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John J Nance, an aviation analyst for NBC and former Air Force pilot, has made a second (or, rather, third) career for himself by writing critically acclaimed science-fiction thrillers about adventures in air and space. In his latest, ORBIT, Nance explores the delight and danger of a very real new technology that is hardly fiction: space tourism. Although Nance’s descriptions of aerospace technology are impressive, his real gift is his careful teasing-out of the way that human psychology and imagination create holes that we try to fill with the gleam of fancy toys and the void of outer space. He also presciently brings up some of the serious ethical issues that complicate commercial space tourism and that other modern technological innovation, the information revolution. In ORBIT, Kip Dawson, a middle-American Everyman who wins a shuttle trip round the earth as part of a promotional sweepstakes. Kip has always dreamed of seeing the earth from space, possibly because, alienated from his wife and children, fantasizing about a lover he hasn’t seen in years, and generally frustrated with everything familiar to him, he might find his world more beautiful from a distance. When an accident happens on board, Kip finds himself more alone than he’s ever been on earth, and must try to get himself home. In case he fails, he decides to multi-task, sending a last message to his abandoned earth while he strives, against time and his own inexperience, to return to earth. Soon, the space-tourism company and its cronies are struggling to keep their potentially deadly negligence a secret; a conniving congressman who wants space tourism shuts down considers letting Kip die to teach the industry a lesson; and, while NASA and the Russian cosmonauts race to rescue Kip, his one-way communications from orbit attract, unbeknownst to him, a worldwide internet cult. This is a page-turner that demands to be reread for the politics and the vivid imagery. ORBIT is narrated entirely in the present tense. This, combined with Nance’s detailed description, give the reader a riveting sense of immediacy. “The Earth’s surface curves away like a huge ball now, even though they’re just passing the so-called threshold of space, around sixty-five miles.” Kip’s “mind replays every Star Trek episode he can recall of the Starship Enterprise streaking toward the speed of light. This feels like that looked.” In passages like this, ORBIT offers an interesting response to the lure of amateur space travel – why risk it, when the option of armchair-travel, courtesy of imaginations like Nance’s, beckons?
Reviewed by Rebecca Nesvet, July 2007
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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