Sunday, February 9, 2020

Book Review: S.M. Stirling’s Theatre of Spies

Theatre of Spies is the second book in S.M. Stirling’s alternate history of the Great War, which continues the adventures  of American super-spy Luz O’Malley Arostegui, and her companion, technical wizard Ciara Whelan. 

It’s late 1916 and Teddy Roosevelt is President and America is now at war (Spoilers ahead). Imperial Germany has launched a deadly gas attack on the Entente Powers, all but destroying France and crippling England. America’s eastern seaboard would’ve fallen to similar fate, if not for the intervention of Arostegui, an agent for America’s spy agency the Black Chamber, and her friend Whelan, who is now an agent in her own right. Now word has leaked out that the Germans have developed another potentially war-winning weapon, one that the Entente must have at all costs, if only to maintain the precarious balance.

Astroegui and Whelan manoeuvre through a series of masterfully-plotted adventures ending in a satisfying climax. They travel through a deiselpunk paradise of technology given the full-steam ahead signal both by Roosevelt and the pressures of war. Let it not be said that Stirling does not have a sense of humour. Pop culture references abound from James Bond movies, to Hogan’s Heroes, and Young Frankenstein.

Stirling is a masterful storyteller, doing what any mature writer does, showing, not telling. By giving his protagonists and antagonists – and us – an opportunity to walk through such a richly-detailed universe, which is a real treat. Stirling is a past master of the alt-history genre, having first cut his teeth in the Draka series, and then moving forward from strength to strength to strength.

Highly recommended. Definitely looking forward to the next instalment.

Update:


In a previous post, I had written that scientists have recently speculated that they had found evidence of matter leaking in from a neighbouring universe via “Cold Spots” in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), possibly as a result of a collision between bubble universes sometime in our very distant prehistory. 

The concept of a bubble universe may fly in the face of the generally accepted theory of a flat universe, but a key piece of data retrieved from the European Space Agency’s Planck space telescope suggests that we be in fact living inside a bubble universe of our own, prompting a paper from Nature Astronomy warning a “cosmological crisis.” Reviewing the most recently published data, the paper suggests that Plank, whose mission was to map CMB, may have also recorded a phenomena known as “gravitational lensing,” were gravitational fields are bent, distorted and warped.  According to the data, the CMB is being gravitationally lensed much more than expected. One possible explanation for this seeming curvature in spacetime is that the universe is itself closed. In fact, according to the paper, there is a high level of confidence to this, on the order of 99%.

Mind blown yet? So let’s draw a few concluding links to set our heads really spinning. If our universe is in fact a gigantic bubble and Cold Spots in the CMB represent matter leaking in from neighbouring universes, is it possible to travel between universes through such a Cold Spot? Have people or other beings done it, accidentally or on purpose?  Are there Type V universe-spanning civilizations out there, such as the one in H. Beam Piper’s Paratime series, that have turned these Cold Spots into portals and have mastered how to transit them? 

I don’t know about you, but my mind is sufficiently blown now. I’m going to have a drink. If you don’t see me in this space next month, it’s quite possible I’ve fallen through a Cold Spot. 

What's Next?
Next month, hopefully now that the ruckus of the move to a new apartment and the setting of my new job continues, I’ll be reviewing The British Lion, a novel of Britain under Nazi occupation, by Tony Schumacher. 

In the meantime, you can purchase Elvis Saves JFK! for just 99 cents and War Plan Crimson, A Novel of Alternate History, for $2.99 and now The Key to My Heart, also $2.99 (all are free to preview). All books -- which are already on Smashword's premium distribution list -- are also available through such fine on-line retailers such as Sony, Chapters Indigo, Barnes & Noble and Apple's iTunes Store.  Thanks.