The Tranquillity Alternative
Read The Tranquillity Alternative Online
Authors: Allen Steele
“An author with the potential to revitalize the Heinlein tradition.” —
Booklist
“The best hard SF writer to come along in the last decade.” —John Varley, author of
Slow Apocalypse
“One of the hottest new writers of hard SF on the scene today.” —
Asimov’s Science Fiction
“No question, Steele can tell a story.” —
OtherRealms
Winner of the Locus Award for Best First Novel
“Stunning.” —Chicago Sun-Times
“[Steele is] the master of science-fiction intrigue.” —
The Washington Post
“Brings the thrill back to realistic space exploration. It reads like a mainstream novel written in 2016 A.D.” —
The New York Review of Science Fiction
“A damned good book; lightning on the high frontier. I got a sense throughout that this was how it would really be.” —Jack McDevitt, author of
Cauldron
“An ambitious science fiction thriller . . . skillfully plotted and written with gusto.” —
Publishers Weekly
“A splendidly executed novel of working-class stiffs in space.” —
Locus
“Reads like golden-age Heinlein.” —Gregory Benford, author of
Beyond Infinity
“Readers won’t be disappointed. This is the kind of hard, gritty SF they haven’t been getting enough of.” —
Rave Reviews
“A high-tech thriller set against the backdrop of an alternative space program. Allen Steele has created a novel that is at once action-packed, poignant, and thought provoking. His best novel to date.” —Kevin J. Anderson, bestselling author of the Jedi Academy Trilogy
“Science fiction with its rivets showing as only Steele can deliver it. This one is another winner.” —Jack McDevitt, author of
The Engines of God
“With
The Tranquility Alternative,
Allen Steele warns us of the bitter harvest reaped by intolerance, and of the losses incurred by us all when the humanity of colleagues and friends is willfully ignored.” —Nicola Griffith, author of
Ammonite
“Unanswered questions, high-tech, hard-science SF adventure, and action—how can you fail to enjoy this one?” —
Analog Science Fiction and Fact
“Allen Steele is the best hard SF writer to come along in the last decade. In
The Jericho Iteration
he comes down to a near-future Earth and proves he can handle a darker, scarier setting as well as his delightful planetary adventures. I couldn’t put it down.” —John Varley, author of
Slow Apocalypse
“A portrait of a writer who lives and breathes the dreams of science fiction.” —
Analog Science Fiction and Fact
Allen Steele
In memory of Dot Hill
Introduction
S
CIENCE FICTION’S GREAT
question is, “What if?” Usually the rest of the question occurs within a futuristic scenario, although on occasion the setting may be in the present day. Every so often, though, the scenario takes place in the past, and therefore a somewhat different question is asked: “What might have happened if … ?”
This is the subgenre known as alternate history. My sixth published novel,
The Tranquillity Alternative
, falls squarely in that category.
In 1993, I was ready to start writing about space exploration again, after taking a break from the subject a couple of years earlier to produce my previous novel,
The Jericho Iteration
, which was set in St. Louis. However, I wasn’t ready to return to the Near-Space series, which had been the future-history setting of my first four novels and a dozen or so short stories. I’d enjoyed melding the near-future SF novel with the mystery-thriller and wanted to do another novel like that, only this time set in space. Yet many other writers were now doing much the same thing, with techno-thrillers like Payne Harrison’s
Storming Intrepid
or Dale Brown’s
Silver Tower
the typical result. I wanted to do something different: a novel that took place in the present day, but had the scope of my earlier Near-Space novels.
I was born with the Space Age. In January 1958, less than two weeks after my mother delivered me into the world, the first American satellite was launched from Cape Canaveral. My earliest memories include learning about Alan Shepard’s ride aboard
Freedom 7
, and my childhood was spent watching Gemini and Apollo missions on TV. So while I was fascinated by space travel from an early age, my interest didn’t come from the same place older Baby Boomers got their space jones: namely, books like
Across the Space Frontier
and
The Conquest of Space
, in which authors like Wernher von Braun and Willy Ley set forth a vision of cosmic exploration far more ambitious than that which NASA turned into reality. Similarly, my cultural touchstones were
Star Trek
and
2001: A Space Odyssey
, not
Tom Corbett, Space Cadet
and
Destination Moon
.
Nonetheless, I was aware of the 1950s visions of space exploration, and as time went by I became fascinated by this space program that we might have had if there had been a military US Space Force instead of a civilian NASA. My very first published story, “Operation Blue Horizon” (later revised as “Goddard’s People” and expanded even further into my most recent novel,
V-S Day
) was about what might have occurred if the first space race had taken place during World War II. Later, I explored this same alternate-history background with my short story “John Harper Wilson,” which depicted a different version of the first lunar landing on July 20, 1969. So I decided to revisit this scenario in a novel,
The Tranquillity Alternative
.
(As a quick aside: no, the second word of the title isn’t a typographical error. The Sea of Tranquillity has two
l
’s in it, a misspelling which goes all the way back to the original lunar maps. I went with what’s on the map, not what’s in the dictionary.)
The difference here, though, was that instead of taking place in the past, the novel would occur in the present; that is, the 1990s, a world in which we have not only the Internet, cell phones, and post–Cold War international politics, but also a stall-out of American space exploration due to public indifference and government budget cutbacks. Our world today, in other words, but with a giant wheel-shaped space station in orbit and a now-abandoned military base on the Moon.
The Tranquillity Alternative
was originally intended to be little more than a thriller, yet as it emerged from my keyboard, it became something more: a novel of protest, in which I condemned the factors that led to the US abandoning its plans to explore the Moon and venture outward to Mars and beyond. At times, the story took the form of satire—hence the segments about an alternate-history
Star Trek
and a late-night talk show whose host makes Jay Leno look like a Rhodes scholar—and I also took the opportunity to come down hard on anti-gay bigotry. But it’s a thriller that wears hobnailed boots, which I kicked against some bloated and self-satisfied backsides.
Yet at its core, it remains a science fiction novel. A tale of space adventure—just not as we know it. With
V-S Day
coming out, I’m very pleased that
The Tranquillity Alternative
has returned as an ebook. It’s not necessary to read one to understand the other; indeed, a minor inconsistency or two have probably cropped up between these two novels and their associated short stories. All the same, they form an alternate history of their own, and I hope you enjoy visiting this world that we might have had if only things had worked out a bit differently.
Allen Steele
Whately, Massachusetts
May 2013
The space station, with all its potentialities for exploration of the universe, for all kinds of scientific progress, for the preservation of peace or for the destruction of civilization, can be built. When the decision has been reached and the funds have been appropriated, the rest is only a matter of time. Many factors make the station inevitable—not the least the insatiable curiosity that has sent man across the oceans and finally into the air. Perhaps the military reasons for building such a station are in the long run the least significant, but in the existing state of the world they are the most urgent. Unless a space station is established with the aim of preserving peace, it may be created as an unparalleled agent of destruction—or there may not be time to build it at all.
Under the impetus of their considerations, perhaps the space station will become a reality, not a generation hence, but in—say—1963.
—Wernher von Braun,
Across the Space Frontier
(1952)If we had a base on the moon, either the Soviets must launch an overwhelming nuclear attack toward the moon from Russia two to two-and-a-half days prior to attacking the continental U.S., or Russia could attack the continental U.S. first, only and inevitably to receive from the moon some 48 hours later sure and massive destruction.
—Brig. General Homer A. Boushey,
director of advanced technology, USAF(as quoted by
Aviation Week
; September 29, 1958)President Harry S Truman; White House radio address to the nation, May 26, 1944
“My fellow Americans …
“Early this morning, a giant rocket was launched from a secret military installation in Germany. Unlike the V-2 missiles and buzz bombs which have been previously launched by the Axis against France and Great Britain, this rocket was a manned space plane, piloted by a single human being. This space plane, which is known to have been code-named the
Amerika Bomber
, was believed to have been carrying an eighty-ton incendiary bomb, which the Nazis intended to drop from high altitude above Earth’s atmosphere into the New York City metropolitan area.
“This sneak attack on American soil, the most scurrilous assault against a civilian population since the beginning of this war, was unsuccessful. It was foiled because our allies in Europe became aware of Nazi Germany’s efforts to develop such a weapon, and they warned us that an attack from outer space was forthcoming, thus allowing our own scientists to develop a countermeasure.
“At 5:35
A.M.
Pacific War Time on the West Coast, another space plane, this one built by the United States Army Air Force, was launched from a secret location in the southwestern United States. I can now tell you that this manned space-faring vessel was christened the
Lucky Linda
, and its single pilot was a young U.S. Navy captain named Rudy Sloman. In a feat of great daring, Captain Sloman flew his craft above Earth’s atmosphere, whereupon he intercepted the
Amerika Bomber
above the Gulf of Mexico and destroyed the invading space plane before it could complete its foul mission.
“Captain Sloman then piloted the
Lucky Linda
through fiery reentry in American skies and successfully landed his craft at Lakehurst, New Jersey, not far from the city he saved. Because of Captain Sloman’s heroism and the great efforts of the scientists and engineers who designed and built his craft, the United States of America has nothing to fear from Adolf Hitler and his Nazi war machine.