First Cosmic Velocity
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
A stunningly imaginative novel about the Cold War, the Russian space program, and the amazing fraud that pulled the wool over the eyes of the world.
It's 1964 in the USSR, and unbeknownst even to Premier Khrushchev himself, the Soviet space program is a sham. Well, half a sham. While the program has successfully launched five capsules into space, the Chief Designer and his team have never successfully brought one back to earth. To disguise this, they've used twins. But in a nation built on secrets and propaganda, the biggest lie of all is about to unravel.
Because there are no more twins left.
Combining history and fiction, the real and the mystical, First Cosmic Velocity is the story of Leonid, the last of the twins. Taken in 1950 from a life of poverty in Ukraine to the training grounds in Russia, the Leonids were given one name and one identity, but divergent fates. Now one Leonid has launched to certain death (or so one might think...), and the other is sent on a press tour under the watchful eye of Ignatius, the government agent who knows too much but gives away little. And while Leonid battles his increasing doubts about their deceitful project, the Chief Designer must scramble to perfect a working spacecraft, especially when Khrushchev nominates his high-strung, squirrel-like dog for the first canine mission.
By turns grim and whimsical, fatalistic and deeply hopeful, First Cosmic Velocity is a sweeping novel of the heights of mankind's accomplishments, the depths of its folly, and the people--and canines--with whom we create family.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Powers's entertaining and winning debut novel about the 1960s space race launches from an intriguing premise: that the Soviet Union covered up fatal rocket misfires by recruiting groups of twins as cosmonauts one to pilot the ill-fated space capsule, the other to bask in the glory of a faked hero's return. Set primarily in Star City, Russia, in 1964, Powers's story centers around the earthbound experiences of Nadya (whose twin burned up on re-entry years before) and Leonid (whose brother, the last twin, is currently orbiting the earth), through which Powers refracts glimpses of the competitive Soviet space program and its personnel, the sometimes absurd politics of the Khrushchev era, and the process by which a cold-hearted recruiter pried the twin Leonids away from their family in 1950s Ukraine. Powers (Gravity Changes) endows his stoical, driven characters with distinctive personalities and the capacity to reflect philosophically on their charade, as when Leonid says, "Maybe our individual personalities are just the areas in which we failed to copy someone else." Powers's deadpan depiction of the ruse that drives his tale and the historical figures duped by it will give readers pause to wonder if it really is that improbable.
