Books: Phases of Gravity By Dan Simmons (1989)

"Richard Baedecker, a divorced former astronaut who walked on the moon, has hit a professional and personal low by the late ’80s. He still mourns the Challenger disaster, hates his mediocre civilian job, and can’t connect with his grown son. When he visits his son in India, Baedecker falls in love with his son’s friend Maggie, who shows him around the country and later meets him while climbing a mountain in Colorado. His travels, which take him to his Illinois birthplace and a colleague’s funeral in rural Oregon, are interspersed with flashbacks to his days at NASA. It's a story about a man's search: for love, for friendship, for family. Along the way, he'll solve a mystery."

 I find Dan Simmons’ Phases of Gravity hard to categorize. It’s not fantasy, horror, or science fiction –genre the author is well known for (Simmons is not known to stay in one lane, which I think makes him unique in a world that forces writers into one genre, book after book).  It borders on philosophy, with doses of speculative fiction and some element of magic as well. But ultimately, it may be just a novel about a former astronaut who walked on the moon who now is facing middle age and is sort of bored with his world, his life. His travels through this book show a man desperate for deeper connection in his life, but seems unsure who to turn to, the free-spirit Maggie, his son, or his two former astronauts –one who has turned to God and the other who has become a congressman. But all give him something to cling to. Since the book is set after the Challenger disaster, Simmons’ does comment on the differences between old NASA days when everyone was excited to land on the moon, and the days of the space shuttle, which now (until January 1986) was ever hardly noticed. Though, those ideals began to wane even in the Apollo days, along with Richard Nixon’s less than enthusiastic love for space travel.  

Some will find Simmons narrative style a bit difficult to get used to, as he jumbles the chronology of the book so that it can be confusing if he’s in the present (1988) or somewhere else along Richard’s timeline. There were parts that I liked, like when he returned to his small Illinois town of Glen Oak (which is probably near the town Elm Haven, which will appear in his later horror novels), but his time spent with Tom Gavin (one of his fellow astronauts) gets weird and while Simmons paints these Born Again Christians respectively, you also sense (like Maggie’s mantra, “I believe in the richness and mystery of the universe; and I don’t believe in the supernatural”) Simmons’ is making a statement about religion in an off-handed and sometimes mean way.

Phases of Gravity was released in 1989, the same year as his Hugo Award winning sci-fi novel Hyperion was published, so I can see where this book got lost in the shuffle. Still, even as an early work by this author, it well written -even if not everyone of his fans will like it.