m. c. de marco: To invent new life and new civilizations...

Missile Gap by Charlie Stross

This post includes Amazon affiliate links to the book(s) pictured.

I’ve been meaning to blog Missile Gap, a novella by Charlie Stross available online at Subterranean Press, since I read it a couple of weeks ago at the start of my current Big Dumb Object/megastructure phase. I spotted “Missile Gap” making the rounds at del.icio.us and was reminded to link it for its Alderson disk, if nothing else. Here’s part of the novella’s blurb:

It’s 1976 again. Abba are on the charts, the Cold War is in full swing — and the Earth is flat. It’s been flat ever since the eve of the Cuban war of 1962; and the constellations overhead are all wrong. Beyond the Boreal ocean, strange new continents loom above tropical seas, offering a new start to colonists like newly-weds Maddy and Bob, and the hope of further glory to explorers like ex-cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin: but nobody knows why they exist, and outside the circle of exploration the universe is inexplicably warped.