orld War II has recently ended, and America is trying to return to normalcy. For a young man named Vernon Dunham, who never served abroad as a soldier due to his minor crippling by polio, this requires only a fairly easy transition from war-related work at Boeing to civilian-related production of planes. He's a little bitter at his plight, though, since he can't claim any of the glory that's attached to people like his best friend from childhood, Floyd Bellamy. Floyd served in Europe and has returned to their hometown of Augusta, Kan., full of heroic, self-serving tales that drive the girls wild. But more consequential than his boasting is a small souvenir Floyd has brought back, which arrives one day on a flatbed train car.
It's a UFO dug up by the Nazis from the polar ice.
Floyd has pulled a Milo Minderbinder maneuver and gotten this unique craft into his personal possession. Now he enlists Vernon to puzzle out its workings. Vernon signs on board reluctantly, dubious of the legality of the whole procedure. But even his nervous trepidations prove much too conservative. It eventuates that leftover Nazis, resurgent Russian Commies, Chicago gangsters and the U.S. military are all after the UFO for their own purposes. Not to mention the faction headed by Floyd's father, a heartless and unrepentant moonshiner.
Agents and double agents and triple-agents soon descend en masse on the tiny Kansas town to conduct a deadly game of winner-take-all. Vernon finds himself shot at, chased and held captive, all the while trying to puzzle out the fascinating alien technology at his disposal.
Then he manages to awaken the most potent player in this game: the ship itself. Dubbed Pegasus, the sentient craft comes alive singing gospel songs overheard from radio broadcasts. But it soon reveals that it wants the final word about its own fate—and is prepared to take Vernon on a hell of a rollercoaster ride to insure its survival.
First novel from a hot newcomer
Jay Lake is hot, coming off a string of fine short stories (collected in four small-press volumes) and a number of awards and nominations. This debut novel will only solidify his status as one of the bright new voices in the field.
For someone who's done a fair amount of cutting-edge or surreal stories, this retro excursion that exactly duplicates the frissons of the best SF from, say, 1948 is not exactly a predictable move. But you have to hand it to Lake for choosing an unshowy, old-fashioned type of SF, then pushing it to its limits with craftsmanship and ingenuity and heart. This novel is the next best thing to having Clifford Simak alive and writing at the peak of his powers again.
Lake's bucolic setting and his small-town hero (whose first-person voice carries the tale unfalteringly) evoke such classic Simak works as "The Big Front Yard." The sense of cosmic mysteries unfolding in mundane circumstances is palpable. And Lake evokes his vintage Americana with real feeling and precision. The attitudes and worldviews of these characters are utterly of the period, as are the physical accoutrements of their environment. Yes, not too long ago, outhouses were in common use.
Lake has also captured the thrill-a-minute plotting of the pulps, and a Heinleinian transparency of prose. These attributes conduce to a book that rockets along as fast as its UFO "protagonist." But he's also conceptually modern enough to have Pegasus talking about "massively redundant low-bandwidth atmospherically dispersed microspore telemetry units"—talk that leaves Vernon baffled. After all, the most advanced computer he knows about is an artillery-range calculator. But with pluck and luck, he stumbles to victory.
Like some perfect early 1950s black-and-white matinee starring John Agar but scripted by Howard Waldrop, this novel delivers heartfelt excitement and sense-of-wonder riffs.
