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MATT GALLOWAY (HOST):
MG: Hello, I'm Matt Galloway and you're listening to The Current. Chris Hadfield has become one of Canada's most famous faces. He has flown to space on three separate missions. He commanded the International Space Station and he is also an author. His new novel, The Defector, is a story of Cold War era espionage and geopolitics with, as you would imagine, a light dusting of space tossed in. It's also the story that hits very close to home for him personally. And Chris Hadfield is with me in our Toronto studio. Chris, hello.
CHRIS HADFIELD: Good morning.
MG: Thanks for being here.
CHRIS HADFIELD: Oh, my pleasure.
MG: Thank you. They say write what you know. And in many ways, this is a book that that has a lot of I mean, it's fiction, but there's a lot of personal truth in here as well.
CHRIS HADFIELD: Not just personal truth, but global truth. I mean, it's based on all real events. If you read the book, you're going to have a hard time figuring out, well, what of this is even made up? Because everything in it, as much as I could possibly do, is real. But the core kind of action sequences and the the problems that my characters are facing and the the technology involved, that all comes right from the heart of my expertise.
MG: Part of that expertise is as a Canadian fighter pilot during a well in and around the Cold War.
CHRIS HADFIELD: You may not know this. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union used to practice launching cruise missiles on North America on a regular basis. And they would fly out of northern Soviet Union, come down in between Greenland and Iceland. And they had to get to sort of, like the push-the-button-line where they were close enough, where they could have done enormous damage to our continent. Obviously, as a defender of our country, we had to scramble and get out there and intercept them. I would sleep in the quick reaction facility.
MG: What does that mean?
CHRIS HADFIELD: We had to be airborne in 12 minutes, from a dead sleep, to flying an F-18. I mean, what did you...