When Casey lands in Tokyo with a PhD and dreams of building rockets, he expects to find his footing among satellites and spacecraft schematics. What he finds instead is a city that refuses to be navigated on anyone else’s terms—and a crew of hard-drinking skateboarders who derail his carefully laid plans in the best possible way. Satellites and Skateboards: Two Years in the Heart of Tokyo is a belated coming-of-age memoir that zigzags between two worlds rarely visited by the literary artist: the esoteric realm of spacecraft engineering and the kinetic subculture of skateboarding. Between floating weightless in a microgravity jet and assaulting a security guard in a dark alley, Casey struggles to hold on to the last vestige of his adolescence while Tokyo quietly, ruthlessly, finishes the job of growing him up. Blending humour, introspection, and sharp cultural observation, Satellites and Skateboards is an unlikely story of peer pressure, beer pressure, and orbital mechanics in a kind of Neverland before the long journey home—and what it actually takes to leave your adolescence behind when you’ve spent your whole adult life holding on to it.
Casey Lambert is a professional engineer working in satellite operations at the Canadian Space Agency. He lives in Montreal, where he has taught engineering courses at McGill and Concordia University. When he is not engineering or getting bossed around by his two teenagers and their Jack Russel, he is out doing kickflips on his skateboard or taking long rides on his bicycle. To cope with a pesky mid-life crisis, he writes stories about being young and free. His travel stories have appeared in the Montreal Gazette, National Post, and Globe and Mail.
