Summer 2019 should be a great time to release a novel about the Soviet space program. After all, you have the Apollo anniversary and Chernobyl to spark interest. Unfortunately, First Cosmic Velocity is not that great of a novel. At best, it might appeal to the most basic of slavaboos.



First Cosmic Velocity takes a kind of magic realism approach to the topic. The Soviet space program of 1964 is an elaborate sham. Every capsule has burnt up on reentry. To preserve the illusion, cosmonauts are twins, one sent to space to die and one left alive to maintain the illusion. The story follows one of this twinned cosmonauts, Leonid in 1964, dealing with an upcoming launch, Leonid in 1950 as a child in a famine stricken Ukrainian village, and the Chief Designer in 1964, managing the Potemkim rocket program. The novel has all the tropes of the post-Iowa Writer's Workshop literary novel, a tendency to string words together in a pleasing way that is utterly devoid of meaning, with characters who suffer from middle-class ennui and post-ironic detachment.

And it's a shame, because the subject of space, totalitarian societies, and sacrifice is so rife for exploration. Adam Johnson's The Orphan Master's Son has the same 'American white guy writing about totalitarian communism' problem, but Johnson weaves a thrilling fantasy. J.G. Ballard made the alienation of space his own subject in the "The Dead Astronaut" and "Memories of the Space Age". And Victor Pelevin wrote this exact novel but better in his masterful Omon Ra, which is an authentic and utterly compelling modern classic of Russian literature!

Read Omon Ra instead.