I can vividly remember as a young child, all those years ago, listening to the radio with my family as Neil Armstrong’s voice announced “one giant leap for mankind” as he stepped on to the moon. We were staying at a tiny hotel in northern Spain and together with the handful of other guests including a Belgian couple on their honeymoon and a family from Paris, we marveled at the achievement, later staring up through the starlit night sky at the moon trying to imagine that two men were up there looking down at us. It really was the most unforgettable experience, almost impossible to convey in the context of today’s world.
The Last Pilot, Benjamin Johncock’s debut novel, is set in the years of the
fledgling space programme that paved the way for Apollo 11. It was a world made increasingly fearful by the belligerence between the USA and Russia. The Arms Race and the Space Race becoming two sides of the same coin. The book focuses on the fictional USAF Captain Jim Harrison and his wife Grace happily living in the searingly dry heat of California’s vast Mojave Desert where he was a military test pilot. Apart from the job which comes
