SPACE CASE

Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield launches his first novel The Apollo Murders, a thriller set in 1973 against the backdrop of the Cold War and the space race. The author shares insights on the process of crafting a novel that borrows heavily from his own space adventures and experiences.

On art imitating life

Everybody says write what you know. When you return from having flown to space three times and living off the world for six months, you’re faced with the question of what to do with this human experience. How can you share this? That’s why I teach, do interviews, write about it and do TV series about it. I thought writing a fiction book that would really give people a feel for what spaceflight is like would be an interesting personal challenge — but would also give readers an almost intuitive feel for the extremely rare experiences that I’ve been lucky enough to have.

On creating Russian characters

I lived in Russia for about five years. I was NASA’S director of operations in Russia for a couple of years. I have a good understanding of the Russian space program and, to some degree, Russia and its people. It’s so easy to categorize some other part of the world as one dimensional or maybe just two dimensional. But, of course, every single Russian person is different, and they each have their own desires. And there is no uniform, monolithic definition of what a Soviet or a Russian person is. People are motivated by their own goals and their own dreams, and they’re trying to be good contributors to their own particular part of society. That’s been my experience. In The Apollo Murders, I wanted to show that every single person in the book is imperfect and is motivated by different goals.

On keeping it real

It was really important to me as an astronaut and a test pilot that this book be real. Yes, it’s a thriller, but probably 95 per cent of the things in the book are real things — things that exist, things that happened, people who were real. Over half of the characters in my book are real people. So that made it a lot of fun to write. The book is completely based on the reality of what was going on at the time — the Russian spy space station, what was happening on the moon. Having the story so closely interwoven with facts about spaceflight adds a layer to the book that most mysteries don’t have.

On channelling the 1970s

When I wrote The Apollo Murders, I wanted to truly tell what was going on — how it looked from various individuals’ points of view. What did it look like from [U.S. president Richard] Nixon’s point of view? From [U.S. national security advisor Henry] Kissinger’s? From the head of the Soviet space program at the time? From [KGB head Yuri] Andropov’s? What agendas were they following? That allows for a clearer look at what we’re all doing right

now and recognizing how important it is to establish the rules and laws as we start to leave Earth permanently. Maybe readers will get a little better feel for those issues while they’re hopefully being thrilled and excited by The Apollo Murders.

On keeping space safe

Unfortunately, there’s nothing sacred about space. People are going to continue to act like people. Reconciling our differences over issues in space will never be perfect until people are perfect. And that’s not going to happen. And as soon as we start living permanently in space, we’re going to have to have controls in place. You need rules. You need laws. You need a legal system. You need societal norms. You need cultural norms. The International Space Station has had 15 nations, including some that fought each other to the death in the Second World War, who have lived for the last 20 years on a spaceship under the international crew code of conduct. That’s not an Earth set of laws; it’s our own set of laws that supersede what’s going on on Earth. And we have lived productively and peacefully and internationally on the space station since the year 2000 despite great varieties of animosity and political and financial troubles on Earth. And so that does bode well for the future.

On the essence of being an explorer

It’s fuelled by curiosity initially. But there’s a second piece to it. Curiosity’s fine, but that curiosity is useless without a desire to find out the answer. The real essence of exploration is to continuously be curious about everything around you — the world and beyond — but also with the unquenchable imperative to try to the best of our abilities to answer that curiosity and then make that answer part of the pyramid of understanding that you stand on. You can then ask even better questions in the future and hopefully, within your life, not just improve your own understanding of what’s around us but maybe also help other people better understand everything around us. That is my version and my understanding of exploration.

Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield served as commander of the International Space Station. His previous non-fiction works are An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth and You Are Here, as well as the children’s book The Darkest Dark. The Apollo Murders is on sale Oct. 12.

Listen to the full interview on the Explore podcast, to be released Sept. 6. cangeo.ca/explore.

THE BOOK IS COMPLETELY BASED ON THE REALITY OF WHAT WAS GOING ON AT THE TIME — THE RUSSIAN SPY SPACE STATION, WHAT WAS HAPPENING ON THE MOON.