calimac

As an old curmudgeon who doesn't find much new fiction I enjoy, I owe it to report when I do. The Green Glass Sea, a novel by Ellen Klages. I ate it right up.

This is a story taking place almost entirely at Los Alamos during World War II. There's two girls, both about eleven, whose parents are working on the Manhattan Project. The girls are both misfits and loners in different ways; they initially distrust each other but learn to become friends. And that's it, basically.

It's very simply and plainly written, and probably readable by intelligent children of the protagonists' age. But there are subtle little touches. On the first page, the first protagonist is described as "small for her age," yet we don't learn for three pages what age she is, and we don't learn for a considerably further distance why her shoes don't match. But the description in that early paragraph fixed firmly in my mind an image which turned out to be exactly right.

[edited to add, because I forgot to mention this:] This girl has a strong mechanical aptitude, a refreshing thing to find in a young female character, and at one point tickled me tremendously by attaching her alarm clock to her radio's power switch in such a way that the movement of the silenced ringer will turn the radio on. It's 1944, and she's just invented the clock radio. How's that for clever?

It's not at all SF, unless you count as SF a story in which the first atomic bomb is being built in the background, but it is of great interest to me, because I've always been fascinated by the Manhattan Project, and it most intrigues me as the foremost example of Extreme City Planning. How'd they build three cities in the middle of nowhere in nothing flat, why'd they put them in those particular spots, how did it all work? Anything that sheds light on that is of interest to me. Ellen has a good bibliography of "life in Los Alamos" books and gives a lot of hard description. I'd query a few of the details, but I liked touches of awareness of the experience, such as the stunned feeling when Roosevelt, Hitler, and Mussolini all died in the same month.

Aaaand then I get on LJ to write about it, only to find first that

kip_w had found and posted the lyrics to the original "Casino Royale" theme but couldn't figure out how they fit the tune. I had great fun helping out with that. Results here.