I’m old enough to remember watching moon landings on television as they happened. Admittedly, I don’t remember a lot of the details, since the last few happened when I was in Kindergarten and First Grade. I do remember being fascinated by the lunar buggy rolling around on the moon’s surface. However, the first mission I watched with rapt attention was the Apollo-Soyuz link-up mission of July 1975. I would have been eight years old and I remember being utterly fascinated by the Soyuz spacecraft which looked nothing like what I thought a space ship should look like. It looked more like a bug than a proper space ship. It had a round “head” and a body with wing-like solar panels. What’s more, much of the ship was green! Who had ever heard of a green spaceship in 1975? That said, even at eight years old, I was already aware of the tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States and just becoming aware of the dangers of nuclear war. Apollo-Soyuz felt like a way of finding a way to work together rather than being enemies. It’s with this background that I dove into the sixth volume of Keisuke Makino’s Irina: The Vampire Cosmonaut.
So far, the series has only diverged a little from the history of the space program as we know it. True, the names of the United States and the Soviet Union have been changed to the United Kingdom and the Zirnitran Union respectively and the first person in space was the young vampire woman, Irina, but overall, the parallels with real history have been easy to trace. Things started to diverge more from our history in Volume 5. Both the United Kingdom and the Zirnitran Union have suffered serious setbacks that threw both their space programs in jeopardy. What’s more, the UK’s equivalent of Kennedy, Queen Sundancia, was not assassinated in 1963 and the UZSR’s equivalent of Khrushchev, Sergei Gergiev, has not been deposed. The upshot is that the two nations realize the only way they’re going to get to the moon is to put the “space race” behind them and work together using a Zirnitran launch platform and a UK lunar lander to achieve the goal.
The previous books in the series have tended to focus on either cosmonauts Lev Leps and Irina Luminesk in the UZSR or engineers Kaye Scarlett and Bart Fifield in the United Kingdom. This volume devotes about equal time to both sets of characters in separate but connected “fish out of water” stories. Lev and Irina have to go to the United Kingdom to train on the new spacecraft and Kaye and Bart have to travel to the UZSR to work with Zirnitran engineers to make the moon landing a reality. As with the real American space program, they designed several tests along the way to be certain they could achieve their goals. This book culminates in this world’s version of the Apollo-Soyuz link up, which in this case happens before the moon landings. What’s more, both the Zirnitran and UK astronauts rode up on a Zirnitran ship and linked up with an unmanned UK module. Along for the mission, we have astronauts and cosmonauts reminiscent of Deke Slayton and Alexei Leonov.
As with most other volumes of the series, the fact that Irina is a vampire and Kaye is a dhampir, has very little influence on the plot. The way people relate to them as vampires is more a metaphor for race relations in the 1960s than as a specific supernatural story element. Still, the relationships between Irina and Lev along with Kaye and Bart continue to progress. Given how closely the real space program was tied to the politics of the age, there is some interesting political intrigue going on behind the scenes. An event at the end of this volume may have serious ramifications for the series’ final volume.
I fear that world events of the last few years have made me feel discouraged about the tentative promise offered by the Apollo-Soyuz program. Still, Russia and the United States are continue working together with the International Space Station and earlier this year Russia announced it would remain a partner through at least 2028. While the gulf between our two countries has widened considerably, this, at least, provides a faint glimmer of hope that our differences won’t continue indefinitely.
You can learn about my vampire series by visiting: http://davidleesummers.com/books.html#scarlet_order