The Tranquillity
Alternative
by Allen Steele
Review by Sean Doorly
I was born in 1969, the year man walked on the moon. Ever since then I've been a space junkie. When I was a kid I woke up at the crack of dawn to watch the shuttle launches on TV. I read all of the classic science fiction authors: Bradbury, Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein.
Allen Steele writes for people like me. The ones who still believe in the space program and who dream of one day going up on a "pillar of fire." When they offer commercial passage to space, I'll be the first one to sign up (right after the author, I'm sure.) Allen Steele is a hard SF writer -- a sub-genre within the SF world where the author emphasizes technical accuracy.
"The Tranquillity Alternative" is a "what if " story. What if the U.S. space program started 20 years earlier? How far ahead, technologically, would America be? In "Tranquillity," the U.S. has a working space station called the Wheel and Tranquillity Base, a peaceful research instillation on the moon. There is a dark side to Tranquillity though -- Teal Falcon -- a lunar nuclear base with 6 nukes pointing at Earth. Thanks to political reasons (sound familiar?), the U.S. space program is in trouble and the government is forced to sell the long dormant Tranquillity base to foreign industrialists. Commander Gene Parnell is tapped to turn over the base to the new owners and dismantle the nukes. But someone on his team has other plans for the missiles at Teal Falcon. Parnell doesn't know whom to trust.
I've read all of Steele's novels (6 so far, one of which is a collection of short stories). I keep on coming back to his stories for many reasons. He "knows" space and technology and he writes one hell of an adventure. Steele was a science reporter adept at talking space lingo, and he's a thorough researcher. When Steele needed to fill in the details of his research, he posted on AOL and asked for help from the science fiction world. Steele is also a fan of science fiction himself. In his alternative world Star Trek was a hit when it was first aired -- any trekkie knows it tanked and Return of the Jedi is called Revenge of the Jedi. (Revenge is the original name Lucas had for the movie in our world but changed at the last minute.) Steele is a sci-fi writer for true sci-fi fans.
(Written for www.bookreporter.com)