Apollo's Outcasts

October 22, 2012
Hugo-winning SF author Steele offers a fast-paced adventure set in the late 21st-century, sending a handful of kids to the Moon in the wake of a political coup in America. Jamey Barlowe, 16, was born on the Moon but raised on Earth; as a result of a low-gravity infancy, Jamey uses a multifunctional “mobil” chair to get around. En route, Jamey and his fellow refugees worry about the friends and family left behind in a now-hostile environment, where the new administration is imprisoning potential resistors and threatening to make war on the lunar colony of Apollo. Anxious to do something productive upon arriving in Apollo (and able to walk for the first time), Jamey joins the elite Lunar Search and Rescue, just in time to end up on the front lines. Steele adeptly mixes political intrigue, combat, and character development as he ushers Jamey through an action-packed trial by fire. Like the best Heinlein juveniles, the science is realistic and the concepts drawn from modern speculation, and there’s even some chaste romance. This is solid, space-faring fun. Ages 12–up. Agent: Martha Millard, Martha Millard Literary Agency.

October 1, 2012
Despite prose weaknesses, this space adventure with spectacular settings demonstrates that sometimes you can't keep a good plot down. One August night in 2097, in suburban Maryland, Jamey's father wakes him at midnight and tells him to pack a bag and hurry. The family piles into their van, and Dad inches it down the street with headlights off. The president's dead and the dangerous vice president's detaining activist scientists like Dad, who intends to hide his kids "[t]he last place [the government would] ever think of looking": Apollo colony, on the moon. But shuttle launches are no secret. Soon after the rushed launch, Navy jets and a missile barely miss taking them down. Jamey finds himself fighting propaganda campaigns and a lunar ground battle against the corrupt U.S. regime--all while getting accustomed to living on the moon, where, due to lower gravity, he can walk without his wheelchair for the first time. Nitty-gritty details about space travel, astronomy and lunar geography and geology (Apollo's mines provide "the principal source of Earth's energy reserves") are fascinating yet tightly crammed and hard to decipher. Steele's text is ever-factual, which is alienating during emotional dialogue. But nothing beats learning what it's like to walk around the moon and how the Earth appears from there. Awkward prose notwithstanding, this is for anyone who's gazed longingly upward. (Science fiction. 11-16)

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December 1, 2012

Gr 7 Up-Just after midnight on his 16th birthday, August 22, 2097, Jamey Barlowe's dad wakes him to tell him to pack a bag for a trip. This is easier said than done because Jamey has Lunar Birth Deficiency Syndrome and can't walk without the aid of his mobility unit. Although he was born on the Moon, he has lived on Earth since he was six months old when his mother died in an accident at the Apollo Moon Base. As they are driving, his dad reveals that the vice president has taken control of the White House after the president's untimely death. Now she has accused Dr. Barlowe and other Americans who work with the International Space Consortium of taking part in an assassination plot. Jamey, his sister, and four other children are being sent to the Moon for their own safety and so they can't be used as leverage against their parents. One of the other teens turns out to be Hannah Wilford, the daughter of the dead president. She reveals that her father actually died of natural causes and that Shapar's actions amount to a coup d'etat. While both martial law and resistance spread across the United States, the teens struggle to find something meaningful to do from the distance of the Moon. Steele combines the science fiction of Robert Heinlein with modern technical knowledge and political thriller sensibilities to create a novel that should have wide appeal.-Eric Norton, McMillan Memorial Library, Wisconsin Rapids, WI

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