by Allen Steele
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PRAISE FOR THE WRITING OF ALLEN STEELE
“An author with the potential to revitalize the Heinlein tradition.” —Booklist
“The best hard SF writer to come along in the last decade.” —John Varley, author of Slow Apocalypse
“One of the hottest new writers of hard SF on the scene today.” —Asimov’s Science Fiction
“No question, Steele can tell a story.” —OtherRealms
“The master of science-fiction intrigue.” —The Washington Post
“Allen Steele is among the best.” —St. Louis Post-Dispatch
“Steele writes with a spirit of exuberant, even exalted, optimism about our future in space.… Intelligent, literate, and ingenious.” —Booklist
“[Steele’s writing is] highly recommended.” —Library Journal
“A leading young writer of hard science fiction.” —Science Fiction Weekly
Orbital Decay
Winner of the Locus Award for Best First Novel
“Stunning.” —Chicago Sun-Times
“[Steele is] the master of science-fiction intrigue.” —The Washington Post
“Brings the thrill back to realistic space exploration. It reads like a mainstream novel written in 2016 A.D.” —The New York Review of Science Fiction
“A damned good book; lightning on the high frontier. I got a sense throughout that this was how it would really be.” —Jack McDevitt, author of Cauldron
“An ambitious science fiction thriller … skillfully plotted and written with gusto.” —Publishers Weekly
“A splendidly executed novel of working-class stiffs in space.” —Locus
“Reads like golden-age Heinlein.” —Gregory Benford, author of Beyond Infinity
“Readers won’t be disappointed. This is the kind of hard, gritty SF they haven’t been getting enough of.” —Rave Reviews
The Tranquillity Alternative
“A high-tech thriller set against the backdrop of an alternative space program. Allen Steele has created a novel that is at once action-packed, poignant, and thought provoking. His best novel to date.” —Kevin J. Anderson, bestselling author of the Jedi Academy Trilogy
“Science fiction with its rivets showing as only Steele can deliver it. This one is another winner.” —Jack McDevitt, author of The Engines of God
“With The Tranquillity Alternative, Allen Steele warns us of the bitter harvest reaped by intolerance, and of the losses incurred by us all when the humanity of colleagues and friends is willfully ignored.” —Nicola Griffith, author of Ammonite
Labyrinth of Night
“Unanswered questions, high-tech, hard-science SF adventure, and action—how can you fail to enjoy this one?” —Analog Science Fiction and Fact
The Jericho Iteration
“Allen Steele is the best hard SF writer to come along in the last decade. In The Jericho Iteration he comes down to a near-future Earth and proves he can handle a darker, scarier setting as well as his delightful planetary adventures. I couldn’t put it down.” —John Varley, author of Slow Apocalypse
Rude Astronauts
“A portrait of a writer who lives and breathes the dreams of science fiction.” —Analog Science Fiction and Fact
Clarke County, Space
“Lively … engaging.” —Locus
“A really gripping tale … This stuff is what I love the most about science fiction!” —The Texas SF Inquirer
Lunar Descent
“A well-balanced blend of hard science, adventure, and thoughtful extrapolation.” —Science Fiction Chronicle
“A triumph of the individual human spirit … excellent.” —Starlog
Time Loves a Hero
“Not only a story about time traveling and multiple worlds, but also a look at how science fiction inspired scientific endeavors … [Time Loves a Hero] demonstrates Steele’s growth as a writer.” —Steven Silver’s Reviews
Oceanspace
“Steele’s descriptions of the ocean depths and the unknown possibilities down there are first rate.” —The Denver Post
“Steele’s account of the undersea research facility that is the real star of this book is so thorough you’d think he had visited the place. The plot is complex and the characters real. There aren’t many people writing fiction grounded in realistic scientific explanation. Allen Steele is among the best.” —St. Louis Post-Dispatch
“The closest thing in years to [Arthur C.] Clarke’s The Deep Range. Steele has done his technical homework thoroughly and he writes with an eye to pacing and dry wit. Hard SF adventure doesn’t get a whole lot better than this.” —Booklist
Clarke County, Space
Allen Steele
For Damaris, Genevieve, Rachel, and Lilli—
a capricious quartet of siblings
And for Arthur, Elvis, and Bobby Zimmerman—
an unholy quorum of influences
“… I see the main use of space colonies as religious. They should be built, not as industrial enterprise, but in the spirit of the old cathedrals, like Canterbury. We should take it all very slow and build in meaningful earth-stories and myths. Clearly space colonies have more to do with myth than science or industry. I want the connection between the Indian Coyote stories and the space colonies to be very direct and clean. I want the building of the colonies to encourage folk life and country music and old time religion, not discourage it. I want the colonies to have a lot of winos and ne’er-do-wells hanging around the computer consoles, singing and praying and spitting and telling lies.… In my head I’m against all this space stuff. But in my heart, if they’re goin’ to build ’em, I want to be on one. I want to go to heaven, by hook or crook. I’d feel a whole lot better about it, though, if that guy hadn’t hit that golf ball on the moon. I sure do dread being locked up in outer space with ten thousand golfers.”
—Gurney Norman
Introduction
Clarke County, Space was my second published novel. It was also both a first and a last. It was the first novel I wrote after leaving journalism to become a full-time science fiction writer, so this wasn’t a book I wrote in my spare time after spending the day in a newspaper office. And it was the last thing I used a typewriter to write; halfway through the novel, I received my advance from Ace for this book and its companion, Lunar Descent, and used it to buy my first computer, a Tandy 2000 from Radio Shack (this was in 1989, and a decent Mac was still beyond my ways and means).
As I explained in the introduction to Labyrinth of Night, another early novel recently reissued by Open Road Media, Clarke County, Space wasn’t originally intended to be the follow-up to my first novel, Orbital Decay. Work had stalled on Labyrinth, though, and my editor at Ace wanted another book from me as soon as possible. There was also the fact that I’d recently walked away from a salaried job as a newspaper reporter and was trying to make ends meet as a freelance writer. So I was under pressure to produce another novel, and since I didn’t want to start grinding out media tie-ins and the like, that meant coming up with a novel off the top of my head instead of relying on the long, leisurely gestation process that had resulted in Orbital Decay.
I can’t recall exactly what was going through my mind when my newly wed wife and I took a Christmas-weekend ski trip to the White Mountains of New Hampshire. We’d rented a condo in North Conway and brought the dog we’d just adopted, Zack, along with us, so while Linda took to the slopes, Zack and I spent a couple of days on the cross-country trails (an old college back injury has kept me off the downhill trails). Somewhere al
ong the line, I brainstormed the plot for this novel, which I set in the same future history as Orbital Decay and a couple of short stories I’d recently sold to Asimov’s Science Fiction. The specific details of the book’s gestation, though, are now forgotten; when you’re trudging through a snow-covered forest on a pair of skis, with no one for company except the happy golden retriever romping along beside you, your thoughts can go in some interesting directions. In any case, by the time the holidays were over and we’d returned to the small log cabin in southern New Hampshire where Linda, Zack, and I spent our first couple of years together, I had the basic framework for this novel in mind as the substitute for Labyrinth of Night.
Clarke County, Space addresses many of the same concerns as Orbital Decay and Lunar Descent. Indeed, the three books can be considered a thematic trilogy; they share the same background and a few minor characters, and all three are about ordinary people who’ve come to inhabit near-Earth space colonies in the first half of the twenty-first century. I was a bit overoptimistic in postulating that a massive Lagrange point colony of the sort Gerard K. O’Neill postulated in The High Frontier might be possible by 2049, but one of the things I was trying to get at was the dissonance between the techno-hippie utopia forecast by O’Neill and the more realistic aspects of trying to build and maintain communities in space. All three books are about the independence of space colonies, but it’s with this novel that, in hindsight, I believe I got closest to figuring out the political and social structure: Inevitably, the only way to have one of these things function over the long haul is to establish it as an independent nation.
One aspect of this novel that drew a lot of attention when it was published in 1990 was the Church of Twentieth Century Saints, Elvis Has Risen, a.k.a. the Church of Elvis. The cult of personality that rose up around Elvis following his death in 1977 has subsided in recent years, now that a generation has come up that doesn’t have firsthand memories of the King, but when I wrote the novel in the late eighties, it was in full swing, with Elvis impersonators a common fixture in hotel lounges and rumors of a faked demise a routine staple of supermarket tabloids. So the Church of Elvis was satire of that, and also a linchpin for the convoluted plot at the heart of the story. What I didn’t expect was that, shortly after my novel was published, an actual Church of Elvis would come into existence; several readers wrote to tell me about it, but whether my novel was the inspiration is anyone’s guess.
In any case, Clarke County, Space is mentioned in Elvis After Elvis: The Posthumous Career of a Living Legend by Gilbert B. Rodman as one of several SF novels involving a divine Elvis—mine was the first, preceding others by Neal Stephenson, Jack Womack, and Bradley Denton—so it appears the book has found a place within the subgenre of Elvis speculative literature (El-Spec?). To tell the truth, though, I’m a much bigger Bob Dylan fan. That’s why he makes an appearance here too, albeit in a disguised form that I won’t reveal lest I give something away.
After the book was first published, a number of readers in Las Vegas wrote to ask whether Clarke County was based on their town; the presence of the Strip and the fact that Las Vegas is located in Clark County, Nevada, led some to think so. The truth of the matter, though, is that I hadn’t even been to Vegas yet; I named my space colony in honor of one of my literary heroes, Arthur C. Clarke. When the novel came out, I sent a copy to him in Sri Lanka, and much to my surprise, a couple of months later I received a very nice letter from him, thanking me for the book and saying some complimentary things about it. This was the beginning of a long-distance pen-pal friendship between Arthur and me that lasted for a few years near the end of his life.
Clarke County, Space was the first runner-up for the Philip K. Dick Award in 1991. For whatever reason, it’s the last novel of mine to have been nominated for a major SF award. I’ve published seventeen novels since then, so I suppose this doesn’t really matter. I’m just glad to have it reappear, and hope that you’ll enjoy it.
Allen Steele
Whately, Massachusetts
November, 2014
Two years later, I found myself sitting on a wooden bench on Canaveral Pier, just outside the little bar that’s located at the end of the boardwalk. The bar has a name, but even after having lived in Cocoa Beach for more than twenty years, I can never recall it. I doubt, in fact, that any of the residents know what the bar is called. One local says to another, “I’ll meet you at the bar on the pier,” and both people know which bar it is. It’s sort of like Clarke County. If someone mentions Clarke County, it is seldom asked where it’s located.
Canaveral Pier, along with the nameless bar, had been rebuilt by the town in 2018, after the original pier had been destroyed by Hurricane Judy two years earlier. It was just as well that Judy obliterated the original pier, considering that it had been slowly crumbling into the ocean at the time, a victim of the relentless battering of the Atlantic surf and its own decrepitude. The hurricane only saved the local taxpayers the expense of having it razed anyway.
The new pier was stronger, its timber reinforced with concrete and lunar aluminum donated by Skycorp and shipped from the Moon, yet it was a near-exact duplicate of the original pier, with arcade booths and food kiosks lining the boardwalk. The town could have just as easily replaced the pier with an artificial island similar to Disney SeaWorld, farther up the coast in Daytona Beach, but the residents and the Brevard County Chamber of Commerce, in their wisdom, opted for a replacement pier instead. The new pier retained the old-style, no-tech flavor of the twentieth century: weathered, whitewashed wood planks that burned the soles of your feet in summertime; ice cream that melted into gooey rivulets running down your knuckles and tasted slightly like salt, games that relied on keen eyes and a good throwing arm rather than biocybe implants at the base of your skull.
One of the small pleasures of the nameless bar on the pier were the old coin-operated telescopes on the deck outside the bar. You used to see a lot of them in the last century, on the overlook above Niagara Falls or on the observation deck of the Empire State Building, but they’re mostly gone now. The telescopes had crashed into the surf when Judy had totaled Canaveral Pier, but they had been salvaged from the wreckage and lovingly restored to the new pier. The telescopes—big round steel objects mounted on thick posts, a quarter for five minutes—were obsolete, of course. Even a cheap pair of fiber-optic binoculars had many times their magnification, and only one of the two telescopes worked at all.
But I loved the telescopes. They were reminders of the first time I had visited the bar, back in 1985 when I was a much younger man: in my twenties, a novice reporter for a midwestern newspaper, who had lucked into covering the launch of Space Shuttle Mission 51-D. That was the one in which a U.S. Senator, Jake Garn, had been sent up on a junket, doing little more than getting spacesick for the dubious benefit of science. A moment in history. The night before the launch a Canadian photojournalist and I had sat out on the deck, getting ripped on tequila and beer chasers, cracking awful jokes about Barfin’ Jake while an endless string of Jimmy Buffett songs had rolled out of the jukebox inside.
Those were the good old days, the pioneer years of the Space Age. Back then, when you dropped a quarter into one of the telescopes, you could view the old Titan and Atlas gantries along the Eastern Test Range on Merritt Island, south of the larger shuttle launch facilities at the Kennedy Space Center—Pads 39A and 39B and the original Vehicle Assembly Building, looming like a monstrous white block above the flat marshland. Next to the VIP stands and the Press Mound in the KSC, the bar deck was the best place from which to watch launches. It still is, even though the press has long since relinquished the Mound to the tourists.
Reporters rarely turn up for the Cape launches any more and the tourists would rather go to Disneyland. Finally, space travel became routine. The Titan and Atlas gantries are ancient history, replaced by pads for Big Dummy HLVS and various one-shot satellite carriers and the rugged old Mark II shuttles that lift off each day. NASA is still the la
ndlord, but it’s the private companies—Skycorp, Galileo International, Uchu-Hiko Kabushiki-Gaisha, Cheap Thrills inc.—which haul most of the freight and people to orbit.
They always said the day would come when seeing a space launch would be as exciting as observing trucks leaving from a loading dock, and eventually they were right. Now only the geriatric farts like me show up to watch when the rockets go. This is an impatient age. If medical science hadn’t kept me alive this long, I would be tempted to say that progress sucks.
And so … well-preserved at the age of ninety-three, one of the last of the original spacehounds sat on a wooden bench in the meager warmth of the afternoon sun on an early spring day. Retired from chasing deadlines, I wrote an occasional, redundant history of spaceflight, or sometimes banged out a science-fiction novel for the hell of it. Mostly I relished old memories, sometimes flew up to the University of Missouri for alumni reunions and to deliver lectures to bored undergraduates at the journalism school. As a venerable veteran journalist and self-acknowledged geezer, I never expected to get another tip on a hot scoop in my life.
For my past sins, though, God gave me one. A phone call placed to me by a name without a face had brought me to the bar without a name, and now a stranger pushed open the glass slide-door and walked out onto the veranda. He stepped in front of me and asked if I was who he thought I was.
“If I’m not,” I replied, “then I owe Social Security a lot of money.” It was a favorite line, calculated to make young turks respectful of my seniority. He smiled benignly. This one seemed reverent enough, so I decided to give the cranky-senior-citizen bit a rest. “I take it you’re Simon McCoy,” I added, returning his smile.
“Yes, sir. Thanks for taking the time to see me.” McCoy stepped forward, with hand extended. Half-rising from the bench to shake his hand, I took a closer look. Tall, slender, longish but well-groomed blond hair, wearing a white cotton sports coat, baggy plaid trousers and a blue bow tie, carrying a shapeless white Panama hat in his hand. Faint British accent, like an Englishman who’d immigrated to the States as a child. Athletic grace, which made me slightly envious: he could still climb a flight of stairs without effort, or turn a young woman’s head.