The Tranquility Alternative [Hardcover]

Allen Steele (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1, 1996

In an effort to promote world peace, America embarks on its final lunar mission, to retrieve nuclear warheads placed on the moon during the 1960s at the height of the Cold War.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

In another alternative history, the U.S. space program begins in 1944. But now interest in nonmilitary space exploration has waned, and funding for the program has diminished. Commander Gene Parnell heads a team shuttling from Earth to the lunar Tranquility Base to launch six Minutemen II rockets into the sun before turning the base over to a German aerospace company. The mission may be foiled, for an imposter among the crew plans to sabotage the launch. Steele vividly re-creates the experience of manned space flight through excellent technical detail. Highly recommended.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Hard-sf veteran Steele takes America's faltering space program for a wry spin in this clever, suspenseful alternative-history novel. After 50 years of extraordinary progress that includes manned spaceflight in 1944, a giant orbiting station called the Wheel, and a 1976 Mars expedition led by Neil Armstrong, the U.S. space program is dying out. NASA's final moon mission takes place in 1995, and the crew must dismantle a nuclear missile base, deemed unnecessary thanks to the cold war's thawing. Veteran astronaut Gene Parnell and crew are instead sent, along with computer hacker Paul Dooley, to turn the base over to the rising European space program and to launch the missiles into the sun. Shortly before liftoff, though, Dooley is replaced by an impostor, and at least three other crew members have a hidden agenda that includes retargeting the warheads toward Earth. Alternative history rarely works without some oblique commentary on our own times, which Steele slyly delivers in snippets from skewed news reports in one of his best efforts to date. Carl Hays

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 306 pages
• Publisher: Ace Hardcover; 1st edition (March 1, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0441002994
• ISBN-13: 978-0441002993
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,281,652 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Allen Steele is a science fiction writer with sixteen novels and five collections of short fiction to his credit. His works have received the Hugo, Locus, Seiun, and Science Fiction Weekly awards, and have been nominated for the Nebula, Sturgeon, and Sidewise Awards. His first published story, "Live from the Mars Hotel," was published in 1988, and his first novel, Orbital Decay, was published in 1989. His best-known work is the Coyote series -- Coyote, Coyote Rising, Coyote Frontier, Coyote Horizon, and Coyote Destiny -- and the associative novels set in the same universe: Spindrift, Galaxy Blues, and the forthcoming Hex. A graduate of New England College and the University of Missouri, he is a former journalist, and once spent a brief tenure as a Washington correspondent. He was born and raised in Nashville, Tennessee, and now lives in western Massachusetts with his wife and dogs.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Rousing Good "Alternate History" Yarn, November 27, 2006

By 

Terry Sunday (El Paso, Texas United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Tranquility Alternative (Paperback)

I have a soft spot for "alternate history" stories. Philip K. Dick's "The Man in the High Castle," which posits that the Axis powers win World War II and occupy the United States, and Len Deighton's "SS-GB," which looks at England under Nazi German occupation, are two of the best of the genre (Harry Turtledove's many such tales notwithstanding). Now I must add Allen Steele's "The Tranquillity Alternative" to the short-list of alternate history novels that I have most enjoyed.

The "space geek" will immediately feel right at home in Mr. Steele's alternate universe. This is a universe in which the first manned spaceflight, in Nazi Germany's "Amerika Bomber," takes place in 1944. It is a universe (in this way like our real one) in which NASA is in serious decline due to slashed funding, personnel cutbacks and the lack of a meaningful mission. And, most intriguing of all, it is a universe in which Dr. Wernher von Braun's early-1950's vision of a major space exploration program comes to pass. You'll find in "The Tranquillity Alternative" all of the hardware that Dr. von Braun conceived and presented to the American public via a series of stunningly illustrated articles in "Collier's Magazine" starting in 1952. The "Space Wheel" is here in all of its full rotating glory, along with the enormous three-stage reusable "ferry rocket," the "lunar reconnaissance vehicle" and the classic "moonship" that fans of Chesley Bonestell will instantly recognize. There is a U.S. lunar base under the Sea of Tranquillity. Ominously, it houses six "interplanetary" ballistic missiles, relics of the time when U.S. military planners thought that basing nuclear weapons on the moon would deter Soviet aggression on Earth (they really did believe this at one time). And there is even a nuclear-powered rocket straight out of George Pal's 1950 film "Destination Moon."

"The Tranquillity Alternative" features interesting, well-defined characters, realistic dialogue and a strong story line involving the pending transfer of the abandoned Tranquillity Base from the U.S. government to a private German space corporation. Mr. Steele keeps the action going at fever pitch as the scene shifts from Earth to the Space Wheel and on to the Moon. He throws in fascinating glimpses of everyday life that add depth and texture to his alternate universe. For example, the Kennedy Space Center is named after President Robert F. Kennedy. Elvis Presley is on tour with U2. Chuck Yeager pilots the maiden flight of NASA's giant new passenger rocket in 1956. And Irwin Allen's "Star Trek" is a top-rated television show for eight seasons between 1958 and 1966. These little throw-away hints of a very different universe from our own are jarringly unfamiliar but logically and internally consistent. They show well the amount of research, thought and hard work that Mr. Steele put into "The Tranquillity Alternative." This is fun stuff. I highly recommend it to all sci-fi readers and to anyone interested in exploring a little of "what might have been."

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Alternate History Thriller, August 14, 2006

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Kara J. Jorges "Avid Reader" (Minneapolis) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Tranquility Alternative (Hardcover)

In this novel of alternate history, the United States has gone further in the exploration of space than in reality, yet at the same time has taken several steps back. The story is told through a series of interviews and news stories sprinkled throughout the events that occur as the US sends its last manned mission to the moon. Some different politicians have been elected, altering the course of history just enough to affect the space race.

During the Cold War, the United States built Tranquillity Base on the moon, mainly for scientific purposes, but there were also six nukes stashed a few miles away in another crater, called Teal Falcon. The government had managed to keep the nukes a secret for awhile, until outed by the media. The United States experienced a second wave of flak when it was discovered President Dole authorized their use during Desert Storm. In a symbolic gesture, just before the USA sells Tranquillity Base to a German company, it sends one last manned mission to the moon to fire the Teal Falcon missiles harmlessly into the sun.

Unbeknownst to the crew of the Conestoga, the rocket ship taking them to the moon, one of them is an impostor, his agenda unknown. While his identity is no secret, his back-up is another, unknown member of the crew. It's not Commander Gene Parnell, who had helped install Tranquillity Base all those years ago, but there is reason to suspect the two German astronauts who rendezvous with the Conestoga at a low orbit space station. Also suspect is second in command Cris Ryer, a lesbian who is being shoved out of NASA for her sexual preference, a cause of great bitterness. Along for the ride are an annoying team of journalists, Rhodes and Bromleigh, Leamore, the token Brit who works for the Germans, and Lewitt, who Commander Parnell takes into his confidence, as he can't seem to trust anyone else. Commander Parnell has only one chance to stop the unknown plot involving Teal Falcon from unfolding and creating unknown havoc, and makes a few mistakes until he figures out who his enemies really are.

Compared to other Steele novels I've read, the pace of this one is a little slow, merely meandering along until the Conestoga reaches the moon and then getting page-turningly exciting when things start to happen. It seems to be more of a sad commentary on what could happen if we lost our interest in space and its exploration than a story about bad guys trying to get their hands on nuclear weapons. Though not as gripping as some of Steele's others, this is still a good novel with a unique spin.

3.0 out of 5 stars Flat fiction in sci-fi garb, December 18, 2008

By 

M-I-K-E 2theD "2theD" (The Big Mango, Thailand) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Tranquility Alternative (Paperback)

Has Golden Age feeling yet reads like a pulp fiction novel with a dash of hard SF in an alternative history context. The idea that humans have traveled into space before the 1950s has been written about in SF before (consider Baxter's short story collection Traces). While the idea may be a bit crackpot and conspiratorial, I find it rather dull. The book reads like pulp fiction (rather than science fiction) with flat characters and a hokey easily unfolding plot. Yet, the story line is fast paced and has twists and turns... BUT overall flat when it comes to original SF.