Adrift on the Sea of Rains (Apollo Quartet 1), by Ian Sales - book review

[Patrick Mahon]

Overall rating: 4.5 stars (out of 5)

Review:
‘Adrift on the Sea of Rains’ is the first in a four-novella series of alternate reality hard science fiction stories by British writer, anthologist, book reviewer and Chronicles regular, Ian Sales.

This first volume of the Apollo Quartet tells the story of Colonel Vance Peterson and his crew, condemned to a slow, lingering death on a US Moonbase after nuclear war obliterates all life on Earth. Their one hope is ‘The Bell’, a piece of Nazi-era technology that is able to throw them into parallel universes. If they can jump to a parallel timeline that precedes the nuclear exchange, perhaps they will be able to look up at an Earth that is a living blue once more? But can they survive the endless tedium and an almost total breakdown in the relationships between the astronauts while they’re waiting?

This is definitely a novella for the hard SF fan. It is well researched and stuffed full of Apollo-era terminology – so much so that the book includes a list of acronyms and a glossary, explaining not just what the APS (Ascent Propulsion System) is, for example, but also the launch schedule of the real and imagined Apollo missions that created the Moonbase which Colonel Peterson commands.

Sales is adept at switching between detailed descriptions of the technical equipment that keeps these few remaining humans alive in the hostile environment of the Moon’s surface and haunting evocations of the emptiness of their daily routines, carried out in the increasingly vain hope that the mysterious Bell machine will rescue them from despair. You can almost taste the claustrophobia.

Colonel Peterson comes across as a man who is barely holding himself together in the face of their likely fate. Anger seethes just below the surface, and his constant need to get into his spacesuit and go for a walk outside the base highlights how isolated from his crew he has allowed himself to become.

I really enjoyed this novella. Like Sales, I’m a child of the Apollo era. While studying physics at university I got very interested in the technical detail of those missions and I remain in awe of NASA’s achievements at that time. I love reading science fiction that ties itself into the far from mundane realities of astronautics, and Sales has done that in spades. If you’ve watched some of the Apollo footage, perhaps even read books about the missions, and wondered what it might have been like to have actually been there, this story will put you right there with Colonel Peterson on Mare Imbrium, the Sea of Rains of the title.

My only slight criticism of the book follows from the above. This is an alternate reality story, where the Moon missions did not stop with Apollo 17 but continued for several years, with both civilian and military funding, and led to the building of a lunar base and a space station in Earth orbit. Most of this material is extrapolated from contemporary plans, so is certainly technically feasible. On top of this, however, the plot also involves the use of ‘The Bell’, a hypothetical Nazi ‘torsion field generator’, whose existence has been the subject of much speculation by Witkowski and others over the last decade or so. The effects of the device in this story, which are absolutely central to the plot, are however produced through a great deal of handwavium. Yet the glossary at the end of the novella includes all its entries – those that actually happened in our reality, those that might have happened if the Apollo programme had not been cancelled, and the invented properties of the hypothetical ‘Bell’ device – on an equal footing. Although that makes sense within the story context, I found this a bit confusing, and I think a little more flagging of the nature of the different entries might have been helpful to those not quite so intimately familiar with the history of manned spaceflight as Ian Sales so clearly is. This is, though, a minor quibble.

For those who like their science fiction hard and precise, ‘Adrift on the Sea of Rains’ will be a very welcome treat. I loved it, and I can’t wait for the next volume in Sales’ Apollo Quartet.

 

[Abernovo]

A good and fair review, I think. I've almost finished Ian's novella and I'm thoroughly enjoying it. Very much hard sf, as you said, but that's my sort of thing.

What surprised me was that I'm not normally a fan of present tense, which a good portion of the novella is written in, but it didn't faze me at all in this instance. I got absorbed into the story straight away.

 

[SFF Chronicles News]

8th August 2013 02:44 PM

Tim James

To start with this is not the normal type of book that I would choose to read, and it is not a full length, rather a novella.

Set in an alternative time line where the world suffered a third world war in the 1980′s and has been shattered by nuclear armageddon. The only known survivors are a group of US astronauts living on the moon, isolated and alone they face a rather bleak future, with only a faint hope in the form of a device recovered from the Nazi’s at the end of World War II

The above might make the book seem to be some Science Fantasy romp, but it is not, probably one of the most ‘hard’ Science Fiction books I have read, where in many ways the emphasis is on the science. It is easy to believe that the lunar base is real, that spaceflight is real because the information we are supplied with, the description and science feels*real. It is obvious that Sales knows his stuff and his research is in depth and encompassing. I would imagine it would have easy to hit the reader again and again with in a lot more detail, but he has in fact hit the balance just right. Not too much, rather just enough to give the feeling that what is being read could be real.

Even the more fantastical elements of the story, in this instance The Bell are things that have been drawn from reality, or at least reported in reality. The space-station that appears towards the end of the story really existed. The technology is real. So there is that feeling that this really is an alternative universe, somewhere close to our own, where the Moon program continued well beyond *where it did in our own.

Unfortunately, as stated that is not the only change, and nuclear war happened too. And this plays a major part in narrative, as the main story is interspersed with ‘flashback’ sequences, each one a little further back in time, featuring the principal character, ending with a little twist where we find the moment where our realities diverge.

It is highly entertaining reading, easily capturing the depression and near despair of the men trapped on the moon, and delivering opposing emotional responses as the story continues, while giving an ending that will make you want to throw the book across the room – in a good way.

In all, well written, a good story, and it made me keep reading even though it is not my normal fare? What more can I say?

Ian Sales has been a member of Chrons since 2006, and has been active in all that time, regularly posting and adding insightful comments to a variety of threads. This book is the first part of a quartet of books, so three more to come, the second of which The Eye With Which the Universe Beholds Itself*is already available.

 

[Brian G Turner]

Just finished reading this, and really enjoyed it.

The style was very clever in that it created an infectious sense of isolation and dissociation from the POV character of Peterson.

And, despite the 'alternative earth' nature of the story, all the technicalities of space came through loud and clear. Perhaps I haven't read enough hard SF, as it put me in mind of Tom Clancy's Hunt for Red October. There wasn't much character development other than the POV character - most of the lunar crew were just names - but it would be difficult to expect too much from such a short novella.

My only real criticism is that the story was far too short - I really would have liked to have read more. There was such a good build-up and tension that it was disappointing for that to finished.

A very enjoyable read, and a very accomplished story.