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Missile Gap
 
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Missile Gap (Hardcover)

by Charles Stross (Author), J. K. Potter (Illustrator)
4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)

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Product details

  • Hardcover: 99 pages
  • Publisher: Subterranean Press (31 Dec 2006)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 1596060581
  • ISBN-13: 978-1596060586
  • Product Dimensions: 21.8 x 14.5 x 1.8 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 692,928 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

2 Reviews
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Average Customer Review
4.0 out of 5 stars (2 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Ocean - the final frontier, 16 Sep 2007
By David Tonhofer (Luxembourg/Europe) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
Only 99 pages, double spaced? Well, what the hey, it's a good read. 5 stars for the story and the book format. Still, the book is targeted at the Serious Collector.

Stross attacks, Twilight-Zone style, by vectoring the world as it existed the 2nd of October, 1962, onto an Alderson Disk located in the Large Magellanic Cloud, and a million years into the future. From there, one can admire the (now former) Home Galaxy which has become a busy industrial zone.

The transplantation is bad for Cuba (nuked), bad for Europe (assimilated by the USSR), and bad for Yuri Gagarin (out of a job as Cosmonautics has become physically challenging). Luckily the New Flat Earth is surrounded by a sheer infinite ocean dotted by unknown continents, so Yuri can be re-employed as Captain of a new kind of deep-blue ship, "to boldly go where no Soviet man has gone before" - and to look for signs of the abductors. The Soviets are sure that they must be socialist brothers from the stars. Carl Sagan is sure that they are peaceful and interested in contact. The McNamara administration is sure that they present a danger which must be deterred. And everyone is sure that colonizing unknown continents millions of miles away is a Good Idea.

But basic assumptions may turn out to be wrong when you are living on a structure that resembles a giant Petri Dish.

A fast-paced story packed full (in typical Stross style) with references to real-world people, psychotronic movies, Lovecraft (hence cosmic angst) and technologies which just might have come off 60's blueprints - also, Stross uses the nerdy words (though sometimes incorrectly). At the end of the book I had two thoughts: (1) Mutual Assured Destruction is still on the table in 2007, better get rid of that and (2) let's not attract too much attention in our galactic neighborhood just yet, 'kay?

I should add that the text is actually available on the 'net - on the publisher's site. Just google "madeleine holbright".

(Additional questions: What's the weather like on an Alderson disk and how high can waves get if you have 50'000 nautical miles of fetch?)
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7 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars Communists in space, 23 Jan 2007
More of a long short story than a novella, this punchy and pacey story races through a typically Strossian tale of cold-war communist kitsch meets space aliens to arrive at the hiest of high science fiction endings. It interrogates the modernist teleological view - espoused most famously by the Posadists - that any inter stellar aliens must have achieved true communism before being capable of reaching Earth. Along the way it uses verrisimilitudinous names and characters to invoke the spirit of the seventies and revel in the human spirit of adventure and enquiry.

Potter's illustration explode into the text like the third dimension upon the second - strategically placed virtuality breaking out of the text world that advances as well as complementing the plot.
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