Dust jacket image by Alan Bean, courtesy Subterranean Press
I was puzzled, not to say mystified, when I began reading Phases of Gravity by Dan Simmons. Like a lot of Simmons fans, my entry to his fiction was the Hyperion series. I’ve since read many of his books, both newer and older, but hadn’t ever seen Phases. All was cleared up when I learned that it is a 1989 title. It’s being reissued in late 2011 by Subterranean Press, the Michigan house that specializes in fancy, signed, hardcover collectors’ editions.
That 1989 publication date explains why the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger is treated as a recent and still traumatic event. And perhaps why the main character, former astronaut Richard Baedecker, is undergoing a midlife crisis; Simmons had recently turned 40 when the book was published. This is not a science fiction story but a quiet story of a man trying to find a reason to go on with life after he has seemingly fulfilled his dreams but finds himself bereft of human connections.
When we meet Baedecker, one of the handful of astronauts who actually strode upon the Moon, he is in India attempting to connect with his grown son. Scott has become a follower of an Indian guru who resembles the Baghwan Shree Rajneesh. Richard and Scott’s mother are divorced, and he and Scott have a distant and cool relationship. Richard spends some time with Maggie, a friend of Scott’s, hanging around India as they wait for Scott to appear.
The story then proceeds on two tracks, one in the “present” as Baedecker returns to the U.S. and attempts to get his life back on track, and one in flashbacks of the past in which we get intimations about how it fell apart. The two come together in a semi-melodramatic episode involving the death of the other astronaut who walked on the Moon with Baedecker, and another in which Baedecker rescues Scott from the guru’s cult. Along the way, Baedecker spends a lot of time examining his life, in which time with his family was sacrificed to the space program.
Throughout, Simmons deftly weaves the theme of gravity, weight and falling, both literal and as a symbol of the toll time takes on a life. And “falling” as a metaphor for love, of course.
The book kept me interested, in spite of it being dated. As someone who lived through the race for the Moon and the horror of the Challenger disaster, as well as the bizarre Rajneesh episode in my home state, I identified with most of the story’s main incidents. Ultimately, I cared about what happened to Baedecker, although I was disappointed in Simmons for falling into the tired cliche of the May-December romance as the middle-aged man’s salvation.
(Subterranean Press, 2011)
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