Red Moon

Red Moon is the Michael Cassutt counterfactual novel that asks what would have happened if the Soviet space program had been better organized after Sergei Korolev's death and had achieved a lunar landing before Apollo. Cassutt is one of the few SF writers with the actual aerospace background to make the engineering plausible, and the book is interesting most as a careful working-out of a particular technical and political what-if.

The protagonist Yuri Ribko is a Soviet cosmonaut whose career parallels the actual N1 rocket development. Cassutt handles the Soviet space-program politics with the kind of attention that the form requires. The American counterpart material is sketched lightly but adequately.

The book reads as more of an alternate-history specialist's pleasure than a general thriller, which is appropriate to its subject. Four stars. Recommended to readers of careful space-history alt-history.