Overcoming the narrative disadvantage

How do you tell the story of a disaster that everybody is familiar with? Adam Higginbotham’s Challenger: A True Story of Heroism on The Edge of Space, which was our book of the month for February, has a few things to tell us about that. 

First, perhaps, show people that they’re not as familiar with the disaster as they think: give them new ways to look at the seemingly familiar. Second, transport them back to a time before the tragedy took place—a time when they were innocent. That’s something we talked about in the first half of my conversation with Adam, which we shared last week.

Third on the list may be how you really shift the reader’s knowledge. How do you make your reader more knowledgeable about the things that are new to them while at the same time erasing their foreknowledge and preconceptions? This week, I wanted to share more of that discussion where we get even further into the weeds of how you build complicated stories that try to push people to question what they know.

Telling stories where people know the ending is hard… but it can be done. You can get the reader to their knowledge of the ending.

“I was sort of surprised by the number of people who've said to me that in the chapters before the accident happens, and as the accident grows inexorably closer in the narrative, they are genuinely thinking that maybe this time it's gonna turn out differently. I'm obviously kind of pleased that that's the way they feel about it, even if I wasn't consciously trying to generate that sensation.”

“Ultimately, if you're embarking on a narrative where everybody thinks they know what happens in the end, you've got to try and suspend knowledge and try and lose some of that hindsight that the reader will be going into the book with.”

“I would say that the principal difference between this and my previous book Midnight in Chernobyl is that the accident happens much earlier in the Chernobyl book. When I was planning out how the book was going to be structured, that really concerned me, because I did think ‘Aren't readers just going to be coming to this and think, ‘Oh, well, the thing I've been waiting to see described has already happened, so the other 200 pages of this book I don't need to bother with’?’ That was a narrative disadvantage. But I think the advantage I had was that it took place in this world that most people in the West were completely ignorant of.” 

To make it work, you have to use what they know and what they don’t know.

“I think the other big difference is that is that people's awareness of the details of the Chernobyl story meant that you're introducing a group of characters who you know are going to be involved in a catastrophe and their lives are going to change, but you don't know which of them is necessarily going to survive. That's obviously not the case with the Challenger accident, because if anybody knows anything about it, they know that all the astronauts on board that day were killed. So there's an inevitability about the protagonists that you're being introduced to, that you have to work with narratively.”

One way Adam tackles this is by starting the book with another disaster that people aren’t so familiar with: the Apollo 1 fire, which happened nearly 20 years before Challenger exploded after takeoff. That sets up a connection for readers to follow.

“There are three major catastrophes described in the narrative. The first is the Apollo 1 launchpad fire in which three astronauts were killed in 1967. Then there's the Challenger accident in 1986, and then the story concludes with the Columbia disaster in 2003. The way in which NASA—and historians of NASA—have often narrated this is that they experienced these three different catastrophes for different reasons and unique circumstances. But the truth is that really, NASA has experienced the same accident over and over and over. And so that's why the book is structured in that way, is to show that actually, although individual lessons may have been learned, the overarching lessons were not learned.”

I thought one of the impressive things about Challenger is how it didn’t focus solely on the human side or the technical side. It would be easy to focus completely on the people, or skip over the technical detail—but because the failure of process at NASA and its contractors was why the disaster happened, telling the story more accurately does hinge on some technical detail. 

And I’m not a space enthusiast or an engineering boffin, but I felt like I was able to understand some pretty complicated stuff through this book. How did he make it feel that way?

“I had a lot of help is the short answer. With both books, with the nuclear physics in the Chernobyl book and with the rocket engineering in this book, I'm almost always aiming to give the reader the absolute minimum amount of technical information that they require to understand what's going on without slowing the story down. You don't have to understand every aspect of the physics, of how a seal in a solid rocket works, in order to understand how it went wrong. That's what I'm always trying to do, is ask: Do we need this piece of information?”

“With the rocket engineering I had the help of Brian Russell, who was working on the solid rocket program at the time of the accident, and was on the task force that was devoted to trying to solve the problems of the seals. I went out to Utah and interviewed him for a long time, and then corresponded with him and talked to him on the phone. Then I would take the sections of the book that were dealing with the solid rocket, specifically, and get him to look at drafts of it and correct it and tell me where things were wrong, and then hopefully fix it. That's a good example of what I would do to get to that point that you're talking about: to make it simplified but still accurate.”

It’s not just information for story or information for information’s sake, however.

“The other thing is that actually this stuff is really interesting! I mean, I wouldn't put any of it in if I didn't think that. While it's in the service of the story, because we're telling a story like this, in order to be drawn in as a reader you have to understand what a rocket engineer goes through in the weeks and months leading up to a rocket launch, and how terrifying it is, and the extent to which they understand what the stakes are. So if you just reproduce the sort of dry facts of the decision-making process, you're basically just describing a decision-making tree, and that's not interesting to anybody. Well, I'm sure there are some people who are fascinated by that stuff, but if you can get into the minds of the people who are having to make the decisions, and in so doing, explain their decision-making process and their understanding of the engineering that they're working on, that's really interesting.”

“Actually you've reminded me that one of the most surprising things I came across when I was doing the research was that I found out that Roger Beaujolais—who was one of the rocket engineers who who ultimately became a whistleblower, and was central to the effort to try and stop the launch taking place—the reason why he was so fixated on trying to prevent this happening is because 10 years before the accident happened, he had been working at Rockwell, where they were building the Space Shuttle cockpit, and he worked with a colleague who had a nervous breakdown, essentially. The reason that his colleague had a nervous breakdown was because he had been in a position where he was trying to prevent the company he worked at at the time from going ahead with the design of a new jumbo jet, which he thought included a design fault that could result in a catastrophic accident. A few years later, after he had failed to get this design change made, the accident that he'd feared took place, killing more than 400 men, women and children, and the guy was overwhelmed by guilt of this having happened despite his best efforts to do so. And for Beaujolais, witnessing this was the thing that made him determined that he would never let such a thing happen to him.

What lessons are there to be learned from Challenger? Given that a space entrepreneur is now gutting American institutions and giving lectures from behind the Resolute Desk, and apparently stripping away regulations and oversight, does what happened in 1986 have anything to tell us now?

“I mean, I'm not sure that the deregulation and the wider attack on democracy has a lot to do with Challenger. I mean, at the heart of it, you could say that there's a lesson about expediency and not listening to people who are experts. But I'm not really sure, I think that's a kind of oversimplification of what really happened. Because, you know, everybody involved in what happened was an expert of one kind or another.”

“There was no Big Boss involved in decision making who had made a fortune out of some online payment system 20 years ago and therefore decided that he was a genius at everything, getting his fingers caught in the machinery. I mean, that's not what happened. So I'm not sure, really, that there's any real lessons today. NASA is a very different organization now. The lessons that should have been learned—and to an extent were learned in the short term—after Challenger were then forgotten, or had not been learned by the time Columbia took place. You know, those lessons were very much brought home by what happened in 2003, and NASA changed its way of operating and its approach to risk very profoundly after Columbia. They now have an organization called the Apollo Challenger Columbia Lessons Learned Program, which was set up after the Columbia accident specifically to ensure that those sorts of lessons are not institutionally forgotten ever again. The approach to risk is very different: one statistical analysis that was done before the first shuttle launch in 1981 estimated that the chance of a catastrophic accident taking place during launch was one in 25. The contracts that are written with SpaceX and Boeing now stipulate that there cannot be a risk of catastrophic accident that's higher than one in 270 with the launch vehicle. So you can see that their approach to the likelihood of something going very wrong is very different.”

Last up: Adam’s written two books that focus on disasters in a very small window of time—both Challenger and Chernobyl happened within a few months of each other in 1986. Is this now his specialist subject? Is there going to be a third book that looks at the same period?

“When I was working on this, I did think ‘I don't want to spend another five years dwelling in the spring and winter of 1986.’ At some point, when I was very close to finishing the manuscript, my family went away for the weekend so I was alone in the apartment, and I thought, ‘OK, I'm just going to sit down to watch Netflix; I'm going to relax and put this whole period out of my mind.’ And I turn the thing on and the algorithm does its work, and it shows me this documentary about the assassination of Olof Palme. ‘That sounds interesting, I remember that happening, let's watch that and put all of this stuff about this time period out of my mind.’ I start watching it and then there's a bit of introduction, there's a bit of narration, and then we're into the reconstruction of what happened. And the title card comes up and it says, “March 1986” and I was like, ‘Oh.’

I did not finish watching that documentary, and I did not have a relaxing evening. That was between the other two things. 1986 it turns out was a pretty eventful year. But no, I'm not anxious to revisit 1986 at any point.”

That’s all for this week, thanks again to Adam – and we’ll be back soon.

Onward.