Reasons to be Impossible

A review what I have just submitted to Amazon:

Missile Gap
by Charles Stross (Author), J. K. Potter (Illustrator)
Hardcover: 120 pages
Publisher: Subterranean Press (Jan 2007)
ISBN-10: 1596060581
ISBN-13: 978-1596060586

More of a long short story than a novella, this punchy and pacey story races through a typically Strossian tale of cold-war communist kitsch meets space aliens to arrive at the hiest of high science fiction endings. It interrogates the modernist teleological view - espoused most famously by the Posadists - that any inter stellar aliens must have achieved true communism before being capable of reaching Earth. Along the way it uses verrisimilitudinous names and characters to invoke the spirit of the seventies and revel in the human spirit of adventure and enquiry.

Potter's illustration explode into the text like the third dimension upon the second - strategically placed virtuality breaking out of the text world that advances as well as complementing the plot.

Labels: aliens, Charles Stross, Science fiction