An undisciplined review: Kings of the High Frontier

I loaned Victor Koman’s novel Kings of the High Frontier to a friend who told me in turn about Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Wild Shore, and I think perhaps I got the better deal. Both books do a credible job of stirring the imagination, but High Frontier is a ham-fisted space opera and Wild Shore is an adventure on the newly re-primitive California coast following a nuclear war that America loses.

Seven years after reading Kings of the High Frontier, I still remember the basic outline of Koman’s book, which is saying something. A former mentor calls that novel a “walloping great adventure story,” and it is that. But her Amazon review of the book also praises Koman for his alleged restraint in preaching a libertarian ethos “without any lecturing or heavy-handedness,” and that makes me wonder what she considers heavy-handed.

True, Koman doesn’t clang as clumsily as Dan Brown did while richocheting mindlessly off a collection of durable canards in The Da Vinci Code, but while Koman is not up to Brown’s gold standard for sanctimony, he’s certainly in the medal round. One of the main characters in Kings of the High Frontier is a drug dealer financing research into reusuable and disposable orbital vehicles that would enable him to smuggle contraband all over the globe. Beyond that bow to anarcho-capitalist readership, Koman describes every space-going woman in his novel as beautiful. Imagine the odds of waking up in the near future to find that the only average-looking or ugly people in the world are the ones trying to thwart your project, all of whom work for the federal government. Certainly Tom Wolfe’s passing mention of charming astronaut groupies never turned The Right Stuff into a parody of itself, but Koman doesn’t have Wolfe’s touch.

On a tactical level, the book needs more visuals, and one wishes Koman’s editor had recognized that, or that his publisher’s budget allowed for it. Kings of the High Frontier assumes that descriptions of spacecraft are adequate substitutes for drawings of those spacecraft, but they’re not.

Koman could take lessons from “NASA Connect” TV hostess Jennifer Pulley, although he probably won’t. The problem for him is that Ms. Pulley does public relations for a quasi-governmental agency trying to stir love for science among middle-schoolers, and her cordial relationship with NASA bureaucrats would not meet with his approval. In a 1997 speech accepting the Prometheus Award for Kings of the High Frontier, Koman said he “stopped being a NASA fan when they canceled the Moon flights in December of 1972,” and became an enemy of NASA “when Skylab -- a better space station than MIR would ever be -- was allowed to disintegrate into scrap” (is that another thing for which Jimmy Carter can be blamed?). Sure enough, Koman’s novel of rage and hope is never more incindiary than when railing against the people who failed the doomed crew of the space shuttle Columbia.

One wonders if an author who woudn’t be caught looking for NASA sweatshirts on eBay might still be open to learning from a NASA sympathizer, and what Pullman has in her favor is being a vivacious blonde who mugs charismatically for the camera and looks a little like actress Kyra Sedgwick.

In a rebroadcast episode of “NASA Connnect” that I saw by chance over Thanksgiving weekend, engineers working on a “Personal Satellite Assistant” for the International Space Station nearly glow in Pulley’s presence. Her wide-eyed questions for them are intercut with animated instructions showing how to determine the surface area of a sphere. Perhaps even Koman can’t fault NASA (or the PBS stations that carry “NASA Connnect”) for realizing that a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down. After all, show execs are doing essentially what he did to broaden the appeal of Kings of High Frontier.

Whether I would re-read Koman’s book is an open question. His prose is workmanlike at best, but his plotting his deft, and the idea of privately-funded space flight has great appeal. I’d love to ask Koman one of the questions that the novel leaves unanswered, namely, whether his keen appreciation for science is leavened with humility or dampened only by questions of who pays for it. Given the brimstone that Koman heaps on government agencies in general and NASA in particular, I’d probably want to balance his damning portrait of malicious sloth and jealousy at NASA with the true-life heroics described by Apollo 13 astronaut Jim Lovell in “Lost Moon.” To agree with Koman is to suppose that decent people like NASA veteran Homer “Rocket Boys” Hickam have no real notion of public service, and I would not go that far.