Like Benford, Sawyer is going to focus on the Manhattan Project, that legendary secret effort to develop an A-bomb, the very name of which has become shorthand for any desperate, crisis-driven scientific-research-in-hyperdrive. This last-named novel is particularly relevant to the one under consideration today. And recent novels such as Sharma Shields’ The Cassandra and Gregory Benford’s The Berlin Project further attest to the fertility of the genre. The popularity of the TV-version of PKD’s The Man in the High Castle is testament to that allure. Trying to grok WWII is really an effort to grok the present.Īlternate history stories that grapple with this era (an era still within living memory, but losing first-hand participants to death every day) are particularly poignant and illuminating and appealing. Like the earlier Victorian period (the still essential and tangible reality of which fuels steampunk), the WWII era is the soil and compost in which our current era has its roots. It seems doubtful that the material will ever be exhausted. The vast, ineluctable, ineffable reality of World War II has provided infinite substance for fiction writers from 1939 to the present.
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