(A review from Facebook)

Yes, that Chris Hadfield, astronaut, recorded a video of himself playing ‘Space Oddity’ on the ISS and it went viral. That Chris Hadfield. The Defector (2023, Canada) is his second work of fiction, after The Apollo Murders (2021, Canada), and also features one-eyed ex-test pilot Kaz Zemeckis in the lead role.

A Soviet pilot defects with a MiG-25, landing in Israel the day before the Yom Kippur War. He and his aircraft are shipped to the US, to Groom Lake, AKA Area 51, where USAF plans to learn as much as possible about the MiG-25. Complicating matters are the three cosmonauts assigned to the Apollo-Soyuz Project, two real historical figures and the invented female cosmonaut who was the first Russian on the Moon in The Apollo Murders. I enjoyed the first book in what is now plainly a series because of the hardware – I mean, just look at the fiction I’ve written – and this one is centred around a topic also of interest to me: Cold War supersonic military aircraft. But not, unfortunately, to the same degree.

I must admit, Zemeckis is starting to smack a little of Dirk Pitt. I was a fan of Clive Cussler’s novels when I first read them back in the early 1980s, but the writing grew too bad to be forgivable and I eventually gave up on them over 20 years ago. Sadly, recent rereads of those early Dirk Pitt novels have shown they were always bad – as is evident from the reviews I’ve posted here- and I’m somewhat surprised I ever bothered reading past the first one. (I didn’t read them in order, so I’ve no idea which of the first half-dozen or so I read first.) Hadfield is a marginally better writer than Cussler at his best, although this is not a field in which writing chops count for much – in fact, it’s possibly the reverse. But when Zemeckis dogfights in a F-15 after one leg has been shredded below the knee by a shotgun blast, some of Dirk Pitt’s more incredible physical exploits spring to mind.

If Hadfield sticks to areas that interest me, my “enthusiasms” as I call them – deep sea exploration next? – then I’ll probably continue to pick up cheap copies of his books.