From Jay Pasachoff
You published a news piece about a contest to select an astronaut to go to
Mir, and then Chris Elliott wrote to say that this actually happened on a TV
programme in 1991
(19 August, p 5 and
16 September, p 54).
The phenomenon pops
up again in a new novel by Buzz Aldrin, the second person to walk on the Moon,
and his coauthor John Barnes. Their book, The Return: A Novel of the human
adventure, published by Forge in New York, is fun to read and raises a
number of interesting issues about the future of human space exploration. I
won’t give away the plot, but fans of murder mysteries will like it.
Williamstown, Massachusetts
