This Kingdom of Dust by David Dyer

David Dyer’s first novel was the excellent retelling of the Titanic story – The Midnight Watch. He returns with a novel that delves into another major global event – the Moon landing. And while this one was not originally a tragedy, Dyer’s This Kingdom of Dust explores the question: what if it was?

This Kingdom of Dust tells the story of Apollo 11, the first manned landing on the Moon, and considers what might have happened if the lunar lander could not return to Earth. Dyer has two main frames of reference for this story. The first is Buzz Aldrin, second in command to Neil Armstrong. And the second is a journalist called Aquarius (a stand in for Norman Mailer) who has been employed by Life magazine to write about the Moon landing from a technical perspective but is more interested in writing about Aldrin’s wife Joan.

Dyer’s version of events follows actual history up until the Moon landing itself. Then things start to go wrong. The lunar lander cannot take off and neither the astronauts themselves nor mission control can find a technical fix. Dyer stays with Buzz and Neil as they work through all of their options and the series of protocols for this situation developed by Mission Control (these actually existed). On Earth, Aquarius is trying to find a way to get closer to Joan, but also meets Madalyn, a forceful atheist who has been campaigning for NASA to be a religion-free organisation. Joan herself has to keep up the front of a loyal astronaut’s wife while also trying to find a way to help Buzz in any way she can.

Dyer uses his characters and their circumstances to explore some interesting thematic territory. He looks at the role of religion and the intersect between religion and science, he explores the life of the astronaut wives, who had to put their lives on hold and find themselves being part of the NASA PR machine. And he looks at the way in which people deal with and process impending tragedy. He is particularly interested in the relationships between Buzz and Neil and between Aquarius and Joan as this tragedy plays out.

Unfortunately, in the end, Dyer pulls his punches a little. The public failure of the Moon landing would have had significant political ramifications for the United States and the space program as a whole. Some other alternate fiction – For All Mankind, for example – has gone some way to exploring a different future for the space program. But by ending where he does and how he does, Dyer falls short of exploring the potential longer term ramifications of his scenario. But this is a minor quibble as what Dyer does deliver is a thought-provoking alternate history that explores a number of universal issues through the eyes of a group of fascinating characters.

This Kingdom of Dust by David Dyer

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8.0/10