The first part of Lunatics is all-back story. It starts in 1967 and ends with LBJ’s death in early 1973. (There is one exception——after von Braun first learns he has been offered a seat on Apollo XX, he flashes back to a memory of almost being killed in an Allied bombing raid in 1943).
The rest of the novel all takes place in 1974 during the astronauts’ stay on the lunar surface.
So there is quite a jump involved——from my frantic race through political history in the first part——to the concentrated activity of a few days in June of 1974.
Again the question of how to start…
For some time, it has seemed to me that I must start with the Moon itself. I must, in some respect, anthropomorphize the moon, give it its own voice. Dangerous business, and a huge change of pace from what the reader has encountered so far.
One of the poetic sections.
I remember talking to Anne de Grace about her recent novel Sounding Line. I told her that I very much liked the little evocative poetic sections that introduced several of her chapters. She told me that her editor hadn’t been so keen on those sections and that it was a battle to keep them in the book.
Hmm. Wonder if I might anticipate such a battle…
Provided the project ever gets that far…
Anyway, here’s my little poetic section. Poetic Lunar Geology100. Here’s how the chapter opens.
Thursday, May 30
Copernicus Crater
For 800 million years the dust and boulders of Copernicus Crater had waited as the solar wind blew across its regolith. The crater had endured the daily, yearly, eon-long bombardment of micrometeorites which ever so gradually had smoothed its slopes and darkened its ejecta, obscuring, one atom at a time, all evidence of former, unimaginable catastrophe. Yet even amid the galactic silence, the rocks had retained memory. The shattered, melted and fused remnants still carried within their mineral bones echoes. Of a time before time. When two great spheres collided. And the heat was immense and the rocks separated, congealed and flowed till, finally, newborn twin planets swirled together almost within touch of one another. Then, gradually, in a slow tearing, like siblings asunder, they drifted. Inch by inch, year by year, as the rocks cooled and the iron sank. And the lunar crust thickened into a light frothy feldspar.
A momentary calm.
The rest of the novel all takes place in 1974 during the astronauts’ stay on the lunar surface.
So there is quite a jump involved——from my frantic race through political history in the first part——to the concentrated activity of a few days in June of 1974.
Again the question of how to start…
For some time, it has seemed to me that I must start with the Moon itself. I must, in some respect, anthropomorphize the moon, give it its own voice. Dangerous business, and a huge change of pace from what the reader has encountered so far.
One of the poetic sections.
I remember talking to Anne de Grace about her recent novel Sounding Line. I told her that I very much liked the little evocative poetic sections that introduced several of her chapters. She told me that her editor hadn’t been so keen on those sections and that it was a battle to keep them in the book.
Hmm. Wonder if I might anticipate such a battle…
Provided the project ever gets that far…
Anyway, here’s my little poetic section. Poetic Lunar Geology100. Here’s how the chapter opens.
Thursday, May 30
Copernicus Crater
For 800 million years the dust and boulders of Copernicus Crater had waited as the solar wind blew across its regolith. The crater had endured the daily, yearly, eon-long bombardment of micrometeorites which ever so gradually had smoothed its slopes and darkened its ejecta, obscuring, one atom at a time, all evidence of former, unimaginable catastrophe. Yet even amid the galactic silence, the rocks had retained memory. The shattered, melted and fused remnants still carried within their mineral bones echoes. Of a time before time. When two great spheres collided. And the heat was immense and the rocks separated, congealed and flowed till, finally, newborn twin planets swirled together almost within touch of one another. Then, gradually, in a slow tearing, like siblings asunder, they drifted. Inch by inch, year by year, as the rocks cooled and the iron sank. And the lunar crust thickened into a light frothy feldspar.
A momentary calm.
