Review by Duncan Lunan.

Celestial promises to be a novel set in an alternative timeline, where Project Apollo wasn’t cancelled, and an Apollo mission has been scrambled to the Moon because Soviet cosmonauts have made a major, mysterious discovery.  As such, it seems to invite comparison with The Apollo Murders, by astronaut Chris Hadfield  (Fig. 2), in which a superficially similar Apollo 18 is rushed to the location of the robotic rover Lunokhod 2, which has discovered something equally mysterious and is standing guard over it.

Such a comparison would be unfair to both.  Chris Hadfield has gone to great lengths to research the capabilities of the Apollo spacecraft and Lunokhod, and to portray a conflict between a cosmonaut and an astronaut making use of them, with both US and Soviet mission controls monitoring events, interfering, and generally making things worse, sometimes for irrelevant political reasons.  Celestial has none of that.  Its Apollo spacecraft can carry four people in comfort, its Lunar Module can land three people on the Moon in full spacesuits, and the Soviets can land Soyuz vehicles on the Moon carrying two cosmonauts apiece.  The Apollo developments might have been possible with the final version of the Nova booster, had Wernher von Braun been allowed to build it, and the Soviet ones might just have been attainable using Earth Orbit Rendezvous, an alternative plan of von Braun’s for Apollo which was also disallowed.  But they’re not the Apollo and Soyuz programmes that we know, and M.D. Lachlan isn’t concerned about the differences.

The one piece of hardware that’s in both novels is the cannon which the Soviets mounted on the Almaz 1/Soyuz 2 spacestation, and deployed and test-fired on Almaz 2/Soyuz 3  (Figs. 3 & 4).  In Hadfield’s novel it proves to be uncontrollable, killing an astronaut and a cosmonaut as well as wrecking the space station.  In Celestial it becomes a precision weapon, taking out the orbiting Apollo even though it’s attached much less stably to a Soyuz.  But this may never have happened:  the Soviets insist that we fired first, inflicting casualties on them, so neither side can return to Earth.  That’s our first indication that what turns out to be a buried spaceship, is capable of generating illusions both inside and out. 

There are obvious parallels with Algis Budrys’s novel Rogue Moon  (1960, Fig. 5), in which US explorers are trying to get through a mysterious artefact on the Moon which distorts the senses and kills people.  What the artefact is doesn’t really matter, because the novel is about the psychological tensions among the investigators.  I found it gripping when I first read it in the early 60s.  Gary Gibson, whom I respect as a writer and a critic, says on his blog that he found Rogue Moon disappointing, but he really loves Celestial for the madcap illusory worlds that the characters go through.  While I can see that Celestial has aspects of Alice in Wonderland, I’m afraid Gary and I will have to disagree about how enjoyable they are.

One major aspect which the publishers emphasise is that the central character, Ziggy, is sent to the Moon because she’s an expert in Tibetan studies, and the hatch into the buried spaceship has ancient Tibetan carvings.  For the plot, this proves to have no significance, except to make her a focus for the hatred of Griffin, the Lunar Module pilot, who has been tortured in Vietnam.  Evidently he doesn’t know the history of Tibet since 1950, since he sees her as a gook, and to him all Asians are gooks, all gooks are commies, and all commies are the enemy.  Asked in flight what he sees as the priority, on their mission to an alien artefact, he replies, “Dead commies”.  He clings to his gun like a comfort blanket throughout, though it transforms into many different weapons along the way, and the only real tension in the novel is whether he will eventually shoot Ziggy, to prove NASA was wrong to send her.  The voice of sanity, Toog, the Mission Commander, says to him at one point that he can’t understand how Griffin made it through astronaut selection with those attitudes, but Toog quickly gets killed, absorbed into the structure like the dead cosmonauts and a group of US Space Marines, who never existed except in the Russians’ minds.  I’ve met US citizens with attitudes like Griffin’s, but not in the Forces, definitely not among the astronauts, so perhaps Toog is right and the selection process is generally more effective.

The demonic figures in Buddhist art are personifications of bad qualities like greed and anger, which the trained mind can recognise as illusions and dispel.  As the hangups of the other characters take control, I expected Ziggy eventually to get the upper hand and lead them to safety, but it never happens.  After nearly being crushed in tunnels of wormlike roots, they have a series of illusory experiences in a huge underground pool like something from The Lord of the Rings films, then the Soviet commander dominates and they find themselves crossing Russian terrain in Baba Yaga’s three-legged hut, which takes them to the Norse World Tree Yggdrasil, because the other cosmonaut, Melnyk, is Ukrainian and has a Norse background, all interspersed with Griffin’s flashbacks to Vietnam and Ziggy’s own visions of her sister’s death, at which she wasn’t present.  (Those are just the edited highlights;  there are far more illusions than these.)  After they climb the World Tree, she has a moment of amazing power where she teleports Melnyk’s wife from Earth, but only so that she can join him as a squirrel in the Tree, which is what he always wanted.

The top of the tree is a spaceport, and the ship waiting to take them to Earth is an Eagle transporter from Space 1999  (Fig. 6).   It’s not clear whose fantasy that is.  Given the number of errors and non-sequiturs in that series, I’m not surprised that the ship turns out to be a lash-up, a load of spare parts stuck together.  Griffin isn’t sure whether it will survive atmosphere entry – but how the originals managed to get in and out of atmosphere, with their latticework structure, I never understood.  But it doesn’t matter, because instead we enter still another round of illusions, and I confess that by that time I was finding the shifts impossible to follow.  At the end the survivors escape in the Soyuz spacecraft and the Apollo, which was undamaged all along.

Finally the ‘Thunderbolt Vehicle’  (a metaphor for enlightenment in Tantric Buddhism)  lifts out of the lunar soil and heads off into space, presumably to convey the message that humanity now has space travel, as in Arthur C. Clarke’s The Sentinel.  But if this is what ‘breaks the fire-alarm’, in Clarke’s phrase, then what the recipients will make of this extraordinary mixture of recorded illusions, dead bodies  (real and imagined), and a World Tree with two sentient squirrels, I honestly can’t imagine.

Duncan Lunan’s recent books are available through bookshops and on Amazon:  details are on Duncan’s website, www.duncanlunan.com