A Dip into Fiction : Three Tales of Jack Reacher

 Fiction: Prowling the Reacher universe 

I always liked Jack Reacher. Sure, sometimes he’s impossibly tough and smart. But Lee Child managed to make him human all the same, and his adversaries and their plots are an interesting, varied, and sometimes very original lot.  Add in the cool information on the military and law enforcement, and the result is almost always a good read.   (The ones where he’s just the co-author lack an edge somehow.) I like the TV series, after it corrected for excess explicit gore of the first season. Alan Ritchson embodies Reacher as perfectly as Christopher Reeve did Superman, which is the highest praise I can offer. The two Tom Cruise movies are good action flicks in their own right, but Reacher's size and intimidation factor is important to the stories.

I re-read three Reachers this year, and I thought I’d share. The links are to the editions I read.

Blue Moon: 

https://www.amazon.com/Blue-Moon-Jack-Reacher-Novel/dp/039959356X

I should have liked this more than I did. As Reacher visits the town where his father was born and of course crosses paths with bad guys, we learn more about Jack’s family. Also of interest: it includes twists like average citizens rising to heroics, interesting villains with a terrifying scheme that might exist somewhere in real life, Reacher playing matchmaker (if inadvertently) instead of lover to the female lead, and some intriguing psychology. It didn’t quite grip me, but it’s still good. An item at the end should have been mentioned at least a bit in subsequent books but isn’t. Hmm. 

Night School: 

https://www.amazon.com/Night-School-Jack-Reacher-Novel/dp/0804178828/

A lot of detective work for Reacher, which is always nice. While in the Army, he has to solve a sniper attack on the French president before more world leaders are targeted. The diversion into the English criminal world is something he didn’t expect, but he flows with it. Reacher has to figure out, with many twists and some dead ends, who had motive, money, and skills to arrange a complicated scheme to support a single narrow objective – and what exactly that objective is. Along the way we get my favorite Reacher line: when a compatriot is killed next to Reacher, and someone asks about the blood and brains on his jacket, Reacher says, “Just a guy I used to know.” Nitpick: the physical freak who runs the English gang would never get a chance to disappear into crime: he’d be famous, a medical study from his early teens and a constant subject of press coverage. 

The Hard Way:

https://www.amazon.com/Hard-Way-Jack-Reacher/dp/0440246008/ 

One of my top Reacher picks, this one offers a lot of misdirection and twists as Reacher happens (of course) to be in the right place and time to be pulled into in an apparent kidnapping. The standard once-a-book Reacher mistake was a huge one, although it was buffered by the reasons he made it. Nitpick: the ease with which the bad guys took over a house protected by armed good guys and captured everyone needed to be explained.   As to the personal side: Reacher always leaves at the end, of course, and he’s always upfront with the “Reacher girl,” but this was the only time it felt wrong. He at least thought about doing things with his ex-FBI lover when the case was over, and their bond was genuinely romantic for a bit. Her being a decade older and their sexual connection being uniquely tender and memorable for Reacher (details not given) made you hope he’d stick around a while or at least promise visits.  There was, presumably, a farewell discussion that's not related on page. I'd like to have read it.

Matt Bille is a writer, aerospace consultant, naturalist, and historian based in Colorado Springs.  His last novel, Death by Legend, is cryptozoological horror tale set in modern Los Angeles. His scientific thriller Apex Predator will be out in 2026 from Blackstone Publishing.

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The Strangest Human Spaceflight Ideas

 Next Man Up? The Weirdest Piloted Rocket Ideas

Historical programs and events don’t only provide us further ideas. They provide warnings. Ever since the ides of humans in space left the science fiction stage and people started designing rockets to support human life, there have been new ideas and designs. Some have been brilliant. Some haven’t. Some make one wonder whether the engineers were ever tested for controlled substances.

For this essay, let’s call our astronaut “Buster,” the crash dummy from MythBusters. Buster was blown up and burned when re-creating the perhaps-mythical flight of the Chinese sage Wan Ho, who tried to fly a winged chair propelled by gunpowder rockets. So he’s perfect for this job.

The first half of spaceflight is getting the astronaut to space. There are two basic ideas. One is a capsule mounted on an expendable or reusable booster. It’s easier technically, and it’s long been the default: the latest capsules even manage to look spiffy. The piloted spaceplane is technically much more difficult and complex, and was never pulled off until the U.S. Space Shuttle. Smaller ones may fly soon.

That said, aerospace engineers are an imaginative bunch, and in the early years they put that imagination on the drawing boards. The first ideas came from people with imagination but not the technology to test it out. Pioneering space thinker Konstantin Tsiolkovsky designed a large human-carrying rocket ship. Suborbital rocket ideas included the “Silverbird” space plane by Germans Eugen Sänger and Irene Bredt in the late 1930s. It was, if not practical, a beautiful piece of speculative design: the Soviets studied a copy in 1946, and Messerschmitt-Bölkow-Blohm (MBB) looked again in 1985. A piloted version of the V-2 was bandied about at Peenemunde: it could have been tested, but was not, given the wartime priorities and the fact Buster probably would have had to be ordered to test it at gunpoint.  

All astronauts to date have been launched using chemically-fueled rockets, a technology originally developed for unguided rockets and then missiles. A “manned missile” was a good approximation of the first spaceship concepts, like the Air Force’s Man in Space Soonest (MISS) (canceled in favor of Project Mercury). 

USAF image of MISS

After the Air Force and NASA had staked out their roles in human spaceflight, the Navy remained interested. They apparently decided all the rational ideas were taken, and their engineers/contractors explored taking the “manned missile” term literally, firing astronauts from the missile launch tubes of submarines. This might have been the unlikeliest launcher since Wan Ho’s. Buster would enter a tiny capsule on top of a modified Polaris and be shot into space. Getting a proper thrust to weight ratio was probably impossible, and the ride would have been very harsh. The justification for launching in the first place was meager: with no room for any significant payload except Buster, there wasn’t much he could do except perhaps augment the crew of a larger ship or station. I know there are illustrations of this, but I can’t find one.

Launching a piloted craft from a gun was the idea in Jules’ Verne’s From The Earth to the Moon. Kenneth Anderson’s novel Nemo describes how this might have been built as a real project, although the end would be a flattened pile of junk not many miles from the launch site.  

Image: Verne’s Columbiad launch

Robert Heinlein, in his well-researched 1947 The Man Who Sold the Moon, sent rockets up with the help of an electromagnetic catapult built over the cog railway route on Pikes Peak. Versions of that idea have been floated ever since, but no hardware has been built. (Your historian was one of the people who was far too optimistic about this, publishing a paper subtitled, “A Launch Solution on the Way to Reality.”) 

We're in a very busy time for human spaceflight, including tourist and other commercial flight. Stranger ideas may follow!

Read Matt's latest nonfiction book, Of Books and Beasts: A Cryptozoologist's Library. This unique reference offers a friendly skeptic's 400 reviews of books on cryptozoology, zoology, related sciences, and cryptozoological fiction. His next novel. the cryptozoological horror tale Death by Legend, has just hit the shelves!