A long story about what would have happened if the bombardier had dropped the bomb not on Hiroshima but in the ocean, which is a nice exploration of the idea, though it's a bit short. The second part of the book is an essay on alternate histories, and the third is an excellent interview with Terry Bisson. Well worth the hour or so it takes to read the book. ( )

I don't always love Kim Stanley Robinson (I thought the Mars trilogy could have been one book, with far less useless words) but Lucky Strike and the other story were just the right mix of good story telling and a wise use of words. There is a lot of depth in a small amount of pages. I really want to give it four and a half stars, but that's not an option ( )

Alternate history of bombing of Japan. Includes interview with author

Interesting alt-history. I also found very interesting the essay(?) after the story, which followed other potential outcomes if events had gone slightly differently. ( )

Interesting 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. ( )

Nice! ( )

Nice alternative history book (short story) but I would have liked more logical analysis of why the history changed the way it did. ( )

A fascinating exploration of how little it would take to change history completely. ( )

This slim book includes the eponymous novella "The Lucky Strike," a closely-related essay "Sensitive Dependence on Initial Conditions," and an interview with author Kim Stanley Robinson by Terry Bisson. I would totally recommend it as a chaser for anyone who has just finished Robinson's The Years of Rice and Salt and can't stop thinking about it. (Not that further ideas on those lines will stop anyone thinking.) The story and the essay deal with philosophy of history, and the evolving understanding of the relationship between chance and determinism, under the sign of non-linear dynamics and its "strange attractors," as well as the relationship of all of this business to any understanding of free will.

The interview was entertaining, and reassured me that despite the prominence of Robinson's scientific curiosity and social conscience, his ambitions as a writer are primarily literary. I especially enjoyed his angry rejoinder to those who object to the expository elements of his style: "go read Moby Dick, Dostoevsky, Garcia Marquez, Jameson, Bakhtin, Joyce, Sterne--learn a little bit about what fiction can do, and then come back to me when you're done. That would be never, and I could go about my work in peace" (87).

So great! It's really got me thinking about the philosophy of history, and Walter Benjamin's idea that the stories we tell can "foreclose" both certain pasts and even certain futures. Great, economical writing - I'll definitely be reading more of Robinson! ( )

A great alternative view on if the bomb was never dropped during the war. ( )

Really 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: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: 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 a bit differently. An extensive interview with the author, offering insight into his fiction and philosophies, is also included.

My Review: 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.

I said some unkind things about talented writer Ian Tregillis's novel Bitter Seeds, 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. ( )

...Outspoken is certainly applicable to Robinson in this book. He gives us an awful lot to think about in a mere 120 pages. I very much enjoyed reading it and will no doubt reread is a number of times in the future. Robinson is way on the left side of the political spectrum and he makes no secret of it. This book is provocative and meant to be that way, something to keep in mind while reading it. While reading The Lucky Strike I realized I have only read a few of Robinson's short stories. Fortunately there are plans for a best of collection to be published sometime next year. I am definitely going to read that.

Full Random Comments review ( )