Tranquility Alternative by Allen Steele
Tanquility Alternative by Allen Steele. The copyright on my first edition is 1996, at least that’s what I recall from last night. In the author’s thanks, he goes back as far as 1994.
There’s a subservient scene, a subplot, really, that I kept recalling. I finally got tired and pulled the book off the shelf and tried to reread the whole thing in an evening. Didn’t work. A lot of the material in the book is rather dated. But I did locate that one scene, and I did recall it properly.
The story itself is basically an alternative history of the space program, going back to World War II. There seemed to be an impressive amount of reserach that went into the science fiction. Of that, I’m sure.
Plus, as I recall, at the time, it was a gripping read. Then there’s that one little detail, just an addendum to make the whole story flow a bit better, and the details were pretty amazing.
All right, first off, the characters are a bit wooden in places, almost as if they were cut from stock. Which, of course, isn’t that unusual in Science Fiction as a genre, because SF was basically the updated “dime western” wherein the spaceman with a rocket ship and ray gun replaces the cowboy with a horse and six-shooter.
But enough of literary genres and styles.
There was a scene I recalled, and while I didn’t have the patience or eyesight to read the whole thing again, as I flipped to the back, the denouement was there, like I remembered.
Powerful bit of extrapolation. And not that far off from what’s unfolding on the world scene these days. Goes a long to explain just what’s happening on some days.
Not bad for pulp fiction.
