Countdown
I’m reading a novel by Frank G. Slaughter, published in 1970, set in Florida in the space program. There’s no indication in the novel of whether it was before or after the successful moon landing; instead it’s talking about the medical issues faced by astronauts and the foibles of human beings who build space ships. There’s a lot of drinking and sex; no clear descriptions of sex but it’s plainly obvious and expected behavior, including among the teen children of the technology elites. Some of the characters are horrified and others are frankly prurient; the most sensible astronaut and his wife, who are not the main characters, live away from most other people in a cottage on the beach to get away from the dominant social culture.
The title, Countdown, applies to the impending launch of a new, unusually large and ambitious flight into space, as well as to a sex game and to the deadline the main character has for unveiling problems in the spaceship before astronauts die of them. I was born in 1970 in a small town far away from Florida; it’s interesting to read about a culture far removed from my experience, in this case like watching a slow-motion car pile-up. Besides rampant drinking (my parents and my entire social set were teetotallers), scanty clothing (I have never even owned a two piece swim suit), the book references sex of all types except so far no animals, misuse of legal and illegal drugs, smoking lots of tobacco and weed, and —apparently the latest thing for wealthy teens in late 1960s Florida— glue sniffing.
Okay, I hear you say, why are YOU reading this tripe? Well, it’s like this: I found Frank Slaughter’s books at yardsales fairly often in the 1990s. The man can write an engaging yarn, showing realistic consequences for all these things, including peculation, gambling, political shenanigans, bribery, covering each other’s rear ends; it’s a murder mystery and a look at medical knowledge of the time, a kind of society time capsule for me. The good end well and the bad end badly, as Oscar Wilde says, “that is what fiction means”. Mr. Wilde said that in The Importance of Being Earnest, in which no one is exactly who or what he says he is, but all are trying to come out with less pain and more pleasure despite the odds being stacked against them. Countdown is in no way funny, but otherwise they’re similar: stacks of catastrophes, our hero squirming through it all, choosing well, choosing badly, trying for enough sincerity and honor to keep himself alive and kicking, along with as many bystanders as possible, the unjust with the just.
I want him to succeed.
