The Lucky Strike
4/5
()
Currently unavailable
Currently unavailable
About this ebook
Combining dazzling speculation with a profoundly humanist vision, this astounding alternate history tale presents a dramatic encounter with destiny wrapped around a simple yet provocative premise: the terrifying question of what might have happened if the fateful flight over Hiroshima had gone abit differently. An extensive interview with the author, offering insight into his fiction and philosophies, is also included.
Kim Stanley Robinson
Kim Stanley Robinson was born in 1952. After travelling and working around the world, he settled in his beloved California. He is widely regarded as the finest science fiction writer working today, noted as much for the verisimilitude of his characters as the meticulously researched scientific basis of his work. He has won just about every major sf award there is to win and is the author of the massively successful and highly praised ‘Mars’ series.
Read more from Kim Stanley Robinson
Glimmering Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Escape From Kathmandu Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The New Possible: Visions of Our World beyond Crisis Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsStories for Chip: A Tribute to Samuel R. Delany Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Best of Kim Stanley Robinson Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Related to The Lucky Strike
Related ebooks
Trace Elements Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSeeking Grace in Beulah Land Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Inferno by Committee: A History of the Cerro Grande (Los Alamos) Fire, America’s Worst Prescribed Fire Disaster Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Edge: The Pressured Past and Precarious Future of California's Coast Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Pyrocene: How We Created an Age of Fire, and What Happens Next Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsRule of Capture: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Exit Zero Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsStrange Bedfellows: Adventures in the Science, History, and Surprising Secrets of STDs Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBest Person Rural: Essays of a Sometime Farmer Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5What Branches Grow Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsVanishing Hour: A Novel of a Man, a Girl, and the End of the World Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsTumblehome: Meditations and Lore from a Canoeist's Life Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSouth Pole Peaches & Cream: An Antarctic Ice Fliers Romance Story: Antarctic Ice Fliers, #3 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsForce 12 Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5The Ascendant Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Drive On! Preserve and Prolong Your Time on the Road Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsOff to the Side: A Memoir Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Sixth Extinction & The Sixth Extinction America: Zombie Omnibus Edition (Books 1 – 8) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsStuck Moving: Or, How I Learned to Love (and Lament) Anthropology Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsFires of London Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Green Mill Murder Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Fetterman Massacre: Fort Phil Kearny and the Battle of the Hundred Slain Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Sagebrush Empire: How a Remote Utah County Became the Battlefront of American Public Lands Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAfter London or Wild England Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsPaddling the Boreal Forest: Rediscovering A.P. Low Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe North Runner Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHalf Moon Street Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Man in a Cage Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Prodigal: Shortlisted for the Polari Prize 2019 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Alternative History For You
Mrs Van Gogh Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe 42nd Parallel Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsTales From the Loop Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Dirty Lifestyle - Sex Erotic Stories: Sex And Eroticism For Women And Men Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsShe Who Became the Sun Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Man in the High Castle Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas: A Story Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/51888: The Ripper Revelation: Infinity Engines: Missions, #2 Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A Criminal Magic Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Prayers for Sale: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Lost in Time Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Magic in the Mud Show Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsCaptain Nemo: The Fantastic Adventures of a Dark Genius Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDiana Gabaldon's Best Reading Order: with Summaries & Checklist Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Future Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Orion: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Electric State Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Civilizations: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5An Accidental Christ: The Story of Jesus (As Told by His Uncle) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi: A new fantasy series set a thousand years before The City of Brass Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Plot Against America: A Novel Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Daughter of Time: The After Cilmeri Series, #0.5 Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Gettysburg: A Novel of the Civil War Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Wind's Twelve Quarters: Stories Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Yiddish Policemen's Union: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Strange Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Eifelheim Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Kingdoms Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Reviews for The Lucky Strike
48 ratings5 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A great alternative view on if the bomb was never dropped during the war.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Really just a set of two short stories, or one novella and a short story. Then a long interview with the author about writing, his social thoughts, and such. The main story is about what happens if the crew that was to fly the Enola Gay crashed and never bombed Japan and that task fell on another crew. Another crew that might make different decisions about dropping an atomic bomb. Interesting story -but probably not worth publishing basically alone in this short form.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Interesting alt history story, the essay that follows shows a little of the thought process in evaluating historical events, and alt-history. The interview by the fellow author Terry Bisson helps round out knowledge of the author if the reader is new to Robinson. It's a shame after reading this fine short story to see that the author now focuses entirely on novels. I grew up on short story SF and really miss it.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A fascinating exploration of how little it would take to change history completely.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Rating: 4.5* of fiveThe Book Report: A fifty-seven page novella of alternative developments on Tinian Island in the run-up to the atom bombing of Japan in 1945. A sixteen-page essay on the nature of alternative history and its quantum influences. And a twenty-page interview of author Robinson by fellow author Terry Bisson.In short, my little corner of Heaven delivered early.My Review: I said some unkind things about talented writer[Ian Tregillis's novel[Bitter Seeds here recently, having to do with that novel's use of superhero-y claptrap. Here is the diametric opposite of that novel, and thus the almost certain recipient of my most celebratory smiles. I'd probably give even a crummy alternative history novel, one presented in prose so wooden as to be describable as carpentered not written, three stars after that thoroughly disagreeable experience.Happily, though, Robinson's accustomed prose mastery is intact and I needed no unhappy comparisons to convince me to award the story its four and a half stars. Frank January, bombardier of the Lucky Strike, is older than his crewmates, apart from them in social ways; they see him as Other, as he sees himself. Their responses to him help form his course of action when the Lucky Strike is called to duty as the carrier of the atomic bomb after the failure of the Enola Gay. Hiroshima is spared its place in history. Lives are lost, it's true, but January cannot bring himself to rain devastation down on the city most of us use in our mental inventory of metaphors as representative of annihilation.The story ends as January's fate is decided. And, had there not been an essay called “A Sensitive Dependence on Initial Conditions” included in the book, I might have given The Lucky Strike three and a half stars, because the implications of the events in the story are so, well, so monumental, so completely brain-bending, that leaving me where it did would produce readerly, ummm, well interruptus of literary sort, with attendant shouts of anger and dismay.The essay goes into some very interesting and convincing philosophical explorations of the nature of alternative historical fiction, likening the course of history to the particle-and-wave nature of light. Robinson uses The Lucky Strike as his lens of explanation, running through many possible outcomes of the facts as presented in the story used to explain the butterfly effect, the great man theory, and other established formulations of the central conundrum of history: Why did that happen the way it did? It's a terrific essay, one I want to have for my personal library, and it's been a struggle against my inner book-Gollum not to keep the liberry book and say I lost it....Finally, the interview. I enjoyed reading the author's thoughts on SF, on writing, on politics (we're close on this subject), and I found his assertion that science and leftism are closely allied perceptive and heartening, since I believe that science and logic will eventually grind superstition and conservatism under their boot-heels.I sure as hell hope so, anyway, since I do NOT want to live in a future hag-ridden by viciousness.