Phases of Gravity

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By Dan Simmons

Publisher Description

A New York Times–bestselling author’s moving novel about an astronaut returning to Earth, and the small steps and giant leaps love requires.

Richard Baedecker thinks his greatest challenge was walking on the moon, but then he meets a mysterious woman who shows him his past. Join Baedecker as he comes to grips with the son and wife he lost owing to his passion for space exploration, his forgotten childhood, and the loss he experienced during the deadly flight of the Challenger. The most difficult exploration of his life is not the cold, rocky crevices of the moon, but the warm interior of his heart. Brilliant and beautifully written, Phases of Gravity is a masterpiece about love and loss that transports readers far beyond the confines of space and time.

Phases of Gravity is a thoughtful, deeply involving novel from an author who has earned numerous honors, including the World Fantasy Award for Song of Kali and the Hugo Award for Hyperion.

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10 Reviews

3.0

Fabietto

Created 5 months ago

Likeable Slow-paced Nostalgic

Daniel Wilson

Created almost 2 years ago

Ryan Noble

Created almost 7 years ago

Richard

Created over 9 years ago

Metaphorosis Reviews

Created almost 10 years ago

“<a>reviews.metaphorosis.com</a> 3 stars Richard Baedecker is an astronaut who once walked on the moon, but has since wandered into a grey and lonely existence of aircraft engineering sales. A visit to his directionless son's ashram in India sets Baedecker on a new path. Phases of Gravity is SF in that it deals with an ex-astronaut and uses some technical jargon. Otherwise, it's a contemporary novel of man searching for meaning in his life, and a reason to live it. It's about a gray man with a gray existence, and unfortunately, the novel turns out to be pretty gray as well. I'm a fan of some of Dan Simmons' work, but this book just doesn't offer much. It's well written, but the theme of an aging ex-astronaut's midlife crisis didn't attract me. Baedeker is drifting, emotionless, and acted upon. The main external driver of the story is a younger woman attracted to him for no particularly good reason. Baedeker himself meanders here and there, never interested in much, never doing much. It's hard to see why anyone would really care much about him, and I didn't. The story is not helped by being composed largely of flashbacks interspersed. "Baedeker suddenly recalled" could be the theme of the story. Occasionally the story jumps forward, apparently so that the time skipped can be reviewed in flashbacks later. It's awkward, and not particularly effective. Baedeker spends a lot of his time thinking back to his walk on the moon, and the moments that went with it. He's vaguely interested in a transcendent experience, and in how to evaluate experience in general. He's also, in a subdued way, a bit of a whiner. That is, he doesn't feel his life has amount to much beyond his brief moment of glory, but since he's so passionless, I found I didn't much care. It's possible that there were hidden levels of meaning. For example, that the name Baedeker hints at the Baedeker travel guides, given that Baedeker is trying to find his way. But I think that gives Simmons too much credit for subtlety. I think he was really just trying to tell a story about man and middle age, but ended up with too much of the latter, and not enough of the former. By page 16, I was already finding the book dull, and despite smooth writing, it never really did get better. The story is grouped loosely around Baedeker's reunions with his two former mission-mates. In the second, he seems to wake up a bit, but only a bit. He's generally in a bit of a fog, paying more attention to memory than to reality. Simmons has clearly done his research on proper terminology, so that the men can converse with great verisimilitude, but occasionally, he's so intent on getting it right that he forgets to keep the jargon interesting. I don't really care if an access port is called a hell-hole when I also don't care what's behind it. On the other hand, he quotes "one giant step for man" without comment, when surely an astronaut with at least think about Armstrong's claim to have said "for a man". Similarly, technology that is "light-years ahead" doesn't really underline the book's SF character. A portion of the novel relates to a book a character is writing - noting that the heart of the book will be profiles of ex-astronauts. Clearly that's part of what Simmons is attempting, but I'm afraid his character succeeds better than he does. Simmons' introduction of colorful but extraneous characters doesn't really help. Open Road Media's uneven proof-reading continues here, with a few dozen incorrect paragraph breaks scattered throughout. The lack of scene breaks doesn't help. All in all, a decent look at what an astronaut's post-mission life might look life. Unfortunately if you're the dispassionate type, it mostly looks dull.”

About Dan Simmons

Dan Simmons, a full-time public school teacher until 1987, is one of the few writers who consistently work across genres, and perhaps the only one to have won major awards in all of them. He has produced science fiction, horror, fantasy, and mainstream fiction, and is now launching stunning works in the thriller category. His first novel, Song of Kali, won the World Fantasy Award; his first science fiction novel, Hyperion, won the Hugo Award. His other novels and short fiction have been honored with numerous accolades, including nine Locus Awards, four Bram Stoker Awards, the French Prix Cosmos 2000, the British SF Association Award, and the Theodore Sturgeon Award.

In 1995, Wabash College presented Simmons with an honorary doctorate in humane letters for his work in fiction and education. He lives in Colorado along the Front Range of the Rockies.