V-S Day: A Novel of Alternate History

V-S Day is an interesting alternate history novel by Allen Steele. The “what if” is how the world might have turned out if Wernher von Braun had been diverted on to a program to develop an intercontinental bomber to attack America during World War II. So instead of America spending its treasure on developing an atomic bomb, it has to invest all its resources in developing a suborbital craft that can intercept the bomber and shoot it down.

It’s all very clever stuff, and you can see the time and effort invested by the author to make both the history and the science plausible. Unfortunately it’s a less than riveting read. This is a shame. The situation is full of possibilities. But there’s very little sense of threat. When the Nazis realize the Americans may be working on countermeasures, their efforts to reduce or eliminate the threat are amazingly inept and halfhearted. Even though the key scientists go into hiding, there’s still no sense of urgency. They are working as fast as they can go and, so skilled are they, the jet engine works perfectly the first time and, when assembled into the rocket, fires the manned plane into the right place at the right time. Such triumphalism takes the edge off the tension.