Imagine for a second what would have happened if the Soviets had gotten a cosmonaut to the moon first, if Neil Armstrong and Apollo 11 had been in a humiliating second place. Everything would have unfolded differently. America would never have let the Soviets win the space race. That would have been unthinkable during the Cold War, political suicide for any president. We'd have gritted our teeth and doubled down, poured billions into the Apollo program. HOT MOON is set in 1979 in this alternate world. The US and the Soviets both have permanent moon bases, orbiting space stations, and manned spy satellites supported by frequent rocket launches. Reagan is President and the Cold War is hotter than ever. The crew of Apollo 32, commanded by Vivian Carter, career astronaut, docks at NASA's Columbia space station on their way to their main mission: exploring the volcanic Marius Hills region of the Moon. Vivian is caught in the crossfire as four Soviet Soyuz craft appear without warning to assault the orbiting station. The fight for the Moon has begun!

In the sequel to Hot Moon, set in an alternate 1983, Apollo astronaut Vivian Carter and her crew barely survive an armed attack from mysterious assailants at the lunar South Pole. Back at the joint Zvezda-US Copernicus Moonbase, the precarious Cold War cease-fire between the NASA and Soviet crews comes under threat from another consolidated assault. Vivian must navigate a treacherous political and military landscape, and travel from the lunar surface to high lunar orbit and back again, to solve the riddle of these strange lunar incursions and move ahead to a future that even she can barely imagine.

On July 4, 1983, Vivian Carter and her NASA crew of seven set off on an audacious double flyby of Venus and Mars, a two-year mission with repurposed Apollo technology that will push their ingenuity and resourcefulness to the limit. Meanwhile, superpower conflicts escalate on Earth, mirrored by a dangerously unstable arms race and battles for valuable mineral resources on the Moon. Full-up lunar military actions and treacherous sneak attacks decimate Vivian’s friends, allies and colleagues on both sides of the Iron Curtain and threaten everything she has worked to achieve. Vivian’s odyssey is a high adventure that will bring mankind new knowledge and unimagined insights … just as the risk of worldwide nuclear war has never been greater. Now, on her triumphant return in 1985, Vivian Carter’s path inevitably brings her back to where she began: a desperate rescue mission with no NASA support and no safety net, to a dangerous, war-torn Moon where she will be hard pressed to tell friend from foe. In the concluding volume of Alan Smale’s highly acclaimed Apollo Rising series ("A nail-biting thriller."−Publishers Weekly) humanity faces a stark choice: a bright new interplanetary future … or nuclear apocalypse on two worlds.