Okay, Chris, commander, what's the right way to address you these days?
Yeah they're both right, I'll call you Andrew if that's okay.
[Andrew] We sat down to talk about the book and where fiction starts to feel real.
Let's get right to it, I mean have you written fiction before because like I know you as a
lot of things right but suspense, you know, geopolitical thriller novelist ain't one of them.
So where did this come from?
I had no idea whether I could write fiction, but a few years ago one of the great science fiction
authors, Ray Bradbury, his family asked me to write a whole new introduction for The Martian
Chronicles which was getting re-released and so I really carefully wrote, it was pretty
extensive intro and you know, digging into his science fiction and the ideas of the time and
then extrapolating that into real events, I think that was sort of the genesis of well,
maybe there is a chance that I could write sort of an alternative history thriller fiction.
There's some psychoanalyst somewhere, whose, you know, their fingers are like this right
now because they're thinking, here's an astronaut who has just written 500 pages about astronauts
murdering other astronauts and he's going to be wondering, okay what do I make of that?
They're based on my own life experience that, you know,
they have characteristics of people that I know. To be an astronaut
is hugely competitive. Now we don't have murderers in the astronaut corps,
but you know we've got some pretty intense people and it's not too big an extrapolation to think
that maybe one of them might be hiding something and kept it under wraps that nobody else knew.
Can we, I still want to have fun with this, can we go through some of the fact
versus fiction because you talk about drawing on your own life experiences. You describe in this
novel in very vivid detail I might add, what it's like to vomit in your own space helmet
and of course, it led me to wonder, has Chris Hadfield ever vomited in his own space helmet?
Well fortunately the answer to that question is no, but if you're out on a spacewalk and this has
happened, and you throw up, it's life-threatening because you know that acidic stuff out of your
stomach is now floating inside your helmet and getting in your eyes and your nose and your ears
and because it's all weightless and sticking to your visor, I mean it's just a horrific set of
circumstances and so when I wrote that particular scene into the Apollo Murders, I was thinking of
the astronauts that I'd spoken to who have had to deal with such a miserable thing to happen.
[Andrew] Let's talk about reality if we could and very recent
reality, you know just the other day we saw of course Starfleet's finest,
William Shatner blasting off, I'm curious to know, were you watching as that was happening?
[Hadfield] I was in touch with Bill Shatner beforehand and actually I've been corresponding
with him since and then but when he climbed out of that ship, the look on his face
and then the two or three minutes soliloquy of wonderment that Bill just couldn't help but share.
There is Mother Earth and comfort and there is, is there death? I don't know.
[Hadfield] To me that was, you know, I just have that inside me so vividly from my personal
experience and here's someone who has, you know, made a lifetime of expressing emotion publicly as
an accomplished journeyman actor. I just thought, Bill said it as well as anybody's ever said it.
Incredible feat, there's absolutely zero doubt about that, but I'm gonna
challenge you here because you've seen in response to these types of flights,
you've seen everything, the criticisms that people have leveled. They've written them out,
I mean we heard Prince William say that he wishes that the great minds, the great
wealth of the world would spend a little less time focusing on what's beyond Earth,
a little more time focusing on Earth. When you hear that kind of stuff, what's your take on it?
Well I mean it's a very typical thing to say and and there's there's some justification for it,
but it's the exploration that inspires us to try and do new things. It's the pushing of the
technology that has given us, you know, these. How could you even imagine what a smartphone is just
20 years ago or you know, global positioning satellites? Just think how ubiquitous and how much
we take those satellites for granted or you know, us being able to talk to each other or the weather
satellites and that technology doesn't just instantaneously appear you have to inspire people.
They have to develop it. It takes decades to build the rockets and the sensors and the navigation
systems and communications and once it's there, everyone's going, well of course it's there,
but, and everybody wants to just throw the baby in the bathwater all out at the same time.
Chris Hadfield, great conversation as always, great book, start of,
I'm sure many new adventures to come. Wonderful to talk to you, thank you so much.
Thank you, thank you very much and I'm hard at work with, I think you'll recognize a couple of
the protagonists in the next, in the series. It's a fun project and it keeps me thinking and hopping
and you know, a nice project to be doing at this phase of life. I'm glad you enjoyed it, Andrew.