Modern Monday - The Oppenheimer Alternative: A Review

 

Robert J. Sawyer has done it again.

Alternative history is not a sub-genre within science fiction which I particularly like. Although it has a rich tradition going back to L. Sprague DeCamp, and even earlier, and it has true masterpieces such as Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle, it is usually a form of "what-if-ism" that is only one tick shy of outright fan-fiction. The overrated novels of Harry S. Turtledove are testament to that.

Yet Sawyer rises above that to give us a tale which, I believe, is as good as The Man in the High Castle, and even better. The Oppenheimer Alternative is, as the name suggests, an alternative history which centers around the life and work of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the man behind the development of the atomic bomb.

Much of the book is historical - and faithful to a fault regarding that history. Many of the conversations are word-for-word accurate to what actually happened. But it is that historical accuracy which leads to the book's only fundamental flaw, which is that Sawyer does not warn the reader beforehand when the book will veer away from actual history. (This finally happens after the reader gets about 40% or so into the novel.) Without this warning, the reader is left wondering how much is actual history, and how much has deviated. This so frustrated me that I was forced to stop reading the story, even while I was loving it, and consult some other person's review of the book in order to get some sense of where and how things were about to go awry. When I finally discovered that things went non-historical at roughly the halfway mark, I was able to continue reading and enjoying. But such a digression shouldn't have been necessary.

The timeline change, when it finally happens, has subtle foreshadowing, but is rather obvious when it finally manifests (which is probably why Sawyer never thought to warn us about it in his introduction). In our own timeline, the sun has always been stable. But in Sawyer's alternate timeline, the sun is developing an instability which will result in a HUGE coronal mass ejection, large enough to completely fry Mercury, Venus, and Earth. The CME is projected to occur sometime around 2028. Mercury would be completely blown away. Venus will have its atmosphere driven off. Earth will be helpless to prevent its oceans boiling off into deep space. Mars would be the only planet far enough away from the CME to be relatively safe. The pending solar event is discovered by the same scientific processes which led to the development of the atomic bomb, and so the scientists at the Manhattan Project, located in Los Alamos, New Mexico, are the first ones to discover it. In particular, Edward Teller, who was continually at loggerheads with Oppenheimer, saw the first glimpses of the pending disaster. The physics of his proposed fusion-based hydrogen bomb led directly to it.

The scientists make a pact among themselves to keep this a secret, seeking to prevent a mass panic. Yet the government learns of the discovery anyway, and a secret program is launched with secret U.S. backing. Because the program is kept under wraps, history largely unfolds the way it had beforehand. The Cold War, Sputnik, the Joseph McCarthy witch hunts, the Kennedy assassination, and the Congressional hearing which stripped Oppenheimer of his security clearances for having too many Communist friends in the past - all of it happened just as we remembered. Yet slowly, under the table, things are changing which our own version of history never conceived. The Institute for Advanced Study, located in Princeton, NJ, becomes the epicenter of this activity, and the greatest thinkers, Einstein, Lorenz, Enrico Fermi, Von Neumann, and even Werner Von Braun work to save humanity from pending disaster. A reluctant Oppenheimer, the only person with adequate experience in bringing such disparate minds together, is brought in to head the project. Only Edward Teller is initially left out, due to the continued disagreements they had over the development of the hydrogen bomb.

I cannot say much more without spoiling the plot. I will simply say that the man who saves the day at the Institute for Advanced Study is none other than the cult-hero, Richard Feynman. He cooks up the solution by the late 1960's. When a human guinea pig is needed for an experiment to confirm whether the proposed solution will work, Oppenheimer, then cancer-ridden and dying in his early 60's, volunteers. He has nothing left to lose. And so, the story closes with Oppenheimer himself, just as it opened with him. And the solution to the conundrum, I must say, is both cliche, and wonderful, at the same time!

The Oppenheimer Alternative is an early Hugo Award favorite, and for good reason. It is a tale celebrating the lives and accomplishments of the greatest scientists of the Greatest Generation, particularly Oppenheimer. It is a love letter to their work, even as it exposes all their sins as well as their triumphs. The sexual dalliances of "Oppie" are exposed here in graphic detail. His deep guilt and regret over ever having helped develop the atomic bomb is felt acutely by the reader. It shows how even the greatest minds make cataclysmic mistakes, and hangs them out there, naked, warts and all. 

For those who love science as much as science fiction, this is undoubtedly the best novel of 2020 by far. For those who prefer the more phantasmagorical, some other novel, such as N.K. Jemisin's The City We Became, may take the prize. But for my money, this is my early favorite. I have many more novels to read before my decision is final, but this novel is the best I have read of 2020's publications, and is one of the very best ever written by Robert J. Sawyer.

Considering everything else Sawyer has written, that's saying quite a lot!

 

Eric

*