The Apollo Murders, Chris Hadfield

Random House Canada, 2021, 470 pages, C$36.00 hc, ISBN 978-0-7352-8235-3

Criticizing Chris Hadfield is not recommended up here in Canada—he’s as close to a national hero as we’ve got—an astronaut with impeccable professional credentials, an entertainer’s flair and a high media profile.   His rendition of “Space Oddity” is legendary—the first music video performed and shot in space.   I didn’t have to think twice when I happened to see a copy of his first novel, The Apollo Murders, at a nice discount at the local Wal-Mart—it was an instant buy.

Considering how deeply I admire Hadfield, it brings me no joy to reluctantly find issues with The Apollo Murders—but even admiration should not prevent honest criticism when it’s warranted. It pains me even more considering that The Apollo Murders squarely plays into one of my favourite sub-genres of fiction: the immensely detailed techno-thriller, blended with a good chunk of space program secret history and a one-big-idea-a-chapter narrative drive. There are plenty of reviews elsewhere on this site to testify how I’m not afraid of good long exposition dumps, plotting-dominant functional prose, wild ideas and techno-geek vocabulary. Hadfield’s novel has all of this.

The first few pages set the tone, as we are brought back to the 1970s. Our hero is someone not unlike Hadfield himself—a test pilot turned astronaut, with guitar-playing skills. It’s not meant to be an exact alter ego, of course—In the first chapter, our protagonist (an American) loses an eye due to a plane/bird collision, and other differences abound. Think of it as a way for Hadfield to write about what he knows without necessarily self-inserting himself in the novel.

As the novel advances, it’s clear that we’ve hopped into a slightly alternate dimension where the Apollo program didn’t stop when it did in this universe—Apollo 18 is on the launchpad, and the tensions of the Cold War are heavily informing its secret mission. Overloading his narrative with juicy thriller elements, Hadfield has the mission launched not only to go to the moon, but to take a look at a Soviet orbital station along the way. It gets much, much wilder when someone sneaks aboard an Apollo module that already has a Soviet sleeper agent, and the drama goes all the way to the moon and back. By cramming a full thriller on top of an Apollo mission procedural, Hadfield has a lot of things to talk about.

There are, to my delight, a lot of technical details along the way, and a re-use of odd bits and pieces of Cold War gadgets—many abandoned plans, bizarre ideas and half-baked concepts all make an appearance here, blending fact and fiction with a credible sheen of things that only an astronaut would think about including in the narrative. There’s an appendix specifying what is real, and far more of it is than you’d think. The publisher’s blurb namechecks The Martian and The Hunt for Red October, and that’s an accurate triangulation. (For specialists, I’d throw in other points of closer comparison—Edward Gibson’s Reach, Homer Hickam’s Back to the Moon, Judith & Garfield Reeves-Stevens’s Freefall, even David Onley’s Shuttle if you’re old-school Canadian about it.)  I’m not going to criticize the engineer’s approach to detail in the novel—it was one of my favourite things about it.

Where I’m a bit more neutral is in the actual nuts-and-bolts writing of the novel. Look, I’m a Science Fiction fan—I’m not usually bothered by clunky prose. But time and time again, I found myself looking at sentences and wondering if there wasn’t a better way of phrasing them. The good news is that this brings further credence to the working theory that Hadfield did not use a ghost writer like so many celebrity writers—and further evidence for this can also be found in the other books he’s published.

Where I have far more serious doubts about The Apollo Murder is in overall structure and plotting. My biggest complaint, probably idiosyncratic, is that it seemed to me as if the novel was building to a moon-set climax, but then kept going long after that highlight passed, to ever-diminishing returns in terms of thrills. I get that the entire Apollo trip to the Moon and back was the operating framework for structuring the novel, but there’s something in the way it builds up tension for a specific point in the story, and then doesn’t deal with it effectively. This means that the last third of the story becomes less and less effective, which is a singularly damaging impression for a story that should end with a strong climax. I’m not sure what the problem is exactly, but it felt as if the novel peaked far too soon, and couldn’t commit to an appropriate resolution afterward.

Other nagging issues include an inconsistent sense of claustrophobia (considering that most of the novel takes place in a very small enclosed space with more than one antagonist), a somewhat ambivalent attitude toward its Soviet characters (something no doubt informed by Hadfield’s experiences in Russia, but frustratingly out-of-focus), an equally-weird lack of indignation about the US going to space to sabotage another space exploration effort, some wonky handwaving about whether Apollo 18 is really a secret, and other little bits of unfinished business throughout it all.

Note that I’m not really taking away any points for a ludicrous plot that ignores NASA’s decades-long history of careful planning and risk-averse decision-making: Having the mission merrily trucking to the Moon after an act of orbital piracy goes horribly wrong is part of the fun of an exuberant space thriller. It’s within that plot structure that I have issues with how things are developed. The execution undermines the premise in inconsistent but cumulative ways.

It’s pretty clear to me that The Apollo Murders would not have been published as-is had someone else’s name been on the cover—any strong editorial guidance would have pared down some subplots, revised a good chunk of the book’s last third, and arranged for plot elements to come together in a more propulsive way. But that’s one of the privileges of fame and public goodwill—you can write what you want, few will dare question it and the result may even dazzle readers for whom this is something fresh and new. (For seasoned genre readers, Hadfield’s promotional interviews for the novel are best avoided—the lack of awareness of the space program secret history subgenre is understandable but frustrating.)  But more critical readers may not be so kind. In the end, I’m left unsatisfied—I like a lot of The Apollo Murders, but those parts I didn’t are too significant to ignore.