Reach

The Apollo and Skylab veteran's debut work of fiction - which fascinates not only with its futuristic space-adventure plot but with its authoritative, fully enthralling evocation of what space travel is really like. The year is 2038. The World Space Federation's Wayfarer One, sent on an outrageously expensive mission to study some unidentified objects orbiting just outside our solar system, has mysteriously shut down. A second mission, headed by astronaut/space-cowboy Jake Ryder and crewed by five of the world's most distinguished scientists, is hastily organized to determine the lost spaceship's fate. Ten months after liftoff, Wayfarer Two arrives at the rim of the solar system to encounter a destructive force beyond imagination - the underside of the universe that the heroes thought they knew. Writing in the abbreviated, action-oriented style of NASA ground-control communications, astronaut Gibson offers a sense of nuts-and-bolts realism perhaps not possible from any writer who has not actually travelled into space. The hyperactive workings of an astronaut's overloaded but romantic mind are frankly revealed here, as are his frustrations in dealing with a bureacratic space program and his utter joy when taking a superjet out for a Sunday afternoon spin. In this high-powered ambience, plot seems almost beside the point. An inspiring achievement - and a must for science and science-fiction aficionados. (Kirkus Reviews)