Customer Reviews

Rocket Science

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

As a first novel for Jay Lake, "Rocket Science" is amazing. Fairly short, a quick read, I could not put it down, nor wait to finish it. Keeps the pace to the very last page - didn't want it to end, actually. Lake's style is clean and flows at times like poetry, as in: "Floyd's Nazi bayonet instantly won the loyalty of every boy in town, while his casual good looks won the heart of every girl" (p. 11). Reminiscent of the pulp sci-fi of the 1940-50s, "Rocket Science," borders on the literary without the tedium.

The hero Vernon Dunham is a completely engaging young man, and his friend Floyd Bellamy is as inexplicable as he is sympathetic. While clearly a creation of the 21st century, there are certain values Lake is not afraid to allow his characters to voice, e.g., respect for one's parents, honoring one's father.

"Rocket Science" does a delightful job of exploring that odd, sometimes haunting connection between historical fiction and science fiction (and not as in the specific subgenre of "alternative histories"). After all, is not science fiction historical fiction forward, and historical fiction, at least sometimes, science fiction back?

Lake has been writing short stories, reviews, and editing anthologies for a number of years, so his voice is well established and clear. After enjoying "Rocket Science," I will be looking forward to his next full-length novel.

Vernon Dunham likes airplanes but he never imagined one would like him back. He thought he had learned everything about airplanes working as a parts buyer for B29 production in Wichita, but when Vernon's best friend Floyd Bellamy comes home from WWII Europe, the learning is just beginning. Hey mom, look what followed me home! Can I keep it? A dog, maybe, but a talking alien spacecraft dug out from under the arctic ice by Nazis, certainly not!

The arrival of Floyd and his airplane turns Vernon's world upside down and inside out. A secret like Pegasus is hard to keep and close on Floyd's heels are the Nazis, the Army CID, the County Sheriff, and the local cops; not necessarily in that order. Vernon is in over his head very quickly as all these elements conspire to capture Pegasus while they tear his world apart; taking from him trust in everything and everyone he has ever known, including his best friend. Finally he realizes that he can only trust himself and his new friend, the alien flying machine.

This is truly a classic Science Fiction story. This book has a great retro feel to it and Jay Lake takes you back to a simpler more innocent America. I spent some time growing up in Oklahoma near the Kansas border and Jay has really captured that part of rural America. (Nazi sleeper cells, the Italian mafia, moonshine runners, and communists not withstanding.) The only thing Jay left out of the political soup he concocted were Civil War Confederate holdovers and the KKK. All of the organizations scrambling to get their hands on Pegasus are eventually thwarted by two young men from small town America.

Jay unfolds a plot designed to make the average reader feel smarter than the hero. Another retro facet of this book is that it is a male story. This book is a great read for any young man. In the current era of female dominated editorial staffs and agencies this book is a breath of fresh air for the male reader. How will this translate to sales? We'll have to watch. Women need their literature too but let's hope that Jay continues to supply material for this increasingly neglected market. There are a couple of logistical hiccups that I scratched my head over but the plot moved fast enough that I shrugged them off. (Such as, if you can't feel accelerations while riding in the alien ship, why did it have such an elaborate seat belt system? Hmmm?) If you're looking for a fun read without having to do a lot of thinking, I'm happy to recommend Rocket Science.

Reviewed by Hugh Mannfield at stormbold.com

Jay Lake has been an incredibly prolific producer of short fiction over the past few years, and he has earned some award nominations -- for the Campbell for Best New Writer, and a Hugo nomination for his very fine novelette "Into the Gardens of Sweet Night". (He won the Campbell.) Rocket Science, due in August from Fairwood Press, is his first novel.

It's, well, kind of fun. Pretty fun, really. A fast read. Engaging characters. And ... well, that's all it is. Which isn't by any means a bad thing, but certainly Jay is capable of much more. My thought on reading it was that he was trying to prove he could handle a story at novel length -- pacing, extending the plot, altering expectations as things go on, etc. And in all that the story succeeds quite admirably. But in the end it's not about a great deal, and the central ideas, and the general outline of the plot including resolution, are just a bit too familiar.

I seem, I suppose, to be damning with faint praise. I should reiterate that the book really is a fun fast read. And if I didn't have high expectations for a Jay Lake story, I'd have said nothing more. It certainly repays the reader's investment of time with enjoyment.

Vern Dunham is a mildly handicapped aircraft worker in the years just after World War II. His friend Floyd Bellamy is a classic war hero -- not the best student or the most upright citizen but a handsome young man who went off to fight the Nazis and returned successfully. Soon enough, though, Floyd is asking Vern for help with a mysterious vehicle he smuggled back from Europe. It seems to be some sort of experimental aircraft. Apparently Floyd stole it from the Nazis -- perhaps without the permission of the US government.

Well, this is an SF book, so we know exactly what this airplane is. Vern figures this out quickly enough, though the specific way in which this airplane is special is something unusual. And very quickly he is embroiled in a real mess, with different governmental factions (or are they?) chasing him, along with Nazis, organized crime, and other elements. And he's learning some surprising facts about his own personal history, and about Floyd's personal history, and about both Floyd's parents and his own ... It's a wild mix, and if never precisely new it is often enough twisty and surprising -- and always fast moving and exciting. A solid first novel -- just not a special first novel.

Jay's everything-but-the-kitchen sink post-WW II story of an alien spacecraft stolen by a small town war hero and brought back to plague the life of his served-on-the-home-front civilian buddy Vernon Dunham, is just flat-out great fun. You got yer Nazis, yer talking alien spaceship, yer nerdy yet loveable hero, his questionable war hero best friend, and best of all a fully-realized and completely immersible recreation of what those years looked, felt, tasted, smelled and sounded like. Jay does such a good job of seamlessly painting the backdrop that you provide your own gray snap-brim fedoras, pleated trousers and red suspenders, the billowy hairdo's on the women and the running boards on the rounded black sedans. Even if you don't care for aliens, if you love 1940s black & white movies on the TCM channel, you'll love this book! And if you DO love aliens - Jay's got the story for you.

This is unprecedented in recent history. I devoured this book in three nights of reading. Granted, there aren't that many pages. I enjoyed the heck out of them all.

In Rocket Science, Jay Lake has populated a small post-WWII Kansas town with likable folks, Nazi agents, Communist spies, traitors, mobsters, military police, and a flying machine that's not of this Earth. He blends them together in a tale that is a page turner from start to finish, with the biggest surprises at the end.

The writing is first rate, with enough description to make the characters and setting pop to life in the minds-eye. And not too much to get in the way of the action. But it was not without fault. Some of the surprises are easy to see coming, though they are still a little surprising as you see them set up. The narrators inner monologue got a bit repetitive. And there are occasional bloopers (within pages of each other, characters are pulled up "by main force"). But it's all good.

i judged a book by it's cover. the words "historical romp" and "there is weirdness everywhere...rocket science is your ticket to a glimpse of it" from the reviews on the cover clinched it. i bought it. i read it. i wanted to like it. heck, i wanted to love it. instead i was singularly unimpressed and disappointed. if this book had been written and come out in the late forties (the time it is set in), it probably would have been a barn-burner. instead it's just flat and uninteresting. characters aren't fleshed out, everyone turns out to be nazis or reds or mafia or yadda yadda yadda. not close to believable and not fun on top of it. the actual interaction with the alien craft, the ONLY interesting bit, comes way too late in the story and also needed to be fleshed out more. it's set up for a sequel which would have been great if it had been as fun and romp-ish as it's cover implied. don't waste your time with this one or the next...

Written in an engaging pulp style, this post-WWII science fiction novel set in rural Kansas is a fun ride and a great first novel from Jay Lake. The conspiratorial view of small town America is perfectly hilarious, and the characters suitably sympathetic or menacing.

I read Rocket Science right after I slogged through an 800 page hard SF opus, and it was like a breath of fresh country air - an amusing, light hearted and somewhat nostalgic take on the golden age of science fiction. Recommended.

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This is an amusing pulp-revival story, set just after WW2. A returning American soldier steals a Nazi superplane that turns out to be a damaged alien spacecraft. Hijinks ensue.

A pretty good first novel, but slight: "B", for me anyway. Others have liked it more: http://www.scifi.com/sfw/issue433/books.html

[Lake has captured] "the thrill-a-minute plotting of the pulps, and a Heinleinian transparency of prose. These attributes conduce to a book that rockets along as fast as its UFO "protagonist." -- Paul di Filippo, who gives it an "A".

Happy reading--
Peter D. Tillman

"The pilot fired a bright beam from the
shuttle's laser. The appalling flare of light and energy snatched the
words from his mouth." (Brian Herbert & Kevin J.Anderson,
Legends of Dune: The Butlerian Jihad, 2002)

Rocket Science is an engaging alternate-history science fiction story. When a seemingly ordinary man returns to Kansas after serving in World War II, he carries with him a secret aircraft stolen out from under the noses of the Germans - but it isn't just any aircraft. It has been buried under Arctic ice for hundreds of years, and it can talk. It is not a ship from anywhere on Earth! Unfortunately, a great many interested parties know about the ship, including the Nazis and the U.S. Army, and they will stop at nothing to get it. If the ship falls in the wrong hands, humanity's fate is sure to be in deep trouble! An enthralling story of fallible humans struggling to cope with inexplicable technology before time runs out, Rocket Science is a fast-paced novel that leaves the reader guessing right up to the end.