Alan Smale

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Imagine for a second what would have happened if the Soviets had gotten a cosmonaut to the moon first, if Neil Armstrong and Apollo 11 had been in a humiliating second place. Everything would have unfolded differently.

America would never have let the Soviets win the space race. That would have been unthinkable during the Cold War, political suicide for any president. We'd have gritted our teeth and doubled down, poured billions into the Apollo show more program.

HOT MOON is set in 1979 in this alternate world. The US and the Soviets both have permanent moon bases, orbiting space stations, and manned spy satellites supported by frequent rocket launches. Reagan is President and the Cold War is hotter than ever.

The crew of Apollo 32, commanded by Vivian Carter, career astronaut, docks at NASA's Columbia space station on their way to their main mission: exploring the volcanic Marius Hills region of the Moon. Vivian is caught in the crossfire as four Soviet Soyuz craft appear without warning to assault the orbiting station.

The fight for the Moon has begun!

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Imagine The Martian set in the storyverse of For All Mankind.

So. You got it. You need more?

The author's a praciticing astronomer. A real, actual scientist writing SF is always a positive, from my PoV, because the details are clearly based in a scientist's understanding of what matters to an expedition to the moon. It's also refreshing when someone takes the constraints of the actual extant tech of a given time seriously. Author Smale does both.

Mixed in with the cool sciencey bits are a selection of genre-friendly bits of alternate history, in this case the survival of a Russian scientist whose death caused the end of the Soviet Moon program; a fun twist of gender-equality advancement; and a murder mystery. None of these violated the basic need of the SF reader for a clear path to believable results. It's as accurate to 1960s and 70s science as is possible.

Geopolitics as the source of alt-hist plots are, as you can imagine, the biggest vein in the story-mine ever worked. This one being especially interesting to me, of course I fell for it immediately (despite my absolute conviction that Nixon would never, ever, ever have pulled out of Vietnam...too many defense contractors would've been hurt). I'm one of those who saw "Earthrise" when there was one digit in my age:


...and was never the same again. So a story centered around a time when I was alive but positing a different outcome was meat and drink!

That doesn't stop me from seeing the execution's flaws. I don't see anything in Vivian's sketched-in background that makes her gender relevant, so it feels a bit like tokenism. Mentioning her inclusion for some overarching reason, or integrating some responses that point up the reason, might have helped.

The story's pace is not swift, which I mention for those wanting a real thrill ride. I found it more than swift enough to keep the pages turning. The pace is not representative of the perils. This is space after all, the merest slip of a tool can be lethal...and Vivian seems to be a disaster magnet. She's certainly hair-breadth escape expert par excellence. Permaybehaps a bit too much so.

So I'm not yodeling buy-now-or-else from atop the roof, I *am* saying it's a very enjoyable read for your Kindle as you do your best not to hear little Pookums extorting that second cousin's kid out of the latest game. It'll keep you immersed. show less

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Vivian Carter, the electrifying hero from Hot Moon, returns to lead a lunar geological survey team comprised of both Americans and Soviets. Their journey takes them across the harsh and barren lunar surface as they chart the moon and collect samples for this grueling mission. It is dangerous enough, but the stakes become much higher when an ambush threatens the entire mission.

The crew must navigate a treacherous path where survival requires ingenuity, show more courage, and an uneasy alliance with their Soviet counterparts. As the stakes grow higher, the mission becomes a test of skill, endurance, and trust in an era defined by suspicion and rivalry.

Dive into an electrifying alternate history where space rivalry takes center stage. Radiant Sky is a thrilling continuation of the highly acclaimed hard science fiction novel that will captivate fans of NASA fiction books, near-future adventures, and hard science fiction series. Set in a meticulously crafted world where the Cold War extends far beyond Earth's atmosphere, humanity's reach into space creates a new frontier of tension and exploration.

With breathtaking accuracy from a retired NASA director and an immersive look at the untold stories of space rivalry, Radiant Sky brings hard science fiction alive, capturing the imagination and the thrill of space exploration. Prepare for a pulse-pounding experience that redefines what it means to venture into the unknown.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Sequels to alternate-history books are hoeing a hard row indeed. The setting's the star, and the star's done the lifting in the first one. Now, four years later, we know what happened to Vivian, a chunk of why, and how it made her act.

What's left to do? Make her world do a flip: Cooperate with the Soviets who tried multiple ways to kill you only a few years ago. The Moon makes strange bedfellows, after all. And there's weirdness enough that we need all hands on deck to survive.

So the stakes ratcheted up from personal, the character's still a deeply resourceful person, the setting's still the very hostile one of the Moon, and we're treated to more tense moments. This does seem to me to be Author Smale's favorite way of moving the plot: Add a threat and resolve it with averting death. I'm not totally down with that because those stakes really don't change much, just make the status quo continue. So the dopamine hit of fixing the problem wanes a bit every time it happens again.

That said, I don't for a second want you to think this is a sequel where we just do it all again. The worldbuilding is more sophisticated than that. Geopolitics are present in any alternate history. In this iteration, the geopolitics are dependent on events from the last book, so they're less directly mappable still from the 1983 of your and my memories. That is clear from the fact we're on the Moon, of course...but the story is much more than that.

If you're a fan of "what happens when I pull this?" stories, this series will do it for you. Author Smale understands the puzzle-solver's mind, feeds it puzzles to follow as they're solved, and makes points about conflict, its roots, and some of the ways it does, and doesn't, get resolved.

This book came out last month and I snarfed it down in two days. Possibly displacing Farthing as my favorite alternate-history crime book.... show less

I really wanted to like this book. The basic concept of a surviving Roman empire reaching the Americas and interacting with the natives, in this case the Mississippian Mound-Builders of Cahokia, has lots of potential.

Unfortunately, alternate histories live or die on their plausibility, and while the basic idea can certainly be made plausible, that's as far as this book goes. I can accept the Roman empire in AD 1218 (though I'm not sure how Geta defeating Caracalla as the point of divergence show more would be enough to get there), but I have very large problems with an empire that stretches from the North Sea to the Indus. I see no way for the empire to hold together when the speed of communication is limited to horse and ship. And this despite the fact that things seem to be rather unstable politically, with the 41-year old protagonist having lived under 6 emperors and served under 4 in the previous 25 years. And despite this stability, there are Saxons in Britain and Magyars in whatever they call Hungary. Plus Christianity is just another acceptable cult right next to Mithraism and the usual Roman gods.

At that point I was annoyed, but willing to live with it. Then we encountered the Native Americans. The Iroquois (or Iroqua as the Romans have it) come off as the worst sort of 19th century stereotype of a Plains tribe (not to mention being a good 200 years too early), torturing prisoners to death, scalping those they slay in combat, etc. And then we find out they have hang gliders. Hang gliders from which they can use their bows. The Cahokians even have 12-man catapult-launched gliders and Greek fire.

I almost gave up, but the story was well enough written that I stuck with it. I was prepared to give it 2.5 stars and wish that Smale had filed off the serial numbers and set this in a purely fantasy world (like John Hornor Jacobs in The Incredibles for example).

And then came the final section of the book, which pulled me in completely and made me tear through the last 50 or 60 pages. He took the story in an unexpected direction and the ending is rather a downer, more in line what one might expect from the second book of a trilogy, not the first, but it was very strong. Strong enough to bring the whole thing back up to average and make it likely that I'll read the rest of the books when they come out.

I still wish he'd written this as a pure fantasy, though. show less

As a science fiction author, Alan Smale has more science chops than anybody in the field now. He has a Ph.D. in astrophysics and a distinguished career at the Goddard Space Flight Center. Yet his fiction has featured untechy alternate histories. In Clash of Eagles, for example, he has a Roman legion battling the Iroquois.

In Hot Moon, he at last finds an alternate history subject that exploits his considerable knowledge of space technology. The Russians beat us to the Moon in 1969, and Nixon show more abandoned Vietnam early to provide resources for Lunar exploration. Hot Moon opens in 1979 as the Soviet Union competes with the United States for Lunar resources. The Cold War heats up in cis-lunar space when a KGB agent shoots an assault rifle at Vivian Carter, a spacewalking astronaut from Apollo 32. It is indicative of Smale’s attention to detail that he has Carter speculate on how soon the rifle will overheat when it’s fired in a vacuum.

Smale is especially good at describing plausible Lunar vehicles and habitats. He also describes Lunar geography so well that you can almost smell the regolith. The pacing is excellent, and there are several characters we care about.

If you relished Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Moon or Allen Steele’s Lunar Descent, you will be right at home on Smale’s hot Moon, but be sure you wear your dosimeter. show less