It turns out, Chet Haze isn’t the only multi-hyphenate in the Hanks family. Tom Hanks – he acts, he swings, and now… he writes? Apparently so. Hanks gets literary in the latest issue of The New Yorker with “Alan Bean Plus Four,” short fiction in which Hanks apparently draws on his research for Apollo 13 in a story about a group of privately-funded space explorers – Anna, Steve Wong, and MDash – trying to make a figure eight around the moon. He certainly knows his space jargon, or at least fakes it really well.
We packed granola bars and water in squeeze-top bottles, then pumped in the liquid oxygen for the two booster stages and the hypergolic chemicals for the one-shot firing of the translunar motor, the mini-rocket that would fling us to our lunar rendezvous.
Good enough to fool me, at least. Like seemingly all men of his age, Hanks has a penchant for cutesy-clicky His Girl Friday prose and a semi-obsession with the new world of apps and social media. A couple more excerpts:
I keep all my nonfiction on a pocket-size Kobo digital reader, so I whipped out a chapter from “No Way, Ivan: Why the CCCP Lost the Race to the Moon,” written by an émigré professor with an axe to grind. According to him, in the mid-sixties the Soviets hoped to trump the Apollo program with just such a figure-eight mission: no orbit, no landing, just photos and crowing rights. The Reds sent off an unmanned Soyuz with, supposedly, a mannequin in a spacesuit, but so many things went south that they didn’t dare try again, not even with a dog. Kaputnik. […]
The Americans who went to the moon before us had computers so primitive that they couldn’t get e-mail or use Google to settle arguments. The iPads we took had something like seventy billion times the capacity of those Apollo-era dial-ups and were mucho handy, especially during all the downtime on our long haul. MDash used his to watch Season Four of “Breaking Bad.” We took hundreds of selfies with the Earth in the window and, plinking a Ping-Pong ball off the center seat, played a tableless table-tennis tournament, which was won by Anna. [TheNewYorker]
Whether you enjoy it or not will probably depend on your tolerance for clever references to technology and #millenialstuff – it sort of reads like Don DeLillo meets Christopher Buckley to me. At the very least, it’s a damned sight better than James Franco’s Obama poem.