(1943-    ) US engineer for NASA and author, whose memoir/novel, Rocket Boys: A Memoir (1998; vt October Sky 1999), filmed as October Sky (1999), intensely and movingly captures the longing for space felt by young Americans (not always male), a longing composed in part of frustrated knowledge (Germany had already developed the V2) and in part through the expansionist dreams advocated in sf journals like Astounding after World War Two, an advocacy most eloquently dramatized by Robert A Heinlein. Hickam's Near Future sf novel, Back to the Moon (1999), a continuation of the dream of space in wholly fictional terms, features the proactive hijacking of a space shuttle and a journey to the Moon. [JC]

Homer Hadley Hickam Jr

born Coalwood, West Virginia: 19 February 1943

died

works

series

Helium-3

• Crater: A Helium-3 Novel (Nashville, Tennessee: Thomas Nelson, 2012) [hb/]
• Crescent (Nashville, Tennessee: Thomas Nelson, 2013) [pb/]
• Crater Trueblood and the Lunar Rescue Company (Nashville, Tennessee: Thomas Nelson, 2014) [pb/]

individual titles

• Rocket Boys: A Memoir (New York: Delacorte Press, 1998) [fiction/memoir: hb/]
  • October Sky (New York: Dell Publishing Company, 1999) [vt of the above: pb/]
• Back to the Moon (New York: Delacorte Press, 1999) [hb/]

links

• Internet Speculative Fiction Database

Previous versions of this entry

• 11/09/2008
• 20/12/2011
• 21/08/2012
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• 05/07/2014
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• 11/02/2016
• 26/04/2016
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