A Mistake

Carl Shuker

Victoria University Press, $30

“Events of importance are the result of trivial causes”. In 2018, those words seemed eerily true for students encountering them in a now-infamous NCEA exam. (Some complained to the media because they didn’t know what ‘trivial’ meant.) In 1986, they were borne out as rubber rings in cold weather failed to seal properly, resulting in the Challenger space shuttle disaster and its seven deaths.

In Carl Shuker’s new novel, , a blow-by-blow commentary of the Challenger disaster “assembled from shuttle telemetry, some internal shuttle and mission control comms, public NASA broadcasts … edited for shape” is peppered through a slow-motion portrait of disaster in the shape of a New Zealand surgeon’s