Launching back to the historic Apollo-Soyuz mission in 1975, a new space thriller titled “Final Orbit” arrives next month from New York Times bestselling author, TV host, YouTube sensation, TED speaker, classic rocker, and social media personality, retired astronaut Chris Hadfield.
The energetic Canadian hyphenate and former NASA veteran of three shuttle missions aided in the construction of the Mir Space Station and even commanded the International Space Station.
His first venture into speculative fiction arrived back in 2021 with “The Apollo Murders,” an engaging sci-fi adventure tale centered around Houston flight controller and ex-test pilot Kazimieras “Kaz” Zemeckis, who becomes embroiled in a dangerous conflict involving a secret Apollo 18 mission and the real-life Soviet spy space station called Almaz.
“Like when I learned to fly high performance airplanes, F-18s and such, at first every single thing is equally important and you don’t know how to prioritize, you don’t know what matters and what doesn’t, and you don’t know what to really focus on,” Hadfield told Space.com regarding his evolved level of writing for ‘Final Orbit.’ “Like anything, when you get better at it, you gain all those skills.
“My first draft for ‘The Apollo Murders’ was 195,000 words. The final book was 135,000, so we cut out nearly a whole book because I didn’t know what I didn’t need to write. My editors see the maturation of efficiency as a writer in this new novel and the particular style with which I like to write.”
Following 2023’s “The Defector,” “Final Orbit” is actually the third book in Hadfield’s “The Apollo Murders” series which is anchored again by Kaz and is slated to arrive on Oct. 7, 2025 from Mulholland Books.
The engrossing alternative history novel unfolds during the historic Apollo-Soyuz linkup between American astronauts and Soviet cosmonauts. It deftly chronicles how China’s clandestine launch of its first astronaut in east Asia leads to an international espionage incident and an accident that puts the entire joint mission in jeopardy.
Hadfield is quite excited about how “Final Orbit” turned out, and recalls the layers of plot complexity he settled on, which took a massive amount of research to make sure that he got everything right.
“I learned a whole bunch in writing it,” he notes. “It was a lot of work but I’m really happy with the interplay of how my plots crossed over and how it sets me up for character development for a follow-up book as well. I read a review the other day that said ‘fans of Asimov, Andy Weir, and James Michener are going to love this book.’ Holy crap, gimme a break! That’s unbelievable company so I’m really very pleased.”
The backdrop and framework of “Final Orbit” employs the monumental Apollo-Soyuz mission from 1975 to tell Hadfield’s harrowing tale of Cold War spies and high stakes peril in Earth orbit.
“I wanted it to be chronological with the previous two books in the series, ‘The Apollo Murders’ and ‘The Defector.’ ‘Defector’ ended late in 1973 and I started looking forwards. I thought here’s a good opportunity to close out the Apollo Program with Apollo-Soyuz and also the fact that Nixon was out and Ford was in, that presented some interesting room. And that Skylab had run its course but was now essentially abandoned.
“As soon as I laid out those threads, I thought I needed a whole extra player. I started digging into the Chinese space program and realized their first launches were at the same time. I had never heard of Xuesen, the main Chinese character in the book, the professor who had set up Caltech and the Jet Propulsion Lab. That was such a richness of reality on which to pull and write my fiction in amongst it.”
Delving into the research, Hadfield discovered some fascinating facets of the Qian Xuesen story and how the disgraced American-Chinese scientist was a member of Operation Paperclip in the aftermath of Germany’s World War II surrender before being deported back to China for espionage crimes to became the father of Chinese aerospace.
“He was trusted, along with Von Karman, to go over and evaluate the German Nazi rocket scientists to decide which ones from Peenemünde to bring back,” says Hadfield. “Then because of McCarthyism and the huge political pendulum swinging to have him blacklisted and basically house arrested and then deported, was just a horrific mistake that the United States made. The fact that he went back and was absolutely fundamental in setting up the Chinese nuclear portage and the Chinese space program was just incredible. He stood there in Tiananmen Square next to Mao as they were kicking off their human spaceflight program.”
“Final Orbit’s” central character of Kaz Zemeckis has provided the perfect foundation for Hadfield to spin his captivating outer space yarns.
“To me, Kaz is the personification of so many of my fighter pilot, test pilot, astronaut friends. But at the same time he got punted to the sidelines by an uncontrollable medical thing, but now the life that he’s leading is, if anything, more interesting and it gives me a lot of latitude for where I can take the plot next. It’s also occurred to me that I could write a pretty interesting prequel on his character as well.”
Chris Hadfield’s “Final Orbit” hits bookstores and online outlets on Oct. 7.
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