Orbit: A Novel (Mass Market Paperback)

~ (Author)
Key Phrases: private spaceflight, private spacecraft, forward panel, Kip Dawson, Bill Campbell, Geoff Shear (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

For Kip Dawson, an unhappily married man with a son who blames him for his first wife's death, winning a trip into orbit is a dream come true. But when a meteorite slices through the ship, killing the pilot and severing all lines of communication, the dream quickly becomes a nightmare. Nance is well-known for his aviation thrillers, and with Orbit he successfully ventures into the near future with this tale of privately funded space flight gone awry. Nance is no newcomer to narration and it shows. He reads with an assured, confident voice and moves the story along with the pacing of an expert raconteur. His vocal modulations to distinguish between characters are subtle but effective. Most of his accents sound true. The use of a walkie-talkie like voice filter to indicate when characters are speaking over the phone or radio is a nice touch that makes conversations more vivid. Kudos to Nance for crafting such a taut thriller and for infusing his performance with such heart and vigor, proving that he is the only person who should narrate his books.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Booklist

In Nance's eighteenth novel, the scene is once again set in the wild blue yonder. It's 2009, and the protagonist, Kip Dawson, has won a seat on an American Space Adventure spacecraft, Intrepid, which will orbit the earth. There are problems: a rock smashes into the craft, killing the pilot and the radios, leaving Dawson to fly it back to Earth. He writes his epitaph on the craft's laptop computer, not knowing that thousands of people have received it on the Internet, triggering a vast struggle to rescue him. As always with Nance, there is plenty of aircraft jargon to please his techno-crazed fans. George Cohen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 416 pages
• Publisher: Pocket Star (March 27, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 074347662X
• ISBN-13: 978-0743476621
• Product Dimensions: 6.7 x 4.1 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (41 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #531,088 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

33 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The best Nance has written, March 4, 2006

By	ellen "ellen in atlanta" (Atlanta, Georgia USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Orbit: A Novel (Hardcover)

I have to pay for my books - so when I buy all the authors I follow, I have big expectations that I will be entertained, excited, informed, entranced, all of the above and more.
Orbit: A Novel satisfies on so many levels - A story about Kip Dawson, who has won a trip on a commercial space craft and what happens to him. Things go awry, and he is the only living person on the damaged craft. Thinking his life will end in a matter of days, he turns to the onboard laptop to sort out his feelings about his life, his career, his family - his words keeping him company, so to speak. Unbeknownst to him, the laptop is beaming down his thoughts in realtime - and the earth seems to stop to see his plight and feel his life experiences, and his initial fear that he will die and orbit for decades above the earth.
This book captured my heart. I started it late one night and finished the next morning - amazing. Orbit transcends to what have we done in our life, who we have loved, and the relationships not taken, and what could we do if we had a second chance, and wipe the slate clean.
Nance better crack his knuckles, and think of a doozie for his next piece, because he has set the bar sky high with this one.

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Exciting thriller with intriguing aeronautical twist, March 1, 2006

By	a reviewer and avid reader (Laramie, Wyoming) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Orbit: A Novel (Hardcover)

This book is a masterpiece! Somehow John Nance manages to get better with every work and this is a crowning achievement: a unique, unprecedented, clever plot, with heart-stopping action and a level of humanity and painful truth about the agnst of an ordinary man in an extraordinary circumstance that only a deep humanist could articulate.
Kip Dawson is any one of us, male or female. His thoughts, unwittingly transmitted to the world, are the very thoughts so many men would like to deny or will never face. As one of the character says, it's not the way he's lived, but the way he's dying that's so moving.
Most hrillers aren't able to get to a depth of more than an inch or so of true characterization, let alone able to plumb the depths of the human psyche as in ORBIT. Kip is an entirely new character for a thriller. And with Kip, John Nance has utterly redefined what a thriller can be. You will love this book. You will cry with this book! You will REMEMBER this book.
The Kirkus review of ORBIT is complimentary in many ways, especially in calling this book a "guilty pleasure". The line about "manly men doing manly things" is laughable because ORBIT is an incredibly sensative story, beautifully portrayed, light years from some tale dripping in testosterone. Kirkus usually does justice to a review; however, this reader should re-read and re-consider.
Read ORBIT. Recommend it to your friends and family. Celebrate the accession of a truly talented writer to an even higher plane (no pun intended). And email Oprah to get John Nance back on her show to talk about Kip Dawson and ORBIT... the type of breakthrough book she should be championing!

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars a Space Odyssey for one....., April 1, 2006

By	Richard G. Jerskey "Rich G Jerskey" (Main Camp) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Orbit: A Novel (Hardcover)

A regular guy with his share of regular problems gets a break....he wins a lottery to go into space on a private space shuttle. Of course his wife has to put a damper on it by laying a serious guilt trip down but nevertheless he goes. That's where the story starts to get interesting. He gets stuck in orbit due to a freak accident which kills the pilot/astronaut and wipes out much of the controls. There are no other passengers on board due to some last minute unexpected circumstances. After several bouts of sheer panic, he manages to take an inventory of what he's dealing with and what he's in for. There doesn't seem to be a thing he can do to save himself so he starts typing an inspired running journal of his thoughts, on a laptop which he finds, which is being streamed back to earth (unknown to him). This is probably what helps him keep his sanity as his resources evaporate onboard. Meanwhile, on earth there's all kinds of dramas being played out due to not only the stranding of the shuttle in space but also because of the fantastic public sympathy and response to his downloaded and live musings which are of a personal nature for the most part. The book resolves nicely with an ending that may be just a little hard to swallow but still quite satisfying. A very readable and enjoyable novel.