Orbital Decay
| Orbital Decay | |
| Near-Space [1] | |
| Allen Steele | |
| Legend (1989) | |
| Rating: | ★★★★☆ |
| Tags: | Fiction, Science Fiction, Space Opera |
Winner of the Locus Award for Best First Novel: At work aboard a battered space station, a team of blue-collar laborers stumbles upon a surveillance plot of unprecedented scope
Popeye Hooker knows that space isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. A former fisherman who takes a job building low orbital stations to escape a failed relationship, he finds that in space, construction work is still a grind. And when they aren’t building the space stations that will usher humanity into the stars, Sam Sloane and the rest of the beamjacks get high, blast the Grateful Dead, and stare through telescopes at the world they left behind. But life in orbit is about to get much more interesting.
Nestled among the life support equipment that keeps them alive and the entertainment systems that keep them happy, the beamjacks find something astonishing. Turns out, their home isn’t just a space station—it’s a giant antenna designed to spy on every inhabitant of Earth. It’s the greatest privacy invasion ever perpetrated, and the beamjacks won’t stand for it. They may not be pioneers, but these roughnecks are about to become revolutionaries.
The beamjacks are the builders of the future: the zero-G workers who are assembling satellites in the vacuum of space. Management and the military think they have the beamjacks under control -- but they're
wrong
.
Steele's debut is an ambitious science fiction thriller somewhat marred by amateurish technique. The central story is skillfully plotted and written with gusto: narrator Sam Sloane and a group of 21st-century hard hats called "beamjacks" foil an Orwellian venture into global wiretapping by the U.S. National Security Agency. The author uses a familiar device effectively by setting his story in the near future, 2016, with the culture of the 1980s serving as a believable past. But his straightforward adventure tale is encumbered by two unconvincing and poorly integrated complications: a clumsy narrative framework consisting of memoirs dictated by Sloane, stranded in space without the likelihood of rescue; and a series of flashbacks recounting a crime of passion committed by Sloane's buddy, who eventually becomes part of the space-station work crew. In addition, the narration alternates confusingly between the first and third person.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.
“An author with the potential to revitalize the Heinlein tradition.” —
Booklist
“The best hard SF writer to come along in the last decade.” —John Varley, author of
Slow Apocalypse
“One of the hottest new writers of hard SF on the scene today.” —
Asimov’s Science Fiction
“No question, Steele can tell a story.” —
OtherRealms
Winner of the Locus Award for Best First Novel
“Stunning.” —Chicago Sun-Times
“[Steele is] the master of science-fiction intrigue.” —
The Washington Post
“Brings the thrill back to realistic space exploration. It reads like a mainstream novel written in 2016 A.D.” —
The New York Review of Science Fiction
“A damned good book; lightning on the high frontier. I got a sense throughout that this was how it would really be.” —Jack McDevitt, author of
Cauldron
“An ambitious science fiction thriller . . . skillfully plotted and written with gusto.” —
Publishers Weekly
“A splendidly executed novel of working-class stiffs in space.” —
Locus
“Reads like golden-age Heinlein.” —Gregory Benford, author of
Beyond Infinity
“Readers won’t be disappointed. This is the kind of hard, gritty SF they haven’t been getting enough of.” —
Rave Reviews
“A high-tech thriller set against the backdrop of an alternative space program. Allen Steele has created a novel that is at once action-packed, poignant, and thought provoking. His best novel to date.” —Kevin J. Anderson, bestselling author of the Jedi Academy Trilogy
“Science fiction with its rivets showing as only Steele can deliver it. This one is another winner.” —Jack McDevitt, author of
The Engines of God
“With
The Tranquility Alternative,
Allen Steele warns us of the bitter harvest reaped by intolerance, and of the losses incurred by us all when the humanity of colleagues and friends is willfully ignored.” —Nicola Griffith, author of
Ammonite
“Unanswered questions, high-tech, hard-science SF adventure, and action—how can you fail to enjoy this one?” —
Analog Science Fiction and Fact
“Allen Steele is the best hard SF writer to come along in the last decade. In
The Jericho Iteration
he comes down to a near-future Earth and proves he can handle a darker, scarier setting as well as his delightful planetary adventures. I couldn’t put it down.” —John Varley, author of
Slow Apocalypse
“A portrait of a writer who lives and breathes the dreams of science fiction.” —
Analog Science Fiction and Fact
Allen Steele
Part One: A Hard Day in the Clarke Orbit
6. Hooker Remembers (A Night on the Town)
10. An Inch Away from Eternity
13. Hooker Remembers (Where Did She Go?)
This one’s for Linda because of all the right reasons
And for her favorite band
, The Grateful Dead
“Just as the oceans opened up a new world for clipper ships and Yankee traders, space holds enormous potential for commerce today. The market for space transportation could surpass our capacity to develop it. Companies interested in putting payloads into space must have ready access to private sector launch services… We will soon implement a number of executive initiatives, develop proposals to ease regulatory constraints, and, with NASA’s help, promote private sector investment in space.”
—President Ronald Reagan
State of the Union address
January 25, 1984
“… In recent years there has been an increasing amount of interest and speculation in the area of space colonization and space habitation…. It is only fair to point out, however, that far too much space colonization work has been pure Utopian dreaming; historically, there is nothing wrong with this if you keep fact and fiction delineated. Similar Utopian dreaming heralded the opening of the new frontiers of the past. Cathay was once a magical kingdom with great wizards and magic that were really advanced technology beyond the comprehension of visitors. Par Araby was a place of jinns, flying carpets and odalisques ready to do your every bidding. America was a land of milk and honey where the streets were paved with gold and even if they tossed you in jail it was in golden chains. California was a land of perpetual sunshine where it never rained. And the space colony offers us a pastoral existence with trees, grass, grazing livestock, happy farmers and dancing children eating goat cheese…. But opening a frontier is a deadly, difficult, gut-tearing job that requires the best people that the human race can produce and demands its toll in lives and property.”
—G. Harry Stine
The Space Enterprise
“Sure, we had trouble building Space Station One—but the trouble was people.”
Introduction—Robert A. Heinlein
“Delilah and the Space Rigger”
I’m very pleased that, at long last,
Orbital Decay
is being released as an ebook. At the very least, it means that readers will no longer spill coffee on their first-edition paperback copies … as I did just a few minutes ago.
I was quite proud of this novel when it was published in 1989. I still am.
Orbital Decay
wasn’t the first novel I wrote—that was
Play Dirty
, which I wrote as a college student—but it was my first fiction sale, and thus the first book of mine to see print. I wrote
Orbital Decay
during the mid-eighties, while I was in my twenties. I was a grad student at the time, working on my master’s degree in journalism at the University of Missouri. I wrote the novel in the afternoons and evenings, stealing time from my coursework—and sometimes my classes, when I felt like playing hooky—so I could pursue my ambitions of becoming a science fiction writer, which I intended to support with a newspaper career. I finished
Orbital Decay
while working as a staff reporter for a weekly alternative paper in Worcester, Massachusetts, a job that became increasingly frustrating as time went by. Two weeks after my editor at Ace Books, Ginjer Buchanan, informed me that she wanted to buy the novel, I tendered my resignation at
Worcester Magazine
and became a full-time SF writer.
Orbital Decay
’s success assured me that I’d never have to work for a newspaper again.
I’ve been intrigued by space exploration for as long as I can remember. One of my earliest memories was Alan Shepard’s suborbital flight aboard
Freedom 7
. I spent my childhood watching all the Gemini and Apollo missions on TV, becoming a pint-size space aficionado in the process. My love for science fiction was born at the same time, which only made sense; SF was the only form of literature that routinely dealt with space flight. I wanted to be an astronaut when I grew up, but when it became apparent that that wasn’t going to happen—colorblindness would prohibit me from ever becoming a military pilot, which was pretty much the only way to get into the NASA astronaut corps—I decided to turn a certain talent for storytelling into an earthbound substitute for space travel and become a science fiction writer instead.
I was in college when the space shuttle
Columbia
made its maiden voyage in 1981, and I believed then that human history had just reached a turning point and that we were on the way to becoming a spacefaring species. The future looked rather bleak at the time, with the Reagan administration pursuing a nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union, and World War III seemingly just around the corner—but suddenly things seemed a bit more promising. I was then writing a contemporary novel about the nuclear industry and the anti-nuclear movement, and I eventually finished that book mainly because I’d already committed three years of my life to it, but I wasn’t terrifically upset when
Play Dirty
failed to find a publisher. I was already plotting my second novel, which would be a true-quill science fiction story about a future which was apparently just beyond the horizon.
I sold
Orbital Decay
in early 1987, just a month after my twenty-ninth birthday; my publisher’s backlog delayed its publication for over two and a half years. So more than twenty-five years have passed since I typed the novel’s final words on the Smith Corona Office Electric Standard now rusting away in my basement, and I realize that I may have been a bit over-optimistic in the scenario I projected for 2016. We still don’t have solar power satellites or lunar bases; NASA’s remaining
Columbia
-class shuttles are now in museums, and second-generation shuttles with fully reusable flyback boosters didn’t get past the drawing boards. Although I acknowledged the
Challenger
disaster in a chapter I inserted in the novel’s second draft, I didn’t anticipate the long-term chilling effect it would have on American space exploration as a whole.