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“For more than half a century, there [was] no manned presence on the lunar surface. That was about to change …��

One of my fondest and most vivid reading memories is my first reading of Tom Clancy’s THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER, arguably English literature’s first techno-thriller. I recall holding my breath, eyes wide and eyebrows raised, and swallowing deeply as defecting Soviet submarine Captain Marko Ramius played a deadly silent game of hide and seek in the mountainous undersea terrain of the Reykjanes Ridge off the coast of Iceland. EAGLE STATION riffs on the same themes by moving that international chess match into the air, into space, and onto the surface of the moon, as a Sino-Soviet alliance wages covert (and officially undeclared but very, very hot) warfare (with extreme prejudice) against the USA over control of the lunar surface and the mining of the moon’s helium-3 resources.

There is no shortage of brilliantly exploited, fast-paced themes here to thrill even the most hard-core technology, political, and military junkies �� hard-nosed international diplomacy; deployment of the recently created US Space Force; hard-core military tit for tat that treads ever closer to the boundary of a declared world war; high speed aerial battles; advances in weaponry that would make your head spin; and, of course, government decision making under the stress of all of these conditions.

EAGLE STATION is a snap to recommend to fellow readers and the latest nominee for my Top Ten of 2024 reading list.

On a side note as we rapidly approach the fateful November day on which the US will decide whether its future will include democracy and the rule of law, I shuddered when I tried to imagine a certain Donald J Trump in place of EAGLE STATION’s president, John Dalton Farrell. The possible results for the world as I pictured Trump making decisions in the same scenarios were simply terrifying. Food for thought �� !

Paul Weiss