Adam higginbotham – Welcome to infinitefreetime dot com

Other than the links on the right side of the page, you really don’t see much about my books around here any longer. I haven’t released anything new in six years or so, maybe longer, and most of the time I’m pretty convinced that that particular door is gonna stay closed. Part of the problem is that writing fiction, for me, has always been like pulling teeth– I can knock out any sort of nonfiction prose at length and quickly, but I would spend hours staring at a blank screen and not writing anything, and eventually the pain and the self-torture had to stop. COVID didn’t help, obviously, but it would have happened anyway, I think.

Part of the problem is Skylights. Skylights is near-future science fiction, which is always rough, no matter what, but I was stupid enough to attach certain events in Skylights to actual dates, which put the book on a timer for when bits would become Objectively Wrong, and several of those years have passed by now. In addition, the prologue of the book is explicitly tied to the main character’s recollection of the Challenger explosion. That’s not automatically a problem, not yet, but it made Gabriel the oldest character in the book, and he’s going to keep getting older until his inclusion no longer makes sense.

I have been tossing around the idea (for years now, for the record) of doing a second edition of Skylights that basically gets rid of all of the dates and adjusts the prologue so that it doesn’t automatically age my main character into his late forties or early fifties for a while now. I’ve not done it because 1) it’s kind of pointless, especially since I’ve blown up the sequel more than once already, and 2) I feel like if I’m going to bother revising Skylights, it ought to be in the context of relaunching my writing “career,” such as it is, and I’m not at all prepared to do that.

And then I hit a throwaway detail in Adam Higginbotham’s Challenger book, and bam, everything fell together. I’ve got a way for the prologue to work now, based on something that actually happened, and I can slide Gabe’s birth forward enough that by the time the book is out of date again I won’t have to worry about it. I even came up with a better reason for him to be on the trip in the first place; I was never entirely satisfied with Zub’s reasoning for bringing him on, and I think I’ve got a better idea now.

I’m not sure why I’m telling y’all this, other than another example of my habit of working through my thoughts by writing about them. I mean, I could just quietly update the text on Amazon and not worry about it; I might have to adjust the cover by a fraction of an inch somewhere or something like that, but once the writing part is done, it’s not a lot of additional work. And there are times where I miss being able to call myself an author. The problem is that authors have ideas, and I don’t have any. It’s not like figuring out how to move Skylights onto a floating timeline helped me solve the plot snarls and ridiculousnesses that multiple drafts of Sunlight kept falling into.

I should probably at least put a document together and write out some notes about how it was going to work, though, so that I can get it back later if I need it.

In what might be the least surprising book recommendation in the history of the blog, I thoroughly enjoyed reading a history of the Challenger disaster. This is known; I’m an astronomy nerd, and I’m 50, so I was in fourth grade when the Challenger exploded, and I dressed up as Ellison Onizuka for some sort of history performance thing later that year that I can’t really remember the details of. I do remember several other people in my class were other Challenger astronauts; I don’t think we had all seven, but there were a good three or four of us, and the thing involved everyone standing around in the gym dressed as their chosen person and giving speeches about our lives and our contributions to society to whoever happened to walk past. A history fair of some kind? Maybe. We finagled matching fake space suits from somewhere, I remember that.

I also set part of the prologue of my book Skylights on January 28, 1986, and the Challenger disaster is what gets the main character interested in space. The book is dedicated to the fourteen astronauts we lost in the Challenger and Columbia explosions, but I had to look up the names of the Columbia astronauts. I have been able to rattle off the seven Challenger astronauts by name since 1986.

The book begins with the Apollo 1 disaster, where the pure-oxygen environment in the cabin caught fire and burned the three astronauts to death before the rocket even took off. Higginbotham then goes into the history of the development of the Space Shuttle, which, my God, was an incredible clusterfuck, and it’s amazing that any of them ever flew at all. There’s a fair amount of attention paid to the process used to select Christa McAuliffe as a payload specialist, some biographical information of each of the other six astronauts, and then once we get to about mid-January of 1986 the book shifts to practically an hour-by-hour description of the run-up to the explosion and the multiple investigations afterwards. Higginbotham is an impressive storyteller– I’m going to find his first book, which was about Chernobyl, as soon as I can– and the book is detailed and authoritative without ever getting dry, with an impressive amount of footnoting at the end for anyone who is interested in checking his sources.

This is– okay, I can’t say objectively, really, but I’m gonna do it anyway– objectively a good book, but it’s also a book that there was no way I was going to be able to put down once I picked it up unless it was an absolute travesty of a hack job, and it won a bunch of awards. I read it in a day, mostly because I couldn’t put it down. I learned some things, and I remembered some other things I’d forgotten, and I’m much angrier at 1980’s era NASA than I was before reading it. None of these people should have died. None of them.

I think a lot of you are like me and knew from the title whether you wanted to read this; I would recommend you follow that impulse if you do, and if your initial impulse wasn’t immediately “This book exists? I should read it!” you should read it anyway. I will talk about it again in December, there is no doubt of that.