By John Nance
Finishing my penultimate John Nance novel has left me speechless. In the Author's note at the beginning, Nance states that this is his best book he's written. That's the truth. While the other books Ive read in the past few months have been gripping and have kept me at the edge of my seat, Orbit is something else entirely.
The story is of a man who wins a seat on a private space ship that is going up for 4 orbits. A crisis leaves him alone and stuck. With only a laptop to set down his last thoughts, Kip Dawson pours out all his thoughts for the future generations that might someday recover the capsule. Unbenowst to him the world is reading his every word as he writes it. For the next 5 days society comes to a standstill.
There isn't very much aviation in this story. The President of the United States makes a jab about how Airbus would never snag a USAF contract on his watch (which Airbus did win and the contract is now being reevaluated.) The story also shows how with technology today the whole world could be connected real time to one event fairly easily.
There are problems to the story. Like any John Nance book you have to let reality take a back seat at some point. The things that the hero is able to accomplish during his flight to try and save himself are hard to believe. Untrained he attempts a spacewalk, rewires the capsule, follows the checklists to try and bring the capsule back to Earth, experiences multiple emergencies during reentry and finds and accomplishes the appropriate checklist to each... Well never mind, like I said if you can get past those bits you will find a story that is quite engrossing. It was also quite touching. While I've never read the book, Kip Dawson's tale reminds me of what I've heard The Last Lecture
is about.Orbit was quite a departure from the other John Nance books I've read but different in this case equals fantastic.
