The novel, which Mulholland Books released this week, is set in the American space program in the late 1960s and early ’70s, a time of swaggering ambition and Cold War anxiety. What emerged was “The Apollo Murders,” slimmed down by a third and now 480 pages long. Eventually, he began to trust the process, he said, to internalize the notion that “writers and editors have different skill sets and you need them both,” and even to understand that less can sometimes be more. He sounded cheerful about it, considering. “They sent me back the first 30 pages, and I thought, ‘You have removed a whole bunch of words and ideas that, I’m pretty sure, are germane to what’s happening,’” Hadfield said in a video interview at the end of August. But until earlier this year, he never had to face the stomach-churning professional challenge of turning in a novel and learning that your editors think it is 35,000 words too long. In his long and varied career, the Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield has flown fighter jets, walked in space and orbited the earth for months while commanding the International Space Station.
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