Astronaut stayed grounded by writing a space thriller
In his long and varied career, Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield has flown fighter jets, walked in space and orbited the Earth for months while commanding the International Space Station. But until earlier this year, he never had to face the stomach-churning professional challenge of turning in a novel and learning that your editors think it is 35,000 words too long.
“They sent me back the first 30 pages, and I thought, ‘You have removed a whole bunch of words and ideas that, I’m pretty sure, are germane to what’s happening,’ ” Hadfield said in a video interview at the end of August.
He sounded cheerful about it, considering. Eventually, he began to trust the process, he said, to internalize the notion that “writers and editors have different skill sets and you need them both,” and even to understand that less can sometimes be more.
What emerged was “The Apollo Murders,” slimmed down by a third and now 480 pages long. The novel is set in the American space program in the late 1960s and early ’70s, a time of swaggering ambition and Cold War anxiety.
Featuring undercover spies, scheming Russians and psychopathic murderers, sometimes all at once, it teems with authoritative details about what it might be like, for instance, to throw up in space or to grapple with a deadly Soviet astronaut who assaults you during a spacewalk.
Calling Hadfield, 62, Canada’s most famous astronaut might seem like an oxymoron, or even a punchline, but he is probably
the most famous living astronaut of any nationality in the modern era. (Leaving aside billionaire wannabe astronauts.)
This is partly because his haunting 2013 performance of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” while aboard the space station — literally floating far above the world — has been viewed more than 50 million times. That has a way of raising a person’s profile.
It is partly due, too, to Hadfield’s gregarious nature, extensive social media presence (he has 2.3 million followers on Twitter and 373,000 on Instagram), TED talks, public speaking and teaching jobs, consulting work and bestselling 2013 book, “An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth.”
During the darkest days of lockdown, Hadfield emerged as a go-to comforter of the afflicted, dispensing advice on how to deal with uncertainty, loneliness and isolation.
“A spaceship is like a pandemic to its wildest extremes,” he said. “It’s truly life and death, you can’t ever go outside, you don’t know how long this is going to last, bad things can happen any moment, and you don’t have any other company.”
Hadfield retired in 2013 and did not want to succumb to the ennui that envelops many ex-astronauts who feel that their best days are behind them.
“We saw too many people who had retired and floundered,” his wife, Helene, said in a follow-up interview. “We’d been talking about it for years, what makes someone happy, and one of the plans for our post-astronaut life was that he would write a book.”
Her husband set out to write a golden-age space thriller, but he didn’t want to tamper with the past by putting real astronauts in fake situations. So he invented an alternate history, in which Apollo 18 — a real mission that was canceled during the Nixon administration — went ahead, as a spy mission.
“Right after Apollo 17 is an incredibly ripe time,” he said. “The politics of the time — the end of the war and the rise of women’s rights — was a lovely cultural crucible to put this story into.”
A lot was going on in the space race with the Soviets, too, and Hadfield was able to weave into his story the mysterious demise of two Russian vessels that malfunctioned and became inoperable under murky conditions.
Having never written a novel before, Hadfield did prodigious research, in part by rereading books by some of his favorite writers, like Dick Francis, John D. MacDonald and James Michener.
He took a fiction master class; he read Stephen King’s great memoir-cummanual, “On Writing”; he fretted.
“He was so scared, but I knew it would be good,” his wife said.