Phases of Gravity (1989)
Phases of Gravity is a 1989 fiction book written by Dan Simmons.
Richard Baedecker walked on the moon, and everything since has felt like descent. Middle-aged now, divorced, working an aerospace job that bores him, estranged from a son who has drifted toward an ashram in India, he meets Maggie Brown, a young woman who talks about places of power and sends him looking for his own. The search runs through India, the landscape of his boyhood, the ghosts of the space program and the Challenger disaster. Simmons sets the rockets aside; this is a quiet, earthbound novel about what an astronaut does with the rest of a life once the one great thing is behind him.
Quick answers
What is Phases of Gravity about?
Richard Baedecker walked on the moon, and everything since has felt like descent. Middle-aged now, divorced, working an aerospace job that bores him, estranged from a son who has drifted toward an ashram in India, he meets Maggie Brown, a young woman who talks about places of power and sends him looking for his own. The search runs through India, the landscape of his boyhood, the ghosts of the space program and the Challenger disaster. Simmons sets the rockets aside; this is a quiet, earthbound novel about what an astronaut does with the rest of a life once the one great thing is behind him.
When was Phases of Gravity published?
Phases of Gravity was published in 1989.
Who made Phases of Gravity?
Phases of Gravity was written by Dan Simmons.
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A few thoughts on Phases of Gravity
Damien Chazelle's First Man shares this novel's conviction that the moon was also a place men carried their grief. Brian Eno's Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks holds the same weightless melancholy in ambient form. And Interstellar is louder and stranger, but an astronaut father paying for exploration in family time rhymes with Baedecker's own ledger.
Astronauts figuring out who they are once the mission is over
Richard Baedecker walked on the moon, and Phases of Gravity spends its length on what a person does with an ordinary life once the one extraordinary thing is finished. First Man sits inside that same quiet grief and distance around Armstrong's own landing. Space Brothers follows a would-be astronaut measuring his life against his brother's success, and Project Hail Mary sends a reluctant, ordinary man into space anyway.