MOONFALL

Big, bustling, medium-future global disaster yarn from the author of Eternity Road (1997). In 2024, just as the first manned flight to Mars is about to be launched, astronomers detect a strange new comet far out in space. Comet Tomiko is large, moving very fast—and in only three days’ time it—ll smack into the Moon! If Tomiko shatters the Moon, as seems likely, at least some of the debris will rain down on the Earth, but dying US President Henry Kolladner chooses to disregard this possibility to avoid sparking a general panic. Meanwhile, Moonbase’s owner, Evelyn Hampton, orders the Moon evacuated; among the last to leave, mere minutes before impact, are Evelyn herself and US Vice-President Charlie Haskell. Within hours, fragments of the Moon pound the Earth, triggering tidal waves and earthquakes. President Kolladner, fleeing doomed Washington, dies in an accident; he’d ordered a nuclear strike against one Moon fragment huge enough to devastate the entire Earth—but would the resulting cloud of radioactive wreckage prove just as lethal? At last, working closely with astronomers and space pilots, new President Haskell comes up with a better alternative: A fleet of space planes, operating in concert, might be able to nudge the fragment into a stable orbit. Plausible, panoramic, and sometimes exciting: another solidly engrossing entry from the dependable McDevitt.