the Conestoga is too far from home for NASA to help. On the surface of the Moon, a decades-old conspiracy has reached its final stage, and Earth's fate hangs in the balance.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
An action-packed plot doesn't save Steele's follow-up to The Jericho Iteration (1994) from a dearth of well-developed ideas. In this novel of alternate history, space exploration, after establishing itself as necessary for America's growth and defense, has suffered from public disinterest and lack of funding until the last vestiges of the nation's space program are about to be sold to a private German company. The final U.S. space mission--to the moon, to destroy nuclear missiles planted there decades earlier--is commanded by Gene Parnell, an aging white male given to nostalgia. Accompanied by a multicultural set of passengers and crew, some of whom are spies and agents, Parnell leads the mission through a series of minor crises. By the final third of the novel, with the treacheries revealed and most of the cards played, the reader is prepared for a dramatic climax--but none comes. Several promising subplots, dealing with a lesbian love interest and computer net mores, aren't fully exploited, and Steele's world-building, never strong, is especially weak here, with many of the social and sociological developments poorly conceived. At least the title is right. This disappointing yarn will calm more demanding SF readers right down--and then put them to sleep.
