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But we’re here this evening, mostly, to talk about the retired Canadian astronaut’s new book “The Defector.” It’s a thriller, following his last one “The Apollo Murders,” although this one takes place inside Earth’s atmosphere, during the Cold War, partly in Israel and mostly in the United States, at the US Air Force’s test and training facility in the infamous Area 51 in the heart of the Nevada desert.

Here’s the premise: In 1973, on the eve of Yom Kippur, a Soviet pilot flies a MiG fighter into Israel. The pilot defects, promising to divulge secrets, including those of the MiG-25, and is taken, along with the plane, to the United States. We’re immersed deep into Soviet era warfare, spies, political intrigue, with a bit of love interest thrown in for good measure.

Weaving through the plot and the characters is the things a fighter pilot like Hadfield knows; the things an astronaut has experienced: the characteristics of different planes, the science of how it all works together.

He never flew a MiG25 himself — but it was a legendary aircraft. The Iraqis buried one in the sand during the Gulf War. The Americans found it, dug it out, then brought it back to the U.S. — it’s now at the Air Force museum in Dayton. Hadfield spent a day crawling around in it, making sure he had all the details right, talking to some of the experts, trying to figure out how the details were going help him build his fictional world.

Chris Hadfield’s approach to writing is the same as his approach to learning how to do anything in life: he studies. In the case of penning thrillers, he studied how other people write them, and how they got good at it. So, he says, he read heeding the most prescient advice: if you’re going to write, you have to do a lot of reading in the same genre.

Currently, that means the latest in . “You learn in every single book because Jonathan Kellerman is a child psychologist, and his main protagonist is a child psychologist.” Hadfield tries to reflect the style in his own book, divulging information and educating readers about space, aircraft and history in an entertaining package. “It’s this big, complicated puzzle to solve, to make it all work and to keep the tension and to use the language as well as I can. It’s fun.”

And the book is — perhaps surprisingly — very good.

“The Defector” is dedicated to Henry, his dog, and Poppy his cat, who sit with him all morning when he writes. Hadfield likes to write every day; after exercising and “putting out any fires,” he sits at his desk at the back of the cottage and aims to get down 1,000 words a day. “I try to be as disciplined about it as I possibly can.”

Given that this writing is another way — on top of his non-fiction books, his TED talks, his master classes, his music — of sharing the wonder at what he’s seen, as well as the immense amount of information he’s learned throughout his career, he’s careful that the story is based in truth and that the facts are right; reading even fiction is a great teacher, after all.

To be perfectly clear about what’s real and what’s not (and to save us all from heading to Google), at the back of “The Defector,” there’s a section that explicitly states what is factual and what isn’t — perhaps particularly for those of generations where the Cold War is the deep past in history books. Golda Meir, for example, Israel’s first (and so far only) female prime minister, who held the office from 1969 to 1974, is in the book, on the eve of Yom Kippur, which, in this historic year, was also the eve of the war named for the day it began. Hadfield writes with the knowledge of the omniscient narrator, but to ensure the book had the ring of truth, he watched old videos of Meir, to get a sense of the way she looked and moved.

“I work really hard in these to make it something that is as close to what actually happened as I can,” he says. Right down to her Chesterfield cigarettes.

It’s the same way he approached writing the first book in this series, “The Apollo Murders,” including details such as that the Soviet spy space station had a machine gun mounted on the outside that actually fired into space. “That’s all real,” he says. It makes the story compelling for the reader, something he’s keen to do, figuring out how to transport people “like my mother-in-law, who read the book today.” She pretended to be cross with him for writing a book so compelling, he says, that she couldn’t put it down and spent the afternoon reading it. “That’s the ideal if you can do that.”

He considers engaging people is the best way to share his experience and everything he’s learned. It’s his responsibility, after all. “The Canadian taxpayer, either wilfully or unknowingly, agreed that this is one of the things Canada ought to be doing,” he says, referring to the space program, which chooses those who can do the job of astronaut “as well as possible on behalf of everyone.”

“That doesn’t mean pushing the right buttons in a spaceship; it means for the rest of my life doing this job as well as possible.” Part of which is communicating what he’s seen, heard, felt; giving people a sense of the wonders he’s witnessed and the beauty of the universe.

The perspective of an astronaut has something in common with the perspective of an author — both are able to have a bird’s-eye view of a world.

An example: There are times throughout “The Defector” where the narrative pulls out and the characters look at the topography to understand the full picture before they go back down into the fray. It helps the reader figure out the lay of the land, too, before Hadfield zooms back in to the characters and the action again.

Hadfield points to the photographer. “Like Steve’s doing — he’s not just sitting in one place and taking all the pictures. He’s changing lenses.”

Or like when he looked down on the Earth as he was orbiting in the space station. The most massive pullout of all: when he asked people on Twitter (at the suggestion of his son) what he should take a photo of. And people said: “I want a picture of my hometown.” At first, Hadfield thought, that was “kind of parochial.” But then, he thought, “people are proud of where they’re from … this is where I’m from, this is who I am, those two things are synonymous. And they also want to see how it fits in with everything else. And I was in a very unique position to be able to marry those two things together.” He could show people how they, in their little town, fit into the context of the rest of the planet. A simple action, really, that says a little something about humanity.

We’ve been talking for a couple of hours; the bugs are coming out. I point, “You’ve got a mosquito taking …” Hadfield shrugs. “It won’t do much on my forehead,” and leaves it be.

Just as we’re getting ready to leave — it’s 10 p.m. on an early August night — the sky starts to clear, revealing, finally, the moon. It occurs to me that, although we’re looking at the same sky, he and I are seeing entirely different things; our mind’s eye and our memories inform us all differently, after all. “What do you see when you look up?” I ask him.

“I love seeing the space station go over because I helped build it and then I commanded it,” he says. “It’s a place that I lived.” He likens it to returning to the place you might have grown up, a place that helped define you. The space station “took decades of work; it’s more than just a place I lived once … to watch it go over as a star is very thought provoking and surreal at the same time: to recognize that I lived on that star.”

He recalls his first space walk — “Canada’s first space walk” — riding on the end of the Canadarm and moving through the Aurora Australis (the southern lights) — “they were pouring around the ship and around me”; or, when, as a pilot in an F18 jet at night, with its little bubble canopy, he’d shut off all the lights in the cockpit — “and the universe is right there.”

When he looks up in the sky, he sees the same sky we all see but also “all of the subtleties of the skies I’ve seen throughout my life … in amongst the normal noise and distractions and frustrations of life, to have known that was possible and that’s the thing you’ve done … it perpetually influences how you see things, including the sky.”

He drops us off back across the river. We thank Hadfield, and watch as he spins back across the water, “good Henry,” by his side. As we make our way to the parking lot — and I realize the implausibility of this — I see a shooting star. Whether he saw it too or not, I don’t know; what I do know is that, when I look up, I see something a little richer, and I want to know more.

Deborah Dundas is the Star’s Books editor. She is based in Toronto. Follow her on Twitter: