All Those Vanished Engines

Literary science fiction at its finest, a novel of three alternate histories, from the Civil War to the future

Paul Park returns to science fiction after a decade spent on the impressive four-volume A Princess of Roumania fantasy, with an extraordinary, intense, compressed SF novel in three parts, each set in its own alternate history universe. The sections are all rooted in Virginia and the Battle of the Crater, and are also grounded in the real history of the Park family, from differing points of view. They are all georgeously imaginitive and carefully constructed, and reverberate richly with one another.

The first section is set in the aftermath of the Civil War, in a world in which the Queen of the North has negotiated a two-nation settlement. The second, in northwestern Massachusetts, investigates a secret project during World War II, in a time somewhat like the present. The third is set in the near future US, with aliens from history.

The cumulative effect is awesome. There hasn't been a three part novel this ambitious in science fiction since Gene Wolfe's classic, The Fifth Head of Cerberus.