The Space Race, by Alex Latimer

The Space Race, by Alex Latimer. Random House Struik Umuzi. Cape Town, South Africa 2013. ISBN 9781415203880 / ISBN 978-1-4152-0388-0

Alex Latimer is a South African illustrator and author whose picture books are published here and abroad. With his brother Patrick, he created the Business Day cartoon The Western Nostril. He is also the author and illustrator oiThe South African Alphabet and From Aardvark to Zuma. The Space Race is his first novel.

Alex Latimer  

There were over a hundred and eighty-five thousand applications for this job from all over the world. Everyone wanted it. It was the only way to book a seat in the 'listening room', if you weren't either a billionaire or a president or world-famous journalist. In the end the job went to a local researcher working for the South African government. Silas Kumane. Right now he's sitting at a desk in the centre of a huge room in the Union Buildings, in Pretoria, as he has done every night for the last six hundred and twenty-eight days. Picture it. It's 2.30 a.m. and he has headphones on. The headphones are connected to a radio, and the radio, via a network of cables as thick as my arm, is connected to a five-storey-tall satellite dish built in the once picturesque surrounding gardens. All he can hear is the hiss of distant stars. Ever since the unauthorised nuclear-powered spaceship lifted off from the middle of the Northern Cape desert, the South African government has been trying to contact its crew. It's global news now - in case you haven't heard. People have flocked to Upington from all over the world, despite the mild radiation that covers the area and the general lack of accommodation. Journalists, scientists, politicians, tourists even. It's been hell for the police. Officers from other provinces have been bussed in to manage the crowds ol foreigners, while the local police attempt to bring the people who planned the launch to justice. You can't detonate a nuclear device so close to civilisation and expect to get away with it. Plus there's rumour of more sinister things for the police to deal with. Murders leading up to the launch. Mass graves. And all this with sunburnt foreigners in slipslops clogging the streets and camping illegally on front lawns. Besides the hundred or so people who saw the ship lift off out of the desert, the first people who knew about the launch were the Americans. They have satellites in space just watching Earth for the tell-tale double flash of a nuclear device. So before the South African government knew anything about what was happening, five horizon-obscuring us aircraft carriers suddenly appeared off the coast. Each one armed with more weapons than you could find in all of Africa. (Unless you count sharpened sticks, pangas and knobkerries.) There followed some tense talks. Cold War stuff. The Americans, joined by the British, the Chinese and the French, couldn't believe that our government had no idea what was going on. How could we not have the faintest clue about a nuclear-powered space programme developed within our own borders? They obviously didn't know our government very well, or the sheer size of South Africa. You can't keep an eye on every square kilometre of land, especially in the Northern Cape where there are fewer than a million people in an area larger than Britain. To our government's credit, they were transparent from the beginning. They welcomed foreign investigations, which ultimately saved Joburg from the same fate as Hiroshima. After a week, the investigators announced what everybody suspected, it was a spacecraft, built in secret using a nuclear device left over from the apartheid-era arms race. [...]

This is an excerpt from the novel: The Space Race, by Alex Latimer.

Title: The Space Race
Author: Alex Latimer
Genre: Crime novel
Publisher: Random House Struik
Imprint: Umuzi
Cape Town, South Africa 2013
ISBN 9781415203880 / ISBN 978-1-4152-0388-0
Softcover, 15 x 22 cm, 208 pages