Known for a fleet of aviation thrillers, John J. Nance extendes his boundaries into space with ORBIT.
Its premise proves as simple as its title: A few years from now, Kip Dawson, a pharmaceutical rep undergoing a midlife crisis, wins a seat on a short commercial flight into space. It’s a dream come true, but one not shared by his unloving, frigid wife and emotionally distant children. He goes anyway, a lone passenger on a small ship. Everything is hunky dory until a tiny space rock shoots through the ship, wiping out both its communications system and the captain’s head, leaving the ill-equipped Kip to pilot a spacecraft with limited fuel and oxygen.
Rather than sit and wait to die, Kip spends his time writing in great detail about his life – chicks he’s banged, regrets he’s harbored. Amazingly – even for fiction – the laptop beams down a signal that is hacked by a teenager in Australia, who informs the authorities about Kip’s code-red situation. The media immediately sniffs out trouble, and the world hangs on every word that Kip types. Meanwhile, the evil head of NASA, jealous over these private-industry flights into space, tries to sabotage every rescue mission.
For the first half of ORBIT, Kip’s story is the one you find yourself looking forward to when the narrative returns to the people he left behind. Oddly, this flips in the second half, where you’re more interested in the people’s reaction to Kip than you are to Kip himself, to the point where the expected third-act rescue is merely a distraction. Perhaps that’s because Kip’s space blog grows increasingly bizarre as he starts to rewrite his life, casting himself as an artist; it’s a scenario so schizophrenic, it’s detrimental to the action. Nance attempts to weave a romance into this tale, despite a separation of several layers of atmosphere. That doesn’t work.
But as a pared-down version of APOLLO 13, ORBIT is a passable – if unremarkable – thriller. Non-SF space adventures are almost always a good thing, and Nance provides just enough juice overall to keep the thing from crashing. Plus, it’s pretty slim for an A-list title, so your time investment should be kept to a minimum – just like Nance does with the usually over-technical flightspeak, which should win him over new fans. –Rod Lott
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Less than three months after its release, this book is already available for about five bucks at your local B&N clearance rack. That’s gotta be some kind of record.