Missile Gap

Missile Gap by Charles Stross is one of the strangest novellas I have read in some time, and certainly the weirdest this year. Its a cold war piece set over top of one of the most original SF backdrops that you will find out there. The story is good, but not perfect. But I like it more for its wierdness factor than anything. Three out of five stars.

Missile Gap is the story of a very very alternate reality where just before the hottest day of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, some unknown alien intelligence stripped the cover of the earth like an orange peel, and laid it down on a disc floating somewhere out in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud. Based on observations of other discs floating about 1 light year away it is believed that the disc that humanity now calls home is at least 500 million miles across, at least 8,000 miles thick, and is covered with earth type fauna and flora, and has billions of new continents. The disc masses 50,000 times as much as our sun, but for reasons unknown, it does not collapse into a sphere. Because of the physics of the discs (which is like nothing we have ever encountered), space travel with our current technology is impossible. The Americans and the Soviets are also incapable of launching ICBMs at each other, as the short-cut paths over the polar caps were eliminated with the stretching of the map across a flat surface. This actually was the source of the name of the story, which is a tongue-in-cheek reference to the gap in production of these weapons that existed between our nations in the early days of the cold war. Instead of having a gap in the number of bombs, there now is a physical gap due to unusual gravity and long distances.

With the ranges of attack stretched so far, most of Europe has fallen to Soviet thrall, including the United Kingdom. When the story picks up the nations are getting ready for WW IV to start in Europe again. A Kafkaesaque Hungarian intelligence agent named Gregor Samsa has joined the CIA and is in the midst of putting together a contingency response in case the architects of the discs reappear. Yuri Gagarin has been moved from the scrapped Soviet space program and been given command of a giant nuclear heli-carrier that is intended to make short work of the American defenses. At the same time people from every continent are slowly starting to spread out from the minuscule map of earth to the new surrounding continents, while the Soviets and Americans at least in name attempt to add the goals of containment to their policies of aggression. It seems that the aggression in this world is also entirely about ideology, as land and space are, as far as anyone can tell, virtually limitless and there for the taking.

The Soviets then discover another copy of modern day North America that was nuked over two thousand years ago, then they find an odd Mount Rushmore type monument with Lenin, Stalin and a bug creature carved into stone. Carl Sagan is assassinated for reasons that are only made semi-clear in the end of the story. A semi-intelligent hive-colony of termites is introduced. There is much more in this book, and just about all of it is compelling, but there is one big drawback. I took at least one whole star away because while there is resolution to the story, it comes way too quickly at the end. Moreover, this novella really feels like a set-up for a future sequence of stories to me, even though the story is really weird and will probably never find a huge audience, even if marketed really heavily. It feels to me like Stross wrote a novel, then cut it back to 100 pages. It just feels heavily edited, even though it does have a pretty good internal flow and pacing.

This book is available in a signed hardback, and a trade paperback. Unless you are a hardcore Stross collector, or unless you really like the odder stories that SF has to offer, save your scratch and get the paperback.

EDIT: Since writing this review I have corresponded with Stross. He told me that he would not be ever writing any new stories in this world because it creeped him out too much. I can believe that.