ABSTRACT
Andrew Smiths Moondust is an account of the author's journey to meet all of the remaining astronauts who had undertaken missions to the moon. For Smith, it was when Nick Hornby wrote about Moondust in The Polysyllabic Spree that he realized why the book was an unusual choice for a mass broadcast book club, which generally selected novels from established genres such as historical fiction, crime, and chick-lit. Smith understands this more as an impact of the strong autobiographical narrative position, rather than a considered statement of the way that the moon landings are perceived globally today. The moon missions are, Smith insists, emotional events and not just scientific ones, meaning that to write a book that was purely a science book would be to write an incomplete story, even if some members of the science community would have preferred to read a new scientific analysis of the space program.
