Recovering Apollo 8 and Other Stories

Kristine Kathryn Rusch is an award-winning mystery, romance, science fiction, and fantasy writer. She has written many novels under various names, including Kristine Grayson for romance, and Kris Nelscott for mystery. She is well known for her short stories and novellas as well as her novels, and this collection highlights her recent award-nominated and award-winning (and collected in various Year’s Vest anthologies) short fiction. In “Recovering Apollo 8,” a Sidewise Award winner for Best Alternate History and a Hugo Award finalist, examines a very near-future where Apollo 8 would float forever in the darkness of space; far from ending the space program, this propelled it and spade-faring became almost routine. An eight-year-old at the time of the loss, a wealthy pioneer of this space age devotes his life to recovering the capsule and the three lost astronauts. A companion short story also shows inspiration from Apollo 8 in “The Taste of Miracles.” In “The Strangeness of the Day,” winner of France’s Fantasy Award: Le Prix Imaginales 2003, a shy, successful lawyer is hired by a near immortal to battle a witch to save his love. Dying to the sound of banjo music — that’s how it’s done with Death’s helper in “Substitutions.” An alternate history of the death of J Edgar Hoover, and dark secrets about the man, is related in “G-Men.” A large pile of bones is discovered at a renovation of a resort, which do not seem to be human or animal; what secret lies hidden in “The End of the World”? If you could peek into the past at any day, why would it be “June Sixteenth at Anna’s”? Suicide bombings are taken to a new, horrifying level, with the bombers chosen at birth in “Craters.” The collection finishes with a 22,000-word novella where salvaging a 5000-year-old spaceship is neither easy nor without dangers, as a crew finds out in “Diving into the Wreck.”