Celestial takes us back to the days of Apollo. The early missions are over. The space race, however, isn't. The Soviets are on the moon and the United States are keeping an eye on them. This monitoring allows NASA to spy on the Russians as their mission finds a hatch in the lunar surface. Opening this, and entering, leads to the Russian lunar explorers vanishing. Markings on the surface, and other intercepted intelligence, leads NASA to recruit a specialist linguist Ziggy Da Luca. Da Luca is an expert in languages. She speakers Italian, French and Russian and can "fake it in Spanish". Crucially to the mission she is about to embark on, she can speak three Tibetan dialects and read classical Tibetan. This is important because the marking on the hatch on the moon are very similar to those in many ancient Earth locations and in particular to scripts and markings from ancient Tibet that hint at "ancient astronauts".
So Da Luca is whisked to the moon with three other Apollo astronauts, one of whom is a racist Vietnam vet called Griffin who is suffering badly from PTSD. On the moon their return vehicle is apparently destroyed by arriving Soviet craft and inside the Tibetan lunar structure the US and Soviet astronauts proceed to shoot at each other, then make a wary alliance, as they explore the alien world.
Inside the moon the alien structure seems to respond to their emotional state. As our racist astronaut becomes increasingly unable to cope, he hallucinates weapons and aliens, other visions from ancient Russian folktales attack the humans while Griffin tries to shoot them. The humans cross an ocean in Baba Yah's hut, fly around on a spacecraft modelled on Space 1999 and have an encounter with one of the earlier, lost cosmonauts who has changed into a giant squirrel. Eventually some of them get back, but only because Da Luca is able to call upon her own, understanding of Tibetan culture and languages and navigate them home - while Griffin flies.
When I read the first chapter I described the book as "gloriously silly". By the end I just thought it was silly. The plot hangs together based on a sequence of increasingly bizarre events constructed from various subconsciousness, and there is almost no pay off at the end. Perhaps if this had been building to a great reveal, I would have been satisfied. But we never really learn why, or what, is happening inside the moon. There are some small pay offs. The evil Russians are dealt with, and Griffin overcomes some of his racism. But, the negatives outweigh it all. And there are too many unanswered questions - not least is how NASA made an astronaut out of a man who clearly had intense PTSD, and whose racist towards Vietnamese people makes him entirely unsuitable to be in a confined space with someone of Asian heritage.
The author has inserted some references designed to be amusing with our hindsight - "What the fuck is a mandala?" asks a senior NASA figure. "I thought he was a some terrorist in prison in Africa". Its not that funny, or clever - but its the best this shallow book seems to offer.
Avoid.
Related Reviews
Hadfield - The Apollo Murders
Burgess - The Greatest Adventure: A History of Human Space Exploration
First on the Moon - A Voyage with Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, Edwin Aldrin
French & Burgess - In the Shadow of the Moon: A Challenging Journey to Tranquillity 1965-1969
Scott & Leonov - Two Sides of the Moon
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