"The Winter Fortress" by Neal Bascomb (2016)

"Wallis Jackson, Bill Bray, and the twenty-eight other Royal Engineers were well primed for their operation.  They ate sandwiches and smoked cigarettes outside the Nissen huts on the barren seaside Scottish moor that made up Skitten airfield.  There was some banter, the false bravado of men about to head into action.  Others handled their nerves in silence.  There would be a final briefing, but they already knew what they needed to know: they were heading to Norway to blow up a power station and hydrogen plant."

Neal Bascomb is a former journalist who's written several nonfiction books on World War II.

In The Winter Fortress several Norwegians escape their country during the German occupation of Norway.  They flee to the United Kingdom, where they're trained as commandos at a camp in Scotland.  Their mission?  To destroy or disable an electrical plant producing heavy water, a material used in German nuclear research.

In relation to the historical record, this book introduces one of the more interesting chapters in World War II history.  Norway isn't often discussed in the context of the war, and the German effort to develop a uranium-fueled nuclear reaction is also left outside of most discussions of the time period.  The commandos sent back into Norway are also interesting in their own right, being men of great personal fortitude tasked with a near-impossible feat.

In dramatic terms, however, I'm not sure whether or not the author really "found the story" in the events which constitute The Winter Fortress.  For one thing, the Germans really weren't that far along in their nuclear research, and framing this tale as a "race against time" doesn't really work.  So what if the Nazis secured a supply of heavy water?  Didn't they have bigger problems on their eastern front?  And weren't they somewhat incapacitated by an internal focus on a rocket program and squabbling between ambitious scientists?  It's hard to imagine the German scientists, laboring as they were in increasingly primitive conditions, developing a fission bomb with the resources at their disposal.  The German nuclear program was at best a pale shadow of the Manhattan Project, so aside from the usual Nazi thuggery it's hard to view the Nazi's nuclear ambitions as much of a threat.

And then there's the fact that many of the best minds in Germany had already left that country during the early years of Hitler's rise to power.  During the events related in The Winter Fortress, they were, in fact, on the other side of the Atlantic, working on the Manhattan Project.  The German atomic program, by contrast, couldn't even get the complete cooperation of companies within Germany.

Lastly, considered from the point of view of style, The Winter Fortress reads at times like a lower grade spy novel.  The author often attempts, somewhat clumsily, to end chapters on cliffhangers, a strategy that sometimes mediates against the book's more serious tone.

Were I to give it a score, I'd say 7 stars out of 10.  It presents some interesting episodes from the Second World War, and also some riveting stories of survival, but I feel that The Winter Fortress is very rough around the edges.  Focusing on a single commando might have improved it, or if not that then restricting the narrative to a shorter time frame.  But as it is The Winter Fortress doesn't achieve the epic sweep its author was obviously aiming for, seeming instead like something rushed into print before he was ready to provide the fullest account of this overlooked series of events.

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"Snow Crash" by Neal Stephenson (1992)

"As Hiro and Vitaly approach the vast freeway overpass where tonight's concert is to take place, the solid ferrous quality of the Vanagon attracts MagnaPoons like a Twinkie draws cockroaches.  If they knew that Vitaly Chernobyl himself was in the van, they'd go crazy, they'd steal the van's engine.  But right now, they'll poon anything that might be headed toward the concert."

Neal Stephenson's Seveneves was also reviewed here recently.  A brief bio of the author can be found in that review.  I'm still not a huge fan of Neal Stephenson, but parts of Snow Crash, like parts of Seveneves, are impressive works of imagination.

Snow Crash came along much earlier in Stephenson's career, and I think it reveals the influence William Gibson had over him.  Hiro Protagonist (get it?  get it?) is a hacker and pizza delivery driver working for the mafia, and in the course of a failed delivery he joins forces with Y.T. a teenage "Kourier" skating her way through the dangerous streets of a postapocalyptic Los Angeles.

But why, you ask, do they join forces?  That's a long story, but by way of explanation Hiro crosses paths with a virus called "Snow Crash" which causes computers to crash, brains to implode and new religions to form.  It all goes back to ancient Sumer, you see, and the god Enki...

I could elaborate, but that would take a while and at this point you're either interested or not.  Given Neal Stephenson's reputation, I wouldn't call this book "hard sci-fi" exactly.  It does go into a lot of religious history, and there's some programming lingo, but it's not so much difficult as long-winded.

I did like it though.  I didn't love it, but it definitely wasn't bad.  The idea of a back door into the human psyche is an interesting idea, and the author did a good job of setting up the concept.  Snow Crash is also more cohesive than the later Seveneves, even if it could've been a lot shorter.  I'll take a sword-weilding Afro samurai assaulting an aircraft carrier with a gatling gun over a laborious and implausible tale of human evolution any day of the week.

I'm probably done with Neal Stephenson after this book.  I complained online about Seveneves and was encouraged to go back and read Snow Crash, a book that many people said was better.  I agree that it was better, but I also think that I now know enough about Neal Stephenson's fiction to know that it isn't my cup of tea.

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"Seveneves" by Neal Stephenson (2015)

Warning: spoilers follow.

"The failure of the radio, shortly after the beginning of the mission, had been caused by a defective part for which there was no replacement: a simple, stupid oversight.  The longest leg of the trip - the year and a half spent coasting from the L1 gate to Grigg-Skjellerup - had consisted of lengthy stretches of boredom interrupted by occasional panics, most of which had to do with the life support system.  This was based on using sunlight to grow algae, a process that worked well in the lab but turned out to be difficult to sustain on Ymir.  The newest arklets in the Cloud Ark had benefitted, in this respect, from lessons learned operating such systems in the time since Zero, but Ymir had been built and launched very early, using systems that now seemed painfully out of date."

Neal Stephenson is a science/speculative fiction writer living in Seattle.  Degrees in science run in his family, but he doesn't have any PhDs to boast of.  Seveneves is his most recent novel, and the only of his books I've read.

In this lengthy tome, which is divided into three lengthy parts, a mysterious force known as the Agent causes the moon to shatter.  This event triggers a frantic scramble to establish a viable colony in space.  The old International Space Station (ISS) serves as the nucleus for this colony, with smaller crafts/habitats sent up to join the ISS as the Earth is bombarded by lunar fragments.  Various power struggles also come to the fore as governments worldwide come to grips with the extinction of all terrestrial life, and the politics of who and who isn't allowed to immigrate to the orbiting colony divide friends, family and even whole cultures.

So much for the first part.  After that point those inhabiting the colony begin a years-long struggle for survival, predicated upon the allocation of resources, and methods of organizing the colonists into a self-perpetuating community.  The colony's primary goal is achieving a higher orbit, away from the more dangerous pieces of lunar debris.  Two powerful factions emerge in a debate over how to attain this higher orbit, one faction led by the scientific personnel aboard the ISS, and another faction led by the former President of the U.S. from a smaller craft/habitat.

All of which leads to the third and final part, in which the descendants of the remaining colonists resettle Earth and create a new civilization.  Seven of these descendants, each descended from a particular survivor of the factional struggle described above, are sent to investigate an anomalous sighting on what used to be North America, and also to solve the mystery of what this sighting holds for the future of humanity.

All of which sounds GREAT, doesn't it?  It sounds like a stirring epic along the lines of Asimov's Foundation or Frank Herbert's Dune novels.  It sounds like something you could lose yourself inside, something you'd treasure long after the last chapter (and the next 5,000 years of human history) is concluded.

But there's a problem.  The problem is that Neal Stephenson absolutely DROWNS this narrative in details, to the point where finishing it becomes a real chore.  Keep in mind that I have no problem with hard science fiction.  It might even be my favorite genre.  But even I had to roll my eyes at certain points in this book.  Another discussion of orbital mechanics?  Another discussion of genetics?  Another discussion of how human culture has changed over the last few millennia?  

All of these discussions/digressions might add an element of realism to Seveneves, but they do nothing to add interest to the story.  If you're looking for character development, look elsewhere.  If you're looking for dramatic conflict, don't bother.  Both of these things are present in the novel - and when they finally do make themselves known it's SO much better - but in-between their sporadic appearances are pages of scientific detail, backstories, and asides that do absolutely nothing to advance the plot.

This, and the last part of the book is both a fairly derivative AND a fairly anticlimactic science fiction adventure story, not unlike Star Trek III: The Search for Spock meets Larry Niven's Ringworld.  And once you start thinking about Ringworld and Star Trek III you can't help but arrive at the conclusion that they're both more concise and more entertaining stories.  Stephenson's details - for all their hundreds of pages - do little to disguise this fact.

In this I can't help but contrast Neal Stephenson with Andy Weir, another science fiction author who's gotten a lot of attention recently.  Weir, like Stephenson, also adds a lot of detail to his off-world adventures, but the scientific details found in The Martian and Artemis are central to those stories.  Even if I do have certain reservations about Weir (and Niven), it's significant that the details they provide allow the reader access to their plots, whereas most of the details in Seveneves 800+ pages could have been edited out of the book entirely.

Will I be reading more Neal Stephenson in the future?  Well, after asking about his bibliography on r/scifi I was told that his best novel is/was Snow Crash, written 23 years before Seveneves.  The Wikipedia synopsis for that book seems to indicate it was a more concise effort, and I think that in Stephenson's case a little less detail might be a good thing.  Some authors just work better in that kind of medium, and I have the suspicion that Stephenson is one such writer.

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