For relevant historical background, see the excerpts in the appendices. I provide a HTML transcript prepared from the novel, with extensive annotations of all references and allusions, along with extracts from related works, and a comparison with the novella version.
Cain The Hartford Courant. New York Times Taylor Antrim. Review of Contemporary Fiction James Crossley. Kirkus review. Publishers Weekly. Rick Kleffel blog. Chard Orzel blog. Amazon editorial reviews. Goodreads my review. Google Books.
On Thermonuclear War. Nuclear Weapons Since website , overview. Red Plenty Francis Spufford. What Technology Wants Kevin Kelly. National Atomic Testing Museum. The novel is out of print and unavailable as an e-book. All footnotes, hyperlinks, and other annotations are my own work. Somewhere in California, in the s, a nuclear weapons lab develops advanced technologies for its post-Cold War mission.
Advanced as in not working yet. Mission as in continued funding. A scandal-plagued missile defense program presses forward, dragging physicist Philip Quine deep into the machinations of those who would use the lab for their own gain. The Soviet Union has collapsed. But new enemies are sought, and new reasons found to continue the work that has legitimized the power of the Lab, its managers, and the politicians who fund them.
Quine is thrust into the center of programs born at the intersection of paranoia, greed, and ambition, and torn by incommensurable demands. Deadlines slip and cost overruns mount. He is drawn into a maelstrom of policy meetings, classified documents, petty betrayals, interrupted conversations, missed meanings, unanswered voicemail, stolen data, and pornographic files. Amid all the noise and static of the late twentieth century made manifest in weapons and anti-weapons, human beings have set in motion a malign and inhuman reality, which now is beyond their control.
