cover image Abandon in Place

Abandon in Place

Jerry Oltion. Tor Books, $24.95 (363pp) ISBN 978-0-312-87264-9

Nebula Award-winner Oltion (Frame of Reference, etc.) delivers a packed premise that never achieves its potential in this story of a young astronaut who makes a subconscious bid to renew America's space program. Shortly after Neil Armstrong's death, a phantom Saturn V appears on an abandoned NASA pad and launches itself to the moon. After two such supernatural launches, NASA puts astronaut Rick Spencer into the next ghost rocket with orders to decommission its engines on leaving the atmosphere and hitch a ride home with a passing shuttle. Once in space, however, Spencer abandons his flight plan and with two shuttle astronauts and the help of Russian mission control lands on the moon. When Spencer and his team return to Earth, they learn to harness the psychic power of the multitudes who have been following their lunar flight on TV. Oltion tries to explore the minutiae of the science and culture underlying the space program and to investigate collective paranormal psychology; unfortunately, he succeeds at neither. Though the protagonists are NASA-trained astronauts, they describe the most remarkable phenomena in unscientific layman's language. For all its ambitions, this novel never manages to create a single fully fleshed character, much less reach the overarching mysteries at its heart. (Nov.)