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krpalmerIn the “it took until now” category (although I’ve added less there than some people have been positively productive), I’ve now signed up for a proper Internet Archive account. For all the scanned documents of ambiguous status I’ve found there over the years, I’ve also known it offers more conventional “books to be signed out for a while,” and in the current situation has resorted to removing its “no more people can look at these electronic copies than physical copies are on site” limits. The book I started with might not have been much in demand before, but it did take care of something long left incomplete.
Being fond of used book sales, some of them have stuck in my memory. One of those memorable sales happened back when I was in high school, put on by my home county’s library system but located in an available room in my home town’s decades-old former high school, long since converted into a sort of main street community shopping facility. To get to the sale I had to make a long bike ride in from the country (something I have to admit to rarely having done in any other circumstance), but there were plenty of books there, enough I had to turn a few merely eye-catching volumes up. One of those books had the title, perhaps just awkward enough somehow to stick in my memory, of Apollo At Go. Glancing through it I understood it to be a fictional anticipation of a first landing on the moon with a peculiar quasi-melodramatic touch or two. That wasn’t enough to make me add it to my purchase pile, and yet as I said the existence of the book did stick in my memory.
Many years later, watching a movie made just before the actual moon landing might have turned my thoughts back towards the book, and a bit of web searching located it on the Internet Archive. It took a while to sign up for the account needed to actually read it, but once I had I signed it out at once.
The copyright date was 1963, which did get my attention; the Apollo program had only settled on Lunar Orbit Rendezvous the year before. Peering at the book’s cover, I could make out the Lunar Excursion Module had a very preliminary design (having managed to buy a book at an “ordinary” used book store not that long ago with multiple concepts in it). I was willing to suppose that might make the book a little bit more interesting; on starting to read it, though, a sort of “off-kilter” feeling began building up almost at once when “stern tubes” was used where these days we might just say “rocket engines.” I might have remembered the book all these years with an unfair sense of “it must have been ‘slipstream’ science fiction, just about a ‘technothriller,’” and yet a term like that did have me thinking the book’s author Jeff Sutton might have had some connection to older science fiction. (I did manage a little while later to find a short entry for him in the “Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.”) From there, it was on to the crew being put together a few weeks before launch, somebody managing to speechify in the time a Saturn V “cleared its tower,” launch acceleration building to twice what the actual rocket managed (although the G-forces went that high during Mercury launches), and “CapComs” being spaced around the world as they’d been during the Mercury flights happening when the book had been written. Of course, I can’t fault Sutton for not working out every technical detail by himself years in advance, but it still felt oddly intriguing.
The book happened to set the landing in July 1969, but some days ahead of Apollo 11. Here, though, with comments the opposition had to be beat there hadn’t been any previous flights into lunar orbit (although communications satellites had been positioned to radio back from the far side of the moon), and a big deal was made of moon-orbiting dust sandblasting windows. Too, the landing just happened to be made during lunar night with the comment it would be easier to stay warm than cool on the surface, which made the approach rather difficult. I did keep wondering how the (repeated) real thing was supposed to be made more interesting and popular when narratives kept inventing difficulties. On the surface, the astronauts have a “after you; no, after you” discussion, and while there’s a point made of the first words spoken with boots on the ground they aren’t quite as memorable (if open to distinct possibilities of later revision and accusations of “blown lines”) as reality. If that sums up the book, it was something to have read the whole of it at last, and I did happen to notice another book by Sutton in the Internet Archive on a similar topic, still written before the actual landing but years closer to the reality.
Being fond of used book sales, some of them have stuck in my memory. One of those memorable sales happened back when I was in high school, put on by my home county’s library system but located in an available room in my home town’s decades-old former high school, long since converted into a sort of main street community shopping facility. To get to the sale I had to make a long bike ride in from the country (something I have to admit to rarely having done in any other circumstance), but there were plenty of books there, enough I had to turn a few merely eye-catching volumes up. One of those books had the title, perhaps just awkward enough somehow to stick in my memory, of Apollo At Go. Glancing through it I understood it to be a fictional anticipation of a first landing on the moon with a peculiar quasi-melodramatic touch or two. That wasn’t enough to make me add it to my purchase pile, and yet as I said the existence of the book did stick in my memory.
Many years later, watching a movie made just before the actual moon landing might have turned my thoughts back towards the book, and a bit of web searching located it on the Internet Archive. It took a while to sign up for the account needed to actually read it, but once I had I signed it out at once.
The copyright date was 1963, which did get my attention; the Apollo program had only settled on Lunar Orbit Rendezvous the year before. Peering at the book’s cover, I could make out the Lunar Excursion Module had a very preliminary design (having managed to buy a book at an “ordinary” used book store not that long ago with multiple concepts in it). I was willing to suppose that might make the book a little bit more interesting; on starting to read it, though, a sort of “off-kilter” feeling began building up almost at once when “stern tubes” was used where these days we might just say “rocket engines.” I might have remembered the book all these years with an unfair sense of “it must have been ‘slipstream’ science fiction, just about a ‘technothriller,’” and yet a term like that did have me thinking the book’s author Jeff Sutton might have had some connection to older science fiction. (I did manage a little while later to find a short entry for him in the “Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.”) From there, it was on to the crew being put together a few weeks before launch, somebody managing to speechify in the time a Saturn V “cleared its tower,” launch acceleration building to twice what the actual rocket managed (although the G-forces went that high during Mercury launches), and “CapComs” being spaced around the world as they’d been during the Mercury flights happening when the book had been written. Of course, I can’t fault Sutton for not working out every technical detail by himself years in advance, but it still felt oddly intriguing.
The book happened to set the landing in July 1969, but some days ahead of Apollo 11. Here, though, with comments the opposition had to be beat there hadn’t been any previous flights into lunar orbit (although communications satellites had been positioned to radio back from the far side of the moon), and a big deal was made of moon-orbiting dust sandblasting windows. Too, the landing just happened to be made during lunar night with the comment it would be easier to stay warm than cool on the surface, which made the approach rather difficult. I did keep wondering how the (repeated) real thing was supposed to be made more interesting and popular when narratives kept inventing difficulties. On the surface, the astronauts have a “after you; no, after you” discussion, and while there’s a point made of the first words spoken with boots on the ground they aren’t quite as memorable (if open to distinct possibilities of later revision and accusations of “blown lines”) as reality. If that sums up the book, it was something to have read the whole of it at last, and I did happen to notice another book by Sutton in the Internet Archive on a similar topic, still written before the actual landing but years closer to the reality.