Some time in the early eighties (I’m pretty sure) I read this action-based space opera (ala Alan Dean Foster stuff) and would love to track down a copy.
Notable scenes and plot points…
It’s a basic big alien mothership enters the solar system and invades earth trope. The ship launched a bunch of fighters to attack earth, I remember them being boomerang shaped. Earth soon started losing the battle.
The space shuttle fleet (Enterprise, Columbia, etc) had been re-purposed into asteroid miners out in the asteroid belt and was overlooked in the main attack. This was before the Challenger tragedy, and many of the shuttle names in the book were speculative. The shuttles were now fitted with homing “rockbuster” missiles which they hunted stray asteroids with. The shuttles were organized into a desperate reserve fighting unit, sneakily got upgraded and armed more heavily. Much space-dogfighting ensues when they surprise-attack the alien space fighters and save the day.
Nope. I don’t remember this. The shuttle novels I recall from the 80s were pretty faithful – Lee Correy’s (actually G. Harry Stine’s) Shuttle Down and Steven Barnes/Larry Niven’s The Descent of Anansi (which featured space war with space shuttles, but between two earth nations).
Space shuttles got used imappropriately (grotesquely large range and capability) in the Glen Larson Buck Rogers and the meteor disaster flicks Armageddon and [Deep Impact, but there were no aliens in those.
And of course, in Footfall by Niven & Pournelle, the four shuttles were launched into space on the back of the Archangel Michael to bring the battle to the Fithp.
(To be honest, I recall the book as being pretty bad, even when I first read it which was 20 or 30 years ago and I was a lot younger. But have it at–YMMV.)
The Stargate novels based off Emmerich & Devlin’s original ideas for a trilogy featured space shuttles, modified by salvaged Goa’uld technology, pressed into service to build orbital defences and later to serve as fighters. IIRC even Enterprise was brought out of mothballs. Unlike the TV series the Stargate program was quickly given public acknowledgement after the events of the movie.
Fantastic, that’s it! My 12-year-old self loved it back then, yeah it probably wasn’t that good, but I’ll see if I can find a copy for a buck or two for nostalgia’s sake. Thanks!
