KINGS OF INFINITE SPACE

This is Nigel Balchin's best book in years, evidently based on his stay with our NASA--like his Cambridge, England, physiologist, Frank Lewis, who because of his work on Fatigue Deterioration is sent as a scientific observer to America, ready for her first manned lunar expeditions. He leaves behind Dr. Julian Parker, a young woman of hot allure along with considerable cool, and he goes there for the eighteen months work-up. The briefing and screening and training procedures are highly fascinating; so are the reactions of all around him (particularly the appealing Isa, astronaut Zenno's wife); so is his particular stress situation as he approaches his own commitment to go up, underlining the book's meaning and message that ""our technical skill has outrun our imagination"" and perhaps our possibilities to accommodate the unknown.... The story is played out close to the skin (though with no overly explicit sex in the ongoing affair) and should be attractive to intelligent teens.