n the near future, the day after Neil Armstrong dies, a Saturn V rocket mysteriously appears on an abandoned launch pad and launches an Apollo moon landing. One witness to the event is NASA astronaut Rick Spencer. The ghost ship continues to send its telemetry back all the way to the moon, but disappears at the point when a pilot would take manual control for landing.
When the incident becomes a monthly event, NASA wants to seem in control.
They arrange for Spencer to enter the next ghost ship and ride it to Earth orbit to be picked up and returned to Earth by the space shuttle. Spencer decides, against NASA orders, to go all the way to the moon, voluntarily accompanied by shuttle astronaut Tessa McClain and a Japanese astronomer.
On their voyage, plagued by the ship's regularly beginning to de-materialize, they slowly realize that the existence of the ship depends on Spencer's belief that the space program is dying. Along the way, Spencer and McClain fall in love and plan to get married.
Although they return as heroes, Spencer and McClain are held captive by federal agents who believe their newly discovered paranormal abilities create a serious security risk. Spencer must escape and lead a group of sympathetic followers to free McClain, after which they are married at a grand wedding, with the pope and president presiding. The pope reveals the church has been secretly working for centuries to keep psychic powers in check, and the president asks Spencer and McClain to work to create a new mission to Mars.
Spencer and McClain work to make permanent space hardware, creating matter out of "quantum foam," but a Lithuanian dictator with psychic powers is conquering Europe. They decide they must intervene and save humanity's past before continuing to work on building its future.
Gonzo concept, but pedestrian SF
Abandon in Place is the latest novel born of the growing angst in SF-dom about American's near-abandonment, since the untimely demise of the Apollo program, of humanity's future in space. Oltion joins the numerous hard-SF authors in recent years--Benford, Bova and many more--who yearn to see the world finally send a manned mission to Mars.
Of all the novels lamenting our moribund space program, Oltion's concept is perhaps the most gonzo--beating out Terry Bisson's Voyage to the Red Planet. And there is a certain power in his metaphor of the sincere yearning of humanity creating the means to return to its destiny in space. The problem is that Oltion has chosen to treat this over-the-top concept in rather pedestrian hard-SF adventure fashion.
Where Oltion could have capitalized on the ironic ludicrousness of the situation that would be caused if reality could be controlled by the whims of the masses, he instead struggles to rationalize his characters' wish-fulfillment fantasies with hard-science mumbo-jumbo and tries to reinvent human history to explain how humanity could have always had these psychic powers, but seldom used them. He just can't quite make it believable.
Abandon in Place would have been more successful as a humorous romp through people's foibles as humanity tries to adjust to the new powers and responsibilities of its wishes starting to come literally true.
A gonzo concept deserves a gonzo treatment.
