Every Tasmanian knows of the famous 1969 moon landing, when Neil Armstrong became the first person to walk on the Moon.
But what if Armstrong and the other Apollo 11 astronauts (Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins) had never made it back to Earth?
Author David Dyer’s latest novel, This Kingdom of Dust, explores this harrowing scenario. There would have been no hope of rescue, and the men would have slowly suffocated as the whole world watched.
Dyer recently told Tasmanian Times that part of the reason he wrote This Kingdom of Dust was to show just how easily something could have gone wrong during the moon landing.
“It was a very risky venture, and this alternative history shows just how horrifying a mishap could have been,” he said.
“[It will] reinforce [people’s] admiration for the absolute audacity of this enterprise, the courage that was required, the breadth and depth of vision that was needed. I hope that can sort of help us adopt those things again as we reach out towards the moon again, which we are now doing.”
While writing This Kingdom of Dust, Dyer had to engage in ‘narrative telepathy’ and imagine what it is like on the Moon.
“With [my] Titanic book [The Midnight Watch, published in 2016], I went to all the various places where [it] is set,” he said.
“I went to Boston, I went to New York. I even went to the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, where the Titanic sank. But with this book, of course, I couldn’t go to the moon. Luckily enough, there’s a lot of material available online from NASA about how the machines worked. The reports from the astronauts, every word of the mission is available to listen to or to read. There’s also a ton of publicly available material about the lives of the astronauts and their wives themselves. Buzz Aldrin himself wrote a lot of books.”
The only Apollo 11 astronaut Dyer wasn’t able to “get close to” during his research was Neil Armstrong.
“He was so enigmatic, almost God-like,” he said.
“I’m really in complete awe of him because he was such a pure cool cucumber under pressure.”
Dyer added that Aldrin was “so mission-focused”.
“His young daughter, very tragically, not too long before he went to the moon, had died of terrible cancer. A completely heart-breaking story. For a tiny time, [Armstrong] wasn’t quite on his game. He was slightly unbalanced by this thing, but then he quickly got back on focus. By the time Apollo 11 came around, he was completely focused again.”
The Novel That Almost Was
This Kingdom of Dust was very nearly a different novel, Dyer told Tasmanian Times.
David Dyer.
“I had space in my mind, because my American agent, for some reason, said, ‘You know, maybe you should write a book about the space program or something’,” he said.
“I really wanted to write a book on the 1979 Mount Erebus disaster. I was completely obsessed with that accident. But something else came along. I was in Sydney, and an old friend of mine […] came to Sydney with her son […] and he was only 16. We went out for dinner, and he was texting a lot on his phone, and he noticed me noticing him, and he said, ‘Look, I’m really sorry, it’s just my father. It’s the first time he’s been left alone in Launceston, and he’s being a bit needy, and he’s texting me a lot, and so I’m just texting him back’. And I said – I was just joking, of course – ‘Well, you’ve got to cut him off. You’ve got to be cruel, to be kind, just like NASA would have done [to the Apollo 11 astronauts.’ We sort of had a laugh about that. But later on, I thought, ‘That would make a great novel.’ What would have happened? What would the astronauts have done? What would everybody else have done?”
This is how This Kingdom of Dust evolved into the book it is today.
About David Dyer
David Dyer has had a diverse career, studying medicine, travelling around the world on merchant ships, and practicing law in both Sydney and London.
He met moonwalkers Buzz Aldrin and Charlie Duke at an Apollo 11 gala in 2019.
Dyer is currently based in Sydney, where he teaches English, writes, and makes cocktails.
This Kingdom of Dust, paperback, 352 pages, published by Penguin, ISBN 9781761343490.
Callum J. Jones studied English, History, and Journalism at the University of Tasmania. He has written fiction and non-fiction for Tasmanian Times since 2018, and can be traced by the smell of fresh coffee.
Follow him on Twitter (@Callum_Jones_10) and Facebook (@callum.j.jones.creative).
