They say you always hurt the one you love. I love the space program, so, hmm, I wonder, what’s going to be my most obvious target in Prepared for Rage?

I grew up in a coastal fishing village in Alaska. Four hundred people, no road, no television. Even in Anchorage, the largest city, television was taped in Seattle and rebroadcast three weeks later. As for news, someone would tape Walter Cronkite every night at 6pm in Seattle and rush it out to the airport. If they made the flight, the CBS Evening News would broadcast that night in Anchorage at 10pm. If they didn’t, no tv news that night.

So the first live broadcast I saw was in July 1969, the year we moved to Anchorage so I could go to UAA and my mom and dad could give it another try. The first was successful, more or less. The second most emphatically was not.

So guess what that live broadcast was? Yep, the Apollo 11 moon landing. I was hooked on the space program from that moment. I read everything I could get my hands on about it, and about space exploration and colonization (a couple of my favorites are Chariots for Apollo, Carrying the Fire and Riding Rockets), and you could say Apollo 11 was the proximate cause of my writing three science fiction novels, which, alas, weren’t heard from much past their publication date.

I was at KSC on February 3, 1995 for the launch of STS-63, with astronaut Eileen Collins as pilot (in 1999, she commanded STS-93). I live for the day she writes her autobiography.

I’m surprised, and relieved, that no terrorist has yet targeted the space shuttle. It is an obvious and instantly recognizable symbol of US pride and power and spirit, of our determination that our reach should exceed our grasp, or what’s a heaven for? It has failed twice and both times the nation has greatly suffered the loss of its best and brightest.

An attack on the shuttle would really hit us where we live, so naturally that’s where my little shit of a villain directs his attention. The US Coast Guard works offshore security during a shuttle launch. In Prepared for Rage, cutter Munro is the means of the attack, but its Coastie crew is also its rout. This was a scary, fun, scary book to write.

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Here is the link to the latest newsletter that went out on February 26th, with a list of Kodiak events and news about the next Kate Shugak novel.