The Cassandra Project

by Jack McDevitt, Mike Resnick

Overview

Two science fiction masters—Jack McDevitt and Mike Resnick—team up to deliver a classic thriller in which one man uncovers the hidden history of the United States space program…
 
“Houston, we have a problem…”
 
Formerly a cynical, ambitious PR man, Jerry Culpepper finally found a client he could believe in when he was hired as NASA’s public affairs director. Proud of the Agency’s history and sure of its destiny, he was thrilled to be a part of its future.
 
But public disinterest and budget cuts changed that future. Now, a half century after the first Moon landing, Jerry feels like the only one with stars in his eyes.
 
Then a fifty-year-old secret about the Apollo XI mission is revealed, and he finds himself embroiled in the biggest controversy of the twenty-first century, one that will test his ability—and his willingness—to spin the truth about a conspiracy of reality-altering proportions...

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780425256459
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	10/29/2013
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	4.10(w) x 6.70(h) x 1.00(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Jack McDevitt is a former naval officer, taxi driver, English teacher, customs officer, and motivational trainer, and is now a full-time writer. His novel Seeker won a Nebula Award, and he is a multiple Nebula Award finalist. He lives in Georgia with his wife, Maureen. 
 
Mike Resnick has won five Hugos (from a record thirty-six nominations), a Nebula, and other major awards in the US, France, Japan, Spain, Croatia, Catalonia, and Poland. He’s the author of seventy-one novels, more than two hundred and fifty short stories, and three screenplays, and is the editor of forty-one anthologies. His work has been translated into twenty-seven languages.

Read an Excerpt

It was probably a sign of the times that the biggest science story of the twenty– first century, and probably the biggest ever, broke in that tabloid of tabloids, The National Bedrock. It might have gone unnoticed had an enterprising reporter not launched it into the middle of a press conference intended to be a quiet, nostalgic celebration of NASA’s accomplishments over a span of sixty years. And to get everyone’s mind off the fact that the Agency was now looking at a closing of the doors. In any case, when it first happened, nobody recognized it for what it was.
(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "The Cassandra Project"
by .
Copyright © 2013 Jack McDevitt.
Excerpted by permission of Penguin Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"[Jack McDevitt is] the logical heir to Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke."—Stephen King

"Jack McDevitt is a master of describing otherworldy grandeur."—The Denver Post

"Nobody spins a yarn better than Mike Resnick."—Orson Scott Card

"Resnick is thought-provoking, imaginative...and above all galactically grand."—Los Angeles Times

Editorial Reviews

McDevitt and Resnick take us along on a well-written ride through all sorts of back-door deals and hidden secrets before they tell us what really happened...as they rewrite history in a way that doesn’t conflict with what we think we know.”—Florida-Times Union

“The apparent cover-up conspiracy at the heart of (the novel) is unpeeled back layer by layer through and elaborate series of plot twists and turns.”—Jessup Press Sentinel 

“The authors expertly crank up the tension and maintain it throughout via a suite of thoroughly believable characters.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
 

From the Publisher

In 2019, 50 years after Apollo 11, Jerry Culpepper, a NASA press agent, is caught between his hopes for a better future for the space program and puzzling clues that suggest Neil Armstrong was the fifth man to walk on the Moon. Adding in a libertarian entrepreneur with his own Moon rocket and a president anxious to learn what may be hiding on the far side of the moon, Jerry is caught in a race to discover a truth that has been buried in bureaucracy for decades. Nebula-winner McDevitt and Hugo-winner Resnick mix conspiracy theories into classic SF ideas pioneered by Robert A. Heinlein and Poul Anderson, producing a somewhat rushed spacesuit-and-dagger yarn that reads more like 1969 than 2019. Agents: (for McDevitt) Chris Lotts, Lotts Agency; (for Resnick) Eleanor Wood, Spectrum Literary Agency. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

This first collaboration from McDevitt (Firebird, 2011, etc.) and Resnick (The Doctor and the Kid, 2011, etc.), developed from a 2010 story by McDevitt (spoiler alert: don't read the story first), takes the form of a conspiracy involving the moon landings. And no, Stanley Kubrick didn't fake them. By 2019, the U.S. economy is still grinding along the fringes of recession. Jerry Culpepper, NASA's public affairs director, loves his job and still believes in its mission, even though the only foreseeable future is one of continuing slow decline. But then a routine release of background material from the late 1960s turns up an oddity. Before Neil Armstrong landed on the moon, there were two dress-rehearsal moon shots, both of which orbited the moon but did not land. Yet, a recording of a chat between Houston and Sydney Myshko, captain of the first of the test missions, shows Myshko apparently preparing to descend! And Aaron Walker, on the mission after Myshko, wrote in his diary that he landed on the moon. Both men are now dead and cannot be questioned. But was there a coverup? Of what, and for what possible reason? Multibillionaire entrepreneur Morgan "Bucky" Blackstone sees a chance to goose the complacent Washington establishment and, not coincidentally, whip up enthusiasm for his own, strictly private enterprise, planned moon landings. As other evidence, suggestive yet inconclusive, trickles in, Jerry tries to keep a lid on things. Meanwhile, POTUS George Cunningham, an essentially decent man with a strong interest in NASA but hampered by intractable budgetary constraints, finds himself in a bind: If there was a conspiracy and he didn't know, he's out of touch and an idiotic dupe; if he did know, he's a liar and part of the coverup. Against the solid and affectionately rendered NASA backdrop, the authors expertly crank up the tension and maintain it throughout via a suite of thoroughly believable characters. A top-notch, edge-of-the-seat thriller in which there are no villains, only mysteries.

Kirkus Reviews