METEORITE TRACK 291 by Gary Paulsen

Some of us of a certain age will have read Gary Paulsen's Hatchet in school, a wilderness survival young adult novel which spawned several sequels and represented a type for author Gary Paulsen's (1939-2021) work. How interesting then, to find that before all that YA guff he had dipped his toe into the '70s disaster pool with a sleazy, cynical, impacting read. We've twigged onto METEORITE TRACK 291, and we've got one hundred hours until the fall!

Paulsen and his most well known title

The opening is pure technothriller bliss, with satellite tracker Richard Foreman and his crew drawing us deep into their wyrd world, based on Greenwich Mean Time and the movements of unknowable celestial objects. This deep dive puts us into the perfect frame of mind to feel the creeping heebie jeebies when Foreman finds something on his track that shouldn't be there, something that is locked onto a projected course that will TERMINATE EARTH. All Foreman can do is kick it upstairs, but that's when the trouble really begins in true '70 conspiracy style. And here Paulsen excells, as the nameless General and his faceless goons bring their considerable resources to bear in silencing Foreman. We don't get any scenes of General so-and-so browbeating Secretary what's-his-face in the war room, and we're the better for it. All we get is the grounds eye view of a massive structure lashing out even if it kills it and us, endless resources and skills brought to bear for the most asinine, bass-ackwards ends.

Spoilers here, nothing stops the traveller (as Paulsen calls the meteor) from obliterating Chicago. And here the narrative becomes truly Biblical, coming full circle with the prehistoric prologue of a troubled tribesman witnessing another cataclysmic fall. In this totally earthbound thriller, without any astronaut heroics or Star Wars shenanigans, Paulsen outlines how truly small we are in the universe and how utterly pointless our living or dying is in the long run.

For his ruthless honesty, Paulsen earns four blasted craters out of four:

For an alternate perspective, Amazon reviewer Bruce takes the novel to task for geographical sloppiness (I-70 does NOT take you to Chicago) and what he judges as two dimensional characters. Your mileage may vary!

Dell Publishing, 1979