One Small Step (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: One Small Step Elizabeth Bush Kerr, P. B.; One Small Step. McElderry, 2008; 306p ISBN 978-1-4169-4213-9 $16.99 Ad Gr. 5–8 When thirteen-year-old Scott MacLeod successfully makes an emergency landing with an Air Force training aircraft in 1968, his flight-trainer father is in deep trouble for taking his son up on an unauthorized run, but Scott catches the eye of NASA and is recruited into a top secret program. In order to assure that nothing can go wrong with the planned 1969 moon mission, a parallel system of Apollo missions has been underway to test the systems before launches are made in the public eye; Scott, small but quick witted, is needed to take the place of a highly trained chimp that was scheduled to pilot the small scale lunar craft but now shows signs of personality change. Scott embraces the opportunity at first, but when he discovers that the chimps are being misused by NASA and his own chances of staying with the lunar program into adulthood are zero, he changes the nature of the moon shot when he’s far beyond NASA’s reach and makes the first moon walk himself. The novel is constructed in three stages, and readers who happily settle into the imaginative historical fiction of the first two thirds—the emergency-landing scenario and the training sequence—may well herald the concluding mash up of SF and heavy-handed philosophizing with an exasperated “For Pete’s sake!” Likewise the plethora of weighty references to 2001: A Space Odyssey, apropos to the novel’s time period though they may be, are less likely to hit their mark with a contemporary audience. Still, fans of literary what-ifs should be entertained, and anyone tantalized by allegations that the Apollo 11 landing was just an elaborately staged hoax will enjoy this spin on the conspiracy theory. [End Page 27] Copyright © 2008 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois