Customer Reviews

Missile Gap

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

The year is now 1973. Just as the Cuban Missile Crisis was heating up something happened. The Earth, once a sphere, is now flat. The balance of power of the Cold War has shifted because the nuclear deterrent of the United States was predicated on being able to launch a missile over the North Pole and then south to Moscow. With the Flat Earth this is impossible and the Communist Soviet Union has spread its power and influence across Europe with only the United Kingdom holding out, but even that is weakening. Democracy has fallen across the flats like dominoes. The world has done more than flatten itself out, however. Sail to the East from Siberia or to the West from California and thousands of miles out there are new continents not populated by humans. The Earth has been changed, or perhaps moved.

In Charles Stross's novella Missile Gap we are introduced to a situation where what appears to be Communist plots and infiltration is far more than what it seems to be, where the manifest destinies of two empires now have new frontiers to expand the worldviews of democracy and socialism, and where there is the very real danger of some sort of alien threat because unknown beings of unimaginable power had to have been the ones to have changed Earth. Stross touches upon a combination of storylines to advance Missile Gap: a political one, and explorations from the Soviets and Americans about what exactly is on these new massive continents. What has really happened to Earth is a shocker and the ramifications go well beyond the political for our future.

Knowing that this novella first appeared in Gardner Dozois's themed anthology One Million A.D. provides a very different mindset for what sort of story Stross is telling than if the reader goes in blind. This vision of an alternate past is actually a vision of the future and though there is a bit of disjointedness as several of the storylines do not truly intersect, the combination of viewpoints provides a broad view of the impact of this world change that would not be possible with a single viewpoint narrative. References to real life political and science figures like Carl Sagan and President (!) Robert McNamara grounds the novel in a sense of reality in this unreal setting. While some readers may be disappointed in the lack of emotional depth or full exploration of the political (or alien) aspects of Missile Gap, this novella shows another part of the true range of Charles Stross as a storyteller as he is able to move between different styles of speculative fiction with ease and tell a masterful story each time. Weighing in at fewer than one hundred pages, Missile Gap is quite the work of creativity.

-Joe Sherry

This is a good, knife-twist at the end yarn a la SPIN but darker, more terminally competitive, more like nature than SPIN. It will not wreck your role or genderthink like GLASSHOUSE but give it some room to breath and it's a nice alt-world romp.

And it's expensive because it's a signed by the author, hand-numbered, special edition, for the reviewer before me who dinged it on price. Once it's sold off, it'll be worth more, is how these usually work.

...but you're sure to be able to get it cheaper in a 'year's best' collection. I enjoyed this book, but if you're hesitant to pay 25-35 dollars for a book you'll likely read in one sitting, wait for it too come out in a year's best. I don't see Gardener Dozois passing on this. The book itself is signed by the author and beautifully bound and designed, which is pretty cool.

The plot: It is the late seventies, and the Soviets and America are waging their cold war on the face of a new earth. Humankind has nearly come to accept the fact that a far superior intelligence has peeled the earth like a grape an flattened it to the top of a disk many times larger than the original planet. Both governments are preparing to fight each other and are expanding their empires, gathering new territories and resources and seeking out new allies.

The characters: Yuri Gagarin has been put in command of a giant nuclear hover-craft/airplane/aircraft carrier thingee and sent forth to find the comrades who have so changed the earth. After all, if a species is so advanced to change the shape of a planet, they must have developed true communism, right?

Maddy has come to the new frontier with her husband Bob, looking to escape her parents and find a new place in the world. After nearly a year on a retrofitted ocean liner, she finds herself in different surroundings, but no closer to happiness. Trained as a nurse, but unable to find employment in her field, she signs on with a scientist and begins to discover that the insects in her new home have some odd tendencies...

Gregor knows a little more about the world's new shape than he is letting on. A US government spook, Gregor heads a thinktank that includes radical scientist Carl Sagan.

Charles Stross gets a lot done in 99 pages. Missile Gap doesn't feel rushed or sketchy, as one might expect from a novella that covers a lot of ground. The plot moves along briskly, the characters are sympathetic, and I found the rather odd ending to be both satisfying and fitting.

One of the best examples on how you can mix history and fiction and come up with delicious reading for anyone who enjoys book what makes you think.

Charles Stross uses the paranoia and saber-rattling of the super-powers during the Cold War to fuel this alternate history novella to a startling but not unexpected conclusion. Undercover agents attempt to manipulate the opposing sides into weak position, assassinating key scientists who may have better solutions. The parallel to the way the United States under the Bush administration has decayed the scientific process is a strong undercurrent. Stross's conclusion of the outcome of the super-powers' futile struggle to dominate is logical for all the clues that were dropped along the way. Another great story from Charles Stross.

Several reviewers thought this book would appreciate in value; it didn't. My copy, which was originally priced at either $35.00 or $150.00, was $4.00 when I got it.
Stross' story is based on an interesting hard sci-fi concept, but grounded in a faulty understanding of 1960s-1970s history.
The ending was not satisfying, and there was no middle, because the beginning took up almost all of the book.

Missile Gap is another excellent Stross riff on the cold war-era and super beings, this one dark and intensely disturbing. To describe too much of the story would be to ruin the experience of having it unfold for you over the brief arc of this novella, but it was like no other science fiction (other than Stross) that I've read, despite some vague reminisences of Robert Charles Wilson's "Protocols of Consumption" and the creepy Twilight Zone feeling I was left with at the end (and it's an awesome ending).

A delightful and well told tale about how the cole war might have ended if... Well if this alien species in their flying saucers -- no, no, no -- no flying saucers. Let's just say that what he proposes is so far removed from any reality that did happen, is logical to expect could have happened, or even that could be dreamed up that your head will spin faster than the physical laws will be breaking.

The real question is what would happen to our thinking about these minor wars and conflicts that we keep having if all of a sudden we were made aware of a real alien presense.

The only real problem with this book is that it is too small and too expensive. To be sure it is bound as a hardback and that makes it cost more. On the other hand, with paperbacks now beginning to approach $10, perhaps it isn't too much.

Some reviewers have suggested that this novella is relatively expensive because it is part of a signed limited printing by the publisher. The book is enjoyable and worth buying. However, please be aware that the publisher's site (Subterranean Press) lists the price of an unsigned second edition printing as $35. The remaining limited edition copies sell for $150. The book you receive from Amazon will not be part of the limited edition printing.

That said, this book is a solid SF/alternative history and it has a great twist toward the end. I recommend it if you have some extra money.

At $25, this 100 page novella is horribly overpriced. Stross's writing is amazing as usual, but I'd wait for this one to show up in paperback.