Book details of 'Moonfall'

Title	Moonfall
Author(s)	Jack McDevitt
ISBN	0061051128
Language	English
Published	January 1999
Publisher	HarperCollins

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The Virtual Bookcase Reviews of 'Moonfall':

Reviewer amazon.com wrote:
Over the last few years, Jack McDevitt has quietly been producing an outstanding collection of science fiction novels. Earlier works such as The Engines of God and Ancient Shores had a thoughtful, archeological-exploration bent, but with Moonfall he takes off the gloves to create a splashy, near-future science fiction thriller with a big cast of characters and a do-or-die attitude. At the center of the story is Charlie Haskell, the U.S. vice president, who in 2024--an election year--has arrived at the American Moonbase to cut the ribbon and declare it operational. But there's a problem, and it's a doozy: a "sun-grazer" comet, with immense mass and speed, is on a collision course with the moon. Haskell, with an eye to his public image, puts himself at the bottom of the evacuation list. But time grows critically short, and soon more than his political future is in jeopardy--broken chunks of moon will begin exploding outwards. If they reach Earth, some of the chunks are big enough to cause an extinction event. McDevitt pays attention to his science while revving the action, and the stakes couldn't be higher: Haskell's choices will decide who lives and who dies--if anyone survives at all. --Blaise Selby --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Reviewer Rob Slade wrote:
Watch out! It's a comet, come to wipe out ... no, not the earth. Just the moon. Then bits of the *moon* wipe out the earth. Wonderfully sympathetic characters. Interesting twist on an old premise. A bit *too* much tension: by the time the hero survives the cataclysm you begin to wonder why half the book is left, and by the end you are almost willing for everyone to die, just so long as the darn thing finishes! (Along the way a few too many of the plot twists are telegraphed well in advance: not a lot come as any surprise when they do show up.) An awful lot of people from NASA and other space institutions get thanked. In many areas careful research is evident. A number of astronomical, astrophysical, and cosmological facts are presented correctly. Readers of the RISKS-FORUM Digest would be quite happy with the fact that it is small errors, in combination, that create the biggest problems. However, when the plot action starts happening, all the careful research goes out the window. A major factor in the plot are a number of "single stage to orbit" spaceplanes. The space station seems to have an inexhaustible supply of fuel for them. However, the idea behind an SSTO is that while it uses a huge amount of fuel to get up, it needs almost nothing coming down. There just wouldn't be any reason to have that much fuel on hand. Now, despite what "BattleStar Galactica," "Starship Troopers," and other quality training materials may show you, fireballs do not billow, nor do clouds roll, in the vacuum of space. Absent the fairly minor curvatures imposed by gravity, and the effect of the odd collision, everything in space moves in pretty straight lines, including light, hot gases, and rocks of whatever size. Shockwave "fronts" do not exist in space. Dodging debris would be a zero sum game, since unless every piece had the same velocity, in which case matching speed once would take care of everything, decreasing your delta-V with respect to one chunk would tend to increase it with respect to something else. Also, having achieved the relative safety of earth orbit in concert with some of the bits that were going your way would give scant relief: shortly you would round the earth and start heading into a bunch of stuff going the other direction. Orbital dynamics is not a real strong point in this book. The biggest error, though, is granted to the biggest piece of rock. POSsible IMpactor number 38, dubbed Possum in the book, makes two very exciting passes on an elliptic orbit around the earth. The first one is definitely east to west, while orbit two is west to east ... copyright Robert M. Slade, 1999
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Book description:

It's the 21st century, and all is right with the world. Or so it seems. Vice President Charlie Haskell, who will travel anywhere for a photo op, is about to cut the ribbon for the just-completed American Moonbase. The first Mars voyage is about to leave high orbit, with a woman at the helm.Below, the world is marveling at a rare solar eclipse.But all that is right is about to go disastrously wrong when an amateur astronomer discovers a new comet. Named for its discover, Tomikois a "sun-grazer,"an interstellar wanderer with a hundred times the mass and ten times the speed of other comets. And it is headed straight for our moon.In less than five days, if scientists' predictions are right, Tomiko will crash into the moon, shattering it into a cloud of superheated gas, dust, and huge chunks of rock that will rain down on the earth, causing chaos and killer storms, possibly tidal waves inundating entire cities...or worse: a single apocalyptic worldwide "extinction event." In the meantime, the population of Moonbase must be evacuated by a hastily assembled fleet of shuttle rockets. There isn't room, or time enough, for everyone. And the vice president, who rashly promised to be last off ("I will lock the door and turn off the lights"), is trying to figure out how to get away without eating his words. In Moonfall,McDevitt has created a disaster thriller of truly epic proportions, featuring a cast of unforgettable characters: the reluctant Russian rocket jockey entrusted with the lives of squabbling refugees; the woman chosen to be first on the moon; the scientist who must deflect the "possum" (POSSible IMpactors) knocked from orbit or witness the end science itself. And at the center of it all is Charlie Haskell, the career politician who discovers his own unexpected reserves of only himself and his country, but for all humankind. Moonfall,is a spellbinding tale of heroism and hope, cowardice and passion played against the awesome spectacle of human history's darkest night.