Two of Updike's contemporaries published books just before Rabbit Redux that respond in different ways to the success of Apollo 11.

Norman Mailer was invited to the NASA facilities in Houston and Cape Kennedy. He interviewed the scientists and astronauts, had dinner with Wernher von Braun, and witnessed the liftoff of Apollo 11. The result is a book, Of a Fire on the Moon (1970), that contains some of Mailer's best descriptive writing, but he was too close to the events to be able to turn them into metaphors and images for fiction. Mailer and Updike, however, share a fascination for the language used by the astronauts, and quote several examples of how the men in space are programmed to talk like robots.

Saul Bellow was so inspired by the success of Apollo 11 that he planned to call his next book "The Future of the Moon," but second thoughts...