Customer Reviews

Children of Apollo

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

The author of Children of Apollo has a very shrewd eye for the time period he is writing about, even though in the style of alternative history he has changed certain events of the early 1970s to suit him and his story. His slightly enhanced Apollo program seems to have altered just about everything, to the course of the Vietnam War, to the Middle East, to the fortunes of one Richard Nixon, and even popular culture (at one point he has one of Stephen King's early novels taking place on board a haunted space station.)

While Children of Apollo is primarily an adventure story about space exploration, it also has a certain element of satire. Included in the list of the author's targets for gentle (and sometimes not so gentle ribbing) are the forementioned President Nixon, a young and randy Bill Clinton, Steven Spielberg, Madeline Murray O'Hara, William Proxmire, liberal Democrats in general, the Soviet Union, and various spooks, federal agents, astronauts, and politicians.

The book is a delight to read. It has a feel of being about events that actually happened, even though they did not. I found myself sincerly wishing that a woman really had walked on the Moon around Christmas of 1975 and being sad that she did not.

This book, for me, represents the best and worst about self publishing. The best because sometimes good books simply are not picked up by publishing houses, and this one deserved to be published. The worst because a commercial publisher would have cleaned up the prose and made this book really shine.

The plot is really good. Well crafted. Exciting. Good pacing. But the text is rife with spelling and grammatical errors (I didn't count but I'm thinking on average more than one per page). Even a mediocre copy editor could have fixed 99% of the problems with the text. Now, if this book had been crappy in general, I wouldn't have cared. But it is actually a great story. Thus, my frustration stems from the fact that a very good book is dragged down by easily fixable stuff, most of which MS Word would have picked up. It's just plain sloppy.

Some examples of what I mean: Berkeley is not spelled "Berkly". Camaro is not spelled "Camero". Taut is not spelled "taunt". Aide is not spelled "Aid". Applause is not spelled "applauds". Champagne is not spelled "champaign". Asti Spumante is not spelled "Asti Spurmanti". Las Cruces is not spelled "Las Cruzus". Alan Shepard (the astronaut) is not spelled "Alan Shepherd". To add insult to injury, the author does actually spell the name correctly once... Baikonour is spelled in three ways in the book, both incorrect. Proper grammar does not include things like "going to fight for if-no when-you send me to Congress." Stylistically, there are gems like "They looked at each other in for a moment, sharing the awful truth they had just shared."

Then we have the technical errors. I will grant that the author is not an aerospace expert but for this book a modicum of research would have been required. Finding a pilot to answer a few questions would have greatly improved the test flight passages. Certainly no pilot would ever "jerk the joystick". There's no jerking involved. In fact no pilot would EVER call it a "joystick". It's just a stick.

ARGH!

In conclusion. I would say that Mr. Whittington has some real talent. But he needs to let a real editor loose on the text before publication.

Children of Apollo is an adventure story, a spy story, a story about politics, and most important a story about people. I don't ordinarily read "what-if" books, but this one held my attention for some reason. I've always been a fan of the space program, so I found this story about space missions which never flew in "our history" compelling.

Besides, I rather identified with Wendy Pendleton, the first woman to walk on the Moon in the story. I found most of the other charecters, even the not so nice ones, well drawn.

I recommend this book highly.

Such a great plot concept. The execution was very junior varsity. Countless spelling and grammar mistakes. For example, one character drives a Camaro, but in the book its constantly written as "Camero." Also, aerospace company McDonnell Douglas is constantly referred to as "MacDonell Douglas." For a book that is trying to authoritatively discuss "what if" Nixon kept Apollo going etc. etc. , to constantly make spelling errors, forget words where needed etc. etc.- works to undermine the entire story.
The characters are cartoonish. From the Soviets, to Nixon, to liberal peaceniks, to the astronauts - all coming off like a parody.
There are glimpses of excitement and interesting plotlines, but the junior varsity nature of the writing quickly diminishes it...

The author of this novel must have been very disappointed when the year 2001 did not resemble the movie 2001. Children of Apollo is set in an alternate history when, instead of cancelling the last three Apollo missions, the United States flies them and then adds three more. The book obviously has a message or two to impart, the content of which is only obvious with careful reading. The story itself is well worth reading, weaving in a variety of plots populated with interesting and fully realized charecters. Even if one disagrees with the author's premise, the novel is compelling enough to be enjoyed regardless.

The author of Children of Apollo crams in just about everything but the kitchen sink in his story set in an alternate history of the Apollo Program. I would have prefered a little less political intrigue and a lot more space exploration (hence only four stars), but aside from that I thoroughly enjoyed this story. I kind of wish it were a true story and not entirely fiction in a world in which Apollo dominated the 1970s instead of being dominated by that decade.

The remarkable thing about Children of Apollo is how it read like a history novel, even though most of the events depicted as having "happened" in the early 1970s never in fact occured. These "events" include a Korea style resolution to the Vietnam conflict, no Watergate scandal, and most fascinating to me a series of Apollo missions to the Moon which in real life were either cancelled or never even considered. The story of Apollo 23, which occupies the latter third of the book, is especially gripping.

A problematic work - I had much the same reaction as both the complimentary and negative in the reviews. I almost abandoned it - but in the end I'm glad I didn't.

I rather enjoyed the plot - actually the politics and intrigue more than the space action. There was certainly a degree of cleverness in the ideas and the premise for justifying the continuation and expansion of Apollo. I also enjoyed Nixon becoming the second coming of JKF in his space leadership!

Although most of the characters were thin, a few were nicely drawn. I found that Kawalski, in particular, rose above the rest. I was also moved by the idealism and possibilities envisioned in the coda. Ahhh - what could have been for a little leadership, pluck, and funding!

Or could it? Perhaps we could be living in 2001 right now if government had continued to provide inspiring leadership backed up with vast expenditures, or perhaps not. It's wonderful to imagine, but I'm just not sure the additional infrastructure - materials science, processing power, battery technology, manufacturing techniques, etc. could have proceeded apace to allow private ventures to realize a profit launching payloads of any significance - especially manned. As such, I found the solution the crisis at the end to be perilously close to a deus ex machina. Maybe it could have happened that way, but probably not. At any rate, entrepreneurial flights to the moon in the mid-70's are a nice dream.

I also found tiresome the pervasive anti-liberal sentiment - even though I am not totally unsympathetic. I can certainly understand why the author would make Democrats antagonists for wanting to defund the space program (Lauren was perhaps an extreme caricature of Mondale?). However, space exploration is not inherently counter to liberal philosophy as the author suggests, and as such it was a bit unfair to portray liberal idealists as grotesque. Many conservatives were also against NASA and manned space exploration for fiscal reasons. But - that is how the author chose to tell his story, and he's certainly entitled to do it his way. (I was wryly amused that Clinton was considered beneath contempt from a man who would justify murder as political speech!)

Plot resolution aside, several other things detracted from my full enjoyment of the book, mostly due to the obvious lack of editing. Amateurish writing, typos, missing words, grammatical mistakes, repeated sentences, etc., all made me feel as if I was looking over the author's shoulder as he banged away at the word processor. And, someone very much needs to inform Mr. Whittington of the difference between "its" and "it's." Junior varsity indeed.

Anyway, the book provides a nice vision of how the space program should have continued after Apollo. It's worth a read for Project Apollo and space enthusiasts, but I doubt the general reader will be able to get past the book's many flaws.

I ALMOST didn't bother to finish this book (something I almost never do). I'm a fan of "hard" sci-fi, cut my teeth on Heinlein and Clarke, and have a special love for "alternative history". Although Whittington's premise is plausible, he brings almost nothing new to the story, even throwing in some dialogue and situations from other fiction and non-fiction books about the early days of NASA. But what really got me, and I admit I'm a bit picky, was the OBVIOUS lack of editing. Not only is it filled with numerous, repeated mispellings, but even whole words used inappropriately. And it's Madalyn Murray O'Hair, not O'Hara, or O'Hare as she becomes in the end. Halfway through, I thought "This HAS to be self-published", and I was right. Both of this author's books have been published by Xlibris, and they'll publish yours, too, for $375. I'll volunteer to be your editor.
But, y'know, fatuous as I found the writing in the early going, it grew on me, and I found that I actually liked it. Probably won't read it again, but I liked it. So might you, if you can get past the lack of editing.
And to the reviewer who considered it "liberal-bashing", it didn't seem that way to me, even though one of the "heavies" is a liberal Congressman. It was that "either-or" approach to the space program espoused by the liberals of the time that killed it. Pretty hard to tell a story of an alternate history without mentioning that. It would be like writing a real history of WWII without including Neville Chamberlain. And the Speaker of the House is certainly a sympathetic character. Whittington does get in a couple of digs at some guy from Arkansas, but doesn't mention him by name. And you'd have to be in really deep denial to think that the Soviets didn't "run" Americans during the Cold War. Look up the Venona Project. I'm sure we were doing the same (I hope). "(International) Politics ain't beanbag!"

Children of Apollo made me laugh quite a bit, even during the tense moments during the latter portion during the mission of Apollo 23. The author has a lot to say about the period of which he writes beyond the space program, including some people who really lived in that era. His President Nixon, for example, is sly, duplicitous, paranoid, and more than a little cunning. Surprisingly it is shown how such a dubious person could set the world on a course to the stars for narrow, political motives. There is an eclectic group of fictional characters, including an astronaut heroine, a radical Congressman, an African American pilot/aerospace project manager, a somewhat nerdy NASA Administrator, and a CIA analyst who is often in over his head. The attitude toward politics is slightly cynical, but never toward space exploration. Perhaps the message is, good things can come of dubious beginnings.