THE ORION PROJECT

NASA recruits an Air Force pilot for a nuclear-powered spacecraft project in Swirski’s novel.

Jacqueline “Jack” Trew is a woman in a world dominated by men. As the daughter of a military man, she learned early on to control her emotions and radiate a deliberate, confident swagger. When she’s asked why she avoids using the name “Jacqueline,” she responds, “In the end, I just decided it sounded too womanish.” Jack asserts her place as a pilot for the Orion Project, a revolutionary nuclear-powered spacecraft that’s designed to compete against the “Russkies” and ensure that U.S. weaponry is dominant in outer space. After all, “with a neutron bomb up in orbit…they could zap enemy positions anywhere in the world and have their own units at ground zero within days. Perhaps even hours.” In the 1960s and ’70s, Jack rises through the ranks amid torturous training, even deliberately starving herself to test her own capabilities. As one of her trainers notes, “All big projects bring deaths with them.” Swirski painstakingly builds a fictional account of the real-life, but abandoned, Project Orion. He reimagines its launch while grounding the narrative in extensive interviews, NASA files, news articles, and Congressional records, all of which frame the secret operation as an ethically dubious moment in American history. The omniscient narrative style effectively reads like nonfiction, combining extensive explanatory details and descriptions of the setting, the spacecraft, and the training of the crew. Similarly, the characters’ conversations authentically portray the sexism, racism, and ableism of the milieu, and this language is likely to offend some readers. Headlines from the New York Times, interspersed between chapters without commentary, ably form the backdrop for Jack’s antihero storyline, which hints at shadowy intentions.

A brilliantly narrated political novel, despite the crudeness of its characters.