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A review by djotaku
Adrift on the Sea of Rains by Ian Sales
3.0
I got this book in audiobook form as part of a Humble Bundle that had a bunch of other space exploration non-fiction books that I was interested in. The other day I had run out of podcast episodes so I loaded this into my audiobook program.
This is a very short book - probably novella length so it's difficult to discuss without spoilers, so there will be some minor, unmarked spoilers ahead. The story takes place in an alternate timeline where the USA never stopped exploring the moon after the Apollo Project. In this alternate timeline, a group of men have become trapped on the moon and are trying to figure out how to get back home.
It is an old fashioned SF story that reminds me of the style of the short stories in GRRM's Nightflyers collection. If the reader is a NASA nerd they'll probably get a huge kick out of the technical details in the story. For me as someone who just casually follows NASA and was listening to a bunch of acronyms, it could become a little dense. For example, a regular book would have said, "Commander so-and-so pushed the ignition button." But this book had text like, "Commander so-and-so pushed the BLAND (button lander alternative neutral dummy) button"
The glimpses we get of the world via the story are interesting. And I'm not against reading the rest of the quartet. But after the way this story ends, I'm curious where the author goes from here.
This is a very short book - probably novella length so it's difficult to discuss without spoilers, so there will be some minor, unmarked spoilers ahead. The story takes place in an alternate timeline where the USA never stopped exploring the moon after the Apollo Project. In this alternate timeline, a group of men have become trapped on the moon and are trying to figure out how to get back home.
It is an old fashioned SF story that reminds me of the style of the short stories in GRRM's Nightflyers collection. If the reader is a NASA nerd they'll probably get a huge kick out of the technical details in the story. For me as someone who just casually follows NASA and was listening to a bunch of acronyms, it could become a little dense. For example, a regular book would have said, "Commander so-and-so pushed the ignition button." But this book had text like, "Commander so-and-so pushed the BLAND (button lander alternative neutral dummy) button"
The glimpses we get of the world via the story are interesting. And I'm not against reading the rest of the quartet. But after the way this story ends, I'm curious where the author goes from here.