11/10/2024
FREE Kindle download November 19 - 23!!
About 2008 I read South by Ernest Shackleton and anticipated an English-speaking worldwide centennial celebration of his 1914 Endurance expedition. I imagined an adaptation of his historic account but on the Moon. I wrote and published Shackleton Crater in 2009. Set in 2014, some of what I imagined in the novel became reality early, when a new President of the U. S. determined to end American manned space exploration, content to see China colonize the Moon.
I was not as prescient as I hoped however because 2014 came and went and Ernest Shackleton was ignored. South was ignored, and alas, Shackleton Crater was ignored. The early years in the new century were not the time for heroes. It was a time for historical revision in which heroes were reviled, in Britain and America. In just a few more years the statues came down, all of them removed in my home state, Virginia.
Readers of science fiction always want to know what of the science and technology is real, what they can reasonably hope to see in the future, and what is impossible. For Shackleton Crater, I drew upon what I learned in my twenty year attempt to become a full-time freelance aerospace journalist. Nearly all of the technology in the book was either working hardware in 2009 or easy to predict. I speculated and imagined about the Moon’s magnet flow from solar wind and followed the hopeful but at the time totally unfounded idea that there might be water ice in lunar dark regions. I took a wild guess, or perhaps artistic license, for the existence of lunar combustible complex hydrocarbons. Time will tell.
What inclusions might be impractical or even impossible, yet were necessary for the story, were mostly confined to the notion of astronauts living and operating in a cold trap. I read what I could find, which was not much, and in the end, simply, purely fictionally, wrote in suits and devices that functioned in that unique and still unexplored realm. I am very happy with some guesses since proven to the correct, and can say with confidence here, in 2024, that I believe there will be a robot dog (or surely a pack mule), on the Moon and Mars.
I wrote Shackleton Crater to entertain and educate readers, to participate in my own way in the expected big 2014 Endurance Expedition centennial party, to honor Ernest Shackleton and his crew, and I wrote it too, very much hoping to inspire as many readers as possible to take up and enjoy Shackleton’s South.
The phenomenally inspiring story of South and the science fiction novel version of that history, will be the most rewarding preparatory reading for when, in just a few years, the whole world will turn its attention to Shackleton Crater on the Moon.
