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Rating: 
Summary: Red Rarity
Review: "Red Moon" is interesting mostly for its subject and setting: The Soviet space program from the earliest manned flights until the race to the Moon was lost. Yuri Ribko, the protagonist, is a non-entity and his career as a cosmonaut is a non-starter, but the author does a good job evoking the world he inhabits (for a while), and a handful of conspiracy theories -- How did Yuri Gagarin really die? Why did three N-1 boosters in a row explode in flight? -- add spice to the Brezhnev-era bureaucracy and backbiting.
Rating:
Summary: Red Rarity
Review: "Red Moon" is interesting mostly for its subject and setting: The Soviet space program from the earliest manned flights until the race to the Moon was lost. Yuri Ribko, the protagonist, is a non-entity and his career as a cosmonaut is a non-starter, but the author does a good job evoking the world he inhabits (for a while), and a handful of conspiracy theories -- How did Yuri Gagarin really die? Why did three N-1 boosters in a row explode in flight? -- add spice to the Brezhnev-era bureaucracy and backbiting.
Rating:
Summary: dissappointing but above average historical fiction
Review: "Red Moon", a novel, tells of the Soviets' ill-fated attempts to beat the Yanks to the moon. Author Michael Cassutt obviously knows something about the "secret history" of soviet spaceflight - which hailed its own triumphs while covering up some spectacular failures - but nevertheless tries to frame his story in his hero's personal narrative. We first "meet" Yuri Ribko in 1998, as he's interviewed by a western aerospace journalist. The space race is over by then: Russians and Yanks collaborate over the ISS space station that neither can begin to complete alone, and anyway, the Clinton impeachment was the headline of the day. The once-mighty Russian spaceflight infrastructure is a shell of its former self - the nation that pioneered satellites and manned spaceflight can barely afford to complete crucial components for ISS, while the beloved Mir space station faces abandonment (it would re-enter and burn up in the spring of 2001). In his interviews, Ribko takes us back to the mid 1960's when, as an engineer, he joins the Korolev design bureau - one of several bureaus competing for glamorous projects like the moon shot. His timing is fateful - Sergei Korolev (acknowledged years after his death as the genius behind the rockets that orbited the first satellites and then the first cosmonauts) dies in what appears to be a botched operation, and a succession war breaks out to replace him. For those who run the various design bureaus, life is very much a class-war - against various would-be usurpers, other bureaus and the military, with the party and the KGB making everybody's life miserable. Ribko is the son of a veteran combat-pilot, now "Colonel-General", a position he seems too noble to exploit. Unfortunately, he's also the nephew of a KGB bigwig - A. Vlad "Uncle Vladimir" Nefudov - which puts him in a position he can't refuse: investigate the "suspicious" death of Korolev and a string of "mysterious" failures that plague the Soviet space program. Implausibly game, Ribko eagerly accepts, which turns out to be a serious mistake - even he realizes that he's no great detective, and his efforts lag even as the KGB's leash marks him as an informer. As Ribko's "career" progresses, he witnesses further soviet failures that widen America's lead in the lunar race - Vladimir Komarov is killed flying Soyuz-1, while Gagarin is lost when his MiG-15 crashes. Closer to "home" Ribko's colleagues face purges or KGB arrests, while his father goes off to supress the Czech velvet uprising. For a moment, an American catastrophe - the fiery deaths of Grissom, White and Chafee during a test of Apollo-1 - allows the Soviets a moment of hope, only to be dashed when the Soyuz-1 disaster sets their timetable to "man rate" their moonship back by months. "Red Moon" is more absorbing than it has a right to be - mostly because it's seldom more than a fictional, first-person narrative of Russia's failed lunar program. The possibilities of a story that's based on Russian spaceflight seldom here go beyond historical moments (like Soyuz-1). Cassutt knows much about that history, and relating it through Yuri gives the story a personal feel that goes beyond your standard "historical fiction". He goes little further than that, however, delving into historical and technical details you're only likely to know or care about if you know or care about spaceflight. But that only raises the familiar paradox for readers of genre books - you've got to already be interested in that kind of story to want to pick up a book like "Red Moon", but if you are, you're least likely to be surprised. Other subplots - hunting the saboteur/murderer; Yuri's complicated relationship with his father; and a complicated pair of interlocking love triangles (Yuri is split between Marina, who loves him, and Katya, who works for Uncle Vladimir; Marina alternates between Uri and Lev, one of Yuri's fellow engineers) - never develop nor really interlock. The most glaring of the half-baked subplots is the saboteur - though it's the first Cassutt begins to develop, he never gives Yuri (an educated guy) the intellectual tools to actually attack the mystery. Just when the novel begins to look like an intriguing mix of "The Right Stuff" and "Gorky Park", Cassutt drops Yuri back into one of the other (and lesser) subplots (into an argument with his father; an intimidating meeting with Uncle Vlad; to bed with Katya). Making half-hearted stabs at the mystery, Yuri sorts out various suspects based on motive (who would want to kill the father of Soviet spaceflight, and the first cosmonaut?), but few other details (like opportunity), and his crime-solving look like an installment of "The Mole". Strangely, though the Americans are constant in the minds of those enmeshed in soviet spaceflight, the prospect of phantom CIA spies never crosses anybody's mind. Even the historical detail sometimes feels forced - the catastrophic launchpad explosion that killed Marshal Nedelin and about 100 others in 1961 is dropped in just to remind us how much Cassutt knows about spaceflight, but little else. (How Yuri would know about an incident that the Soviets kept under wraps for years is also inexplicable). Cassutt wraps up his story too quickly, with a disastrous test launch of the soviet's lunar booster (a proton rocket mounted on a first stage containing 30 engines). There's a story behind that failure, but Cassutt's explanation is forced, has nothing to do with any of the characters of the story, and doesn't even sound convincing. It's obvious that Cassutt was writing his version of "Peter Nevsky and the True Story of the Russian Moon Landing" but slimmer, less intimidating and character-driven than that book, and one taking the more historically correct, if less tantalizing route. Still an above novel which mirrors the soviets' endeavors in space in aiming higher than they could reach.
Rating:
Summary: dissappointing but above average historical fiction
Review: "Red Moon", a novel, tells of the Soviets' ill-fated attempts to beat the Yanks to the moon. Author Michael Cassutt obviously knows something about the "secret history" of soviet spaceflight - which hailed its own triumphs while covering up some spectacular failures - but nevertheless tries to frame his story in his hero's personal narrative. We first "meet" Yuri Ribko in 1998, as he's interviewed by a western aerospace journalist. The space race is over by then: Russians and Yanks collaborate over the ISS space station that neither can begin to complete alone, and anyway, the Clinton impeachment was the headline of the day. The once-mighty Russian spaceflight infrastructure is a shell of its former self - the nation that pioneered satellites and manned spaceflight can barely afford to complete crucial components for ISS, while the beloved Mir space station faces abandonment (it would re-enter and burn up in the spring of 2001). In his interviews, Ribko takes us back to the mid 1960's when, as an engineer, he joins the Korolev design bureau - one of several bureaus competing for glamorous projects like the moon shot. His timing is fateful - Sergei Korolev (acknowledged years after his death as the genius behind the rockets that orbited the first satellites and then the first cosmonauts) dies in what appears to be a botched operation, and a succession war breaks out to replace him. For those who run the various design bureaus, life is very much a class-war - against various would-be usurpers, other bureaus and the military, with the party and the KGB making everybody's life miserable. Ribko is the son of a veteran combat-pilot, now "Colonel-General", a position he seems too noble to exploit. Unfortunately, he's also the nephew of a KGB bigwig - A. Vlad "Uncle Vladimir" Nefudov - which puts him in a position he can't refuse: investigate the "suspicious" death of Korolev and a string of "mysterious" failures that plague the Soviet space program. Implausibly game, Ribko eagerly accepts, which turns out to be a serious mistake - even he realizes that he's no great detective, and his efforts lag even as the KGB's leash marks him as an informer. As Ribko's "career" progresses, he witnesses further soviet failures that widen America's lead in the lunar race - Vladimir Komarov is killed flying Soyuz-1, while Gagarin is lost when his MiG-15 crashes. Closer to "home" Ribko's colleagues face purges or KGB arrests, while his father goes off to supress the Czech velvet uprising. For a moment, an American catastrophe - the fiery deaths of Grissom, White and Chafee during a test of Apollo-1 - allows the Soviets a moment of hope, only to be dashed when the Soyuz-1 disaster sets their timetable to "man rate" their moonship back by months. "Red Moon" is more absorbing than it has a right to be - mostly because it's seldom more than a fictional, first-person narrative of Russia's failed lunar program. The possibilities of a story that's based on Russian spaceflight seldom here go beyond historical moments (like Soyuz-1). Cassutt knows much about that history, and relating it through Yuri gives the story a personal feel that goes beyond your standard "historical fiction". He goes little further than that, however, delving into historical and technical details you're only likely to know or care about if you know or care about spaceflight. But that only raises the familiar paradox for readers of genre books - you've got to already be interested in that kind of story to want to pick up a book like "Red Moon", but if you are, you're least likely to be surprised. Other subplots - hunting the saboteur/murderer; Yuri's complicated relationship with his father; and a complicated pair of interlocking love triangles (Yuri is split between Marina, who loves him, and Katya, who works for Uncle Vladimir; Marina alternates between Uri and Lev, one of Yuri's fellow engineers) - never develop nor really interlock. The most glaring of the half-baked subplots is the saboteur - though it's the first Cassutt begins to develop, he never gives Yuri (an educated guy) the intellectual tools to actually attack the mystery. Just when the novel begins to look like an intriguing mix of "The Right Stuff" and "Gorky Park", Cassutt drops Yuri back into one of the other (and lesser) subplots (into an argument with his father; an intimidating meeting with Uncle Vlad; to bed with Katya). Making half-hearted stabs at the mystery, Yuri sorts out various suspects based on motive (who would want to kill the father of Soviet spaceflight, and the first cosmonaut?), but few other details (like opportunity), and his crime-solving look like an installment of "The Mole". Strangely, though the Americans are constant in the minds of those enmeshed in soviet spaceflight, the prospect of phantom CIA spies never crosses anybody's mind. Even the historical detail sometimes feels forced - the catastrophic launchpad explosion that killed Marshal Nedelin and about 100 others in 1961 is dropped in just to remind us how much Cassutt knows about spaceflight, but little else. (How Yuri would know about an incident that the Soviets kept under wraps for years is also inexplicable). Cassutt wraps up his story too quickly, with a disastrous test launch of the soviet's lunar booster (a proton rocket mounted on a first stage containing 30 engines). There's a story behind that failure, but Cassutt's explanation is forced, has nothing to do with any of the characters of the story, and doesn't even sound convincing. It's obvious that Cassutt was writing his version of "Peter Nevsky and the True Story of the Russian Moon Landing" but slimmer, less intimidating and character-driven than that book, and one taking the more historically correct, if less tantalizing route. Still an above novel which mirrors the soviets' endeavors in space in aiming higher than they could reach.
Rating: 
Summary: Fascinating detail, slow pace
Review: An authority on the space race (author of the massive biographical encyclopedia "Who's Who in Space"), Michael Cassutt looks at the Soviet side in this thriller. A present-day American journalist in Russia records the inside story of the Soviet failure to be first on the moon, as told to him by Yuri Ribko, a young engineering student in 1964 when the book begins. The story opens with the death, possibly the murder, of the head of one arm of the Russian space program. Yuri, with the help of his uncle, a high-ranking member of state security, lands a coveted job. In return all he has to do is spy on his fellows. Yuri's enthusiasm and youthful naivete allows him to be manipulated by his military father as well as his KGB uncle, but also leads him into various arms of the Soviet program, including capsule recovery and the cosmonaut program. Or one of the cosmonaut programs. Cassutt's portrait of the Soviet program depicts a fractured effort. Intense rivalries between military and civilian space programs duplicate efforts and mistakes, foster competing rocket designs, and encourage jealousy, internal secrecy and rushed decisions. Over the book's five years Yuri is on hand for the triumph of the early lunar landing and the devastating failures of exploding launch vehicles and tragic landings. He nearly drowns falling through the ice on a recovery effort, narrowly misses being blown up, endures torturous medical testing and training and wonders if his successes are due to his own merit or his uncle's maneuvering. There are love affairs and family secrets and close details of daily Soviet life. Cassutt (also a TV writer who has worked on "Max Headroom" and "Beverly Hills 90210") knows his stuff, maybe too well. In his effort to include all the historical details, the passion of his fictional story falls flat. The intricacies will be fascinating for those looking for insight into what went wrong with the Soviet race to the moon but those looking for a page-turner would do better elsewhere.
Rating: 
Summary: Modern Historic Fiction of the Russian Space program
Review: I often wonder why it seems I am reading a different book from other reviewers. Several have called this a mystery of what really happened to cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, but that is a plotline in this story that does not arrive until 2/3 of the way through the story... and is truly only a minor part of this techno-thriller. The history of the Russian space program is absolutely fascinating and dictates both the plot and setting. It is a wonderfully brisk read that kept me entertained and looking for further information in the area of the history of space exploration. Highly recommended.
Rating:
Summary: Sensational new techno-thriller
Review: I thought that Cassutt's "Missing Man" was a superb book, but his latest venture into the mysterious and covert world of cosmonautics is simply without peer. I've been following spaceflight history for many years now, and I can see how the author (a renowned authority on the subject) has interwoven a fictional thriller story into the largely-unrevealed world of the Russian space program of the 1960's. Without spoiling the plot, the central focus is on the alleged murder of Russia's Sergei Korolev, the real-life "Chief Designer" of that nation's space program, whose reluctant anonymity only came to an end with his death on an operating table. Without him at the helm, Russia's space program fell apart, and America reached the Moon first. Because it is based very much on fact, this book is quite astonishing reading, and it is very obvious that Cassutt has done some deep and extensive research in putting together his book. There are many surprises stitched into the story, and it has proved to be a real page-turner for me. One of the best techno-thrillers for many years, in my humble opinion.
Rating:
Summary: Top notch job
Review: I was actually surprised - the only notion I'd had before of Mr. Cassutt's work was that he co-edited a so-so SF anthology "Sacred Visions" (his story was okay, but not the best one in the collection), and here he hits me with an awesome book. Truly - hats off, stand up and applaud. And it wasn't only that the story he presented was an engrossing, detailed and pleasing one - though this is a model thriller per se and should serve as a yardstick for the guys who think they can write. No, I was impressed by something else, something that an American author doesn't pull off all that often. The reality of being Russian in those days. Rybko is so real I was strongly tempted to believe in his existence, warts and all. At once fairly intelligent and helpless in coping with Soviet multi-layered reality, with plots within plots and official smokescreens at every step, with family secrets even more sinister, he just pulled me into the book and didn't let go until the last page. A pity there's no six-star award...
Rating:
Summary: Top notch job
Review: I was actually surprised - the only notion I'd had before of Mr. Cassutt's work was that he co-edited a so-so SF anthology "Sacred Visions" (his story was okay, but not the best one in the collection), and here he hits me with an awesome book. Truly - hats off, stand up and applaud. And it wasn't only that the story he presented was an engrossing, detailed and pleasing one - though this is a model thriller per se and should serve as a yardstick for the guys who think they can write. No, I was impressed by something else, something that an American author doesn't pull off all that often. The reality of being Russian in those days. Rybko is so real I was strongly tempted to believe in his existence, warts and all. At once fairly intelligent and helpless in coping with Soviet multi-layered reality, with plots within plots and official smokescreens at every step, with family secrets even more sinister, he just pulled me into the book and didn't let go until the last page. A pity there's no six-star award...
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