Moonshot

by James Philip

BLAST OFF MINUS TWO! A decade ago, the challenge was to send a man to the Moon and to return him safely to the Earth and now a giant rocket ship designed by Wernher von Braun stands ready on the pad and the clock is counting down. Ten years ago, nobody thought it was possible. But that was then and this is now. Mankind has chosen to sail the new sea of space, to quest after the knowledge and the dreams of the star-filled abyss, to climb the infinite ladder to the stars. While the peoples of the Earth shiver in the chill winds of a thirty-year-long Cold War, and the superpower protagonists prime their thermonuclear arsenals across the ideological void, one country, one empire has dared to attempt what seemed impossible only a decade ago. The race to the Moon is all but run; there can be only one winner and for the loser it may, or may not be an omen of what is to come. To the victor go the laurels; to the vanquished…the ashes. However, this is not July 1969. That world never came to be in in this universe because in the days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour in December 1941 Adolf Hitler was persuaded not to declare war on the United States of America. The United States never came into the war against Germany; and the world was never the same again. Today is 14 January 1975. Now the mighty Moon rocket standing on a pad in Guyana bears not the Stars and Stripes but the Swastika Flag of the Third, Europa Reich and the launch has been timed so that a German astronaut’s boots will disturb the regolith of the Lunar surface on the tenth anniversary of the death of Adolf Hitler, the founding father of the Nazi Movement....

260 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 25, 2021

Reviews

[Allen McDonnell · Rating 3 out of 5]

It Was OK

Three Stars. This novel started strong dropping you right into the heart of a different history. To be honest however by the half way point I was bored because the I just couldn't buy into the premise that the USA of 1941 was still fighting in Asia thirty years later.

Letting wars drag on without conclusion is a modern thing to Americans that gradually evolved over a long period. A lot of that change was driven by UN veto threats by permanent members of the Security Council which is not how this culture was driven to change. I just could not buy into this root premise so for me the whole scenario based upon it just fell apart.