Recovering Apollo 8 and Other Stories

Aliens in Oregon, starship diving, the lost Apollo…

This collection highlights Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s recent award-nominated and award-winning (and collected in various Year’s Best anthologies) short fiction. “Recovering Apollo 8,” a Sidewise Award winner for Best Alternate History, a Hugo Award finalist, and winner of the Asimov’s Reader’s Choice Award, examines a very near-future where Apollo 8 would float forever in the darkness of space. An eight-year-old at the time of the loss, a wealthy pioneer of the 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 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, are revealed in “G-Men.” A large pile of bones is discovered at the renovation of a resort, which do not seem to be human or animal; what secret lies hidden at “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 ends with the inspiration for Rusch’s novel, Diving Into the Wreck, the international award-winning novella of the same name.