Laika

Laika, by Nick Abadzis, Firstsecond Books

AS WE await pictures taken on the planet Jupiter it's amazing what we've achieved with regards to space travel in such a short time. The Americans were the first to get a guy to walk on the moon, but that only came about because they were losing the publicity game as the world’s top superpower to those penny-saving Russians back in the USSR.

The Russians got a rocket up into the outer atmosphere first, their Yuri Gagarin orbited the world before anyone else, and before that they put up the first living creature. It was a dog, and it was known to the world as Laika.

Nick Abadzis envelopes us as readers in a retelling of that momentous event, using facts revealed from now-released top secret documents but moving beyond the dry drama of such dogmatic facts to fictionalise the drama as it might have unfolded, peopling it with characters we come to care about.

Let me state right now, I’m not a dog lover. I don’t mind them, but I’ve never had one, and can get by in my life without ever seeing another. Does that make me heartless to the fact that scientists experiment on them, and as this story shows, used them in space programme experiments? No. I’m not that callous, but neither did I think I’d get sentimental about the dog in this story, but I did come to care for it.

There are a number of people who enter the story, but for the most part it revolves around Korovlev the engineer in charge of Russia’s space program and Yelena a technician who trains and cares for Laika.

I soon found myself investing emotional allegiances towards certain characters, but had them changing as the story developed and discovered them to be much more multi-dimensional individuals and it totally added to the reading experience.

This a tale of egotism, power struggles, public relations affairs, history and fiction, and is worth your spending some quiet downtime with, no matter what your age.

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