I kept waiting for it to turn into a good book--I finally gave up at the last two chapters. Meh. ( )

Full-scale, long running what-if (what if the Kaiser hadn't been injured at birth, what if the young Tsarevitch hadn't had haemophilia, what if Prince Eddy hadn't died) are too vague, far back in time and nebulous to feature as useful arguments. SF-wise I’ve always been fascinated by alt-histories. After having read “The Openheimer Alternative” I thought it was time to finally read Benford’s “The Berlin Project”.

There aren't many examples of this genre, and very few (if any) highly rated by serious critics. I recently re-read Dick's "The Man In The High Castle" (Dick in turn was inspired by “Bring the Jubilee” by Ward Moore in which the Confederates win the Civil war. Can't see anyone tacking that any time soon…ARF ARF! ) at the same time as Doris Lessing's "The Grass is Singing" and the latter was far more gripping. The former indeed seemed like "profitless speculation", while Lessing's work benefited from being based in a real world where apartheid actually did happen. Great fiction should increase one's understanding of reality, but (as fiction!) it is already at one remove from reality. If you take it further from reality by introducing an alternative history then it's difficult to take it seriously at all. What about Harry Turtledove's "World War" series and the "Colonisation," sequels? A massive world spanning work, let down unfortunately by the terrible very last volume which exhibited all the signs of an author who had become bored with his own creation (rumour has it he has to keep writing at speed to pay the alimony...)

What-if history is much derided now by historians after having gone through a popular phase. One of the main criticisms is that the scenarios created in counter-factual history mean making huge numbers of assumptions and excluding so many possible events that could have resulted in differing outcomes that it is misleading to claim that one can know what the end result of one’s deliberate counter-factual change would be. Personally, I think, provided it's not taken too literally as 'this is definitely what it would have been like' that it can be quite enlightening, even if it’s a case of making you argue why you don't think it would have turned out like that. Of course, historians deriding counter-factual history is a bit like scientists deriding science fiction, except that in my experience quite a lot of scientists are SF fans.

Of course, at least standardly in philosophy e.g. David Lewis, to make a claim that x caused y, you will be making a what-if claim such that had x not occurred, y would not have. I'm inferring that Benford wants to hang on to notions of causation within history; that’s where all the possible tension in the novel comes from. Unfortunately it is not really about "x led to y". It's more like a+b+c+d = 1. What's the value for a, b, c and d? And with of course the funny twist that there might be an "e" lurking around in some sources and still missing in the equation. History is fun :)

The most popular subject for what-if history seems to be the Germans in WW2, with some writer trying to prove that they could have won if only they hadn't made certain military or political blunders. It's a redundant exercise because it ignores the fact that both sides made terrible mistakes (starting, on the Allied side, with appeasement and the Maginot Line). They are trying to imagine a world in which the Germans didn't make any important mistakes but the Allies did, and this kind of world is simply not plausible.

What if Hitler had been quite a nice chap really? Maybe he was until we gassed him? He loved his mum and liked animals after all. Or what if Hitler had had two balls? What if we could minimise geniuses like Oppenheimer, Szilard and Fermi? What if we could tell off and outsmart Heisenberg and Groves? As I was saying to my friend from a parallel universe, it would all be so different if Miliseckli wouldn't have invented his high-energy neutron combiner. In an infinite universe, everything has already happened. An infinite number of times. That’s the territory Benford is milking in a SFional setting. ( )

In the alternate history genre, it's commonplace to have historical figures as important characters. It's far less common, however, for the author's characterization of those historical figures to be based upon their firsthand knowledge of them. As a physicist who knew personally some of the leading figures of the Manhattan Project, Gregory Benford is one of the select few for whom such an accomplishment is possible, and he employs it to full effect in this novel exploring the war that might have been.

Benford takes as his point of departure the use of centrifuges to separate the U-235 from uranium hexaflouride. As he explains in the afterword to the novel, this is the primary means most nuclear powers today obtain the critical isotope for building atomic weapons, yet in 1942 it was abandoned for what proved the far less effective method of gaseous diffusion. Edward Teller was among those who theorized that had the centrifuge process been used, the United States would have obtained sufficient material to build an atomic bomb in 1944 rather than in the following year.

Benford's scientific knowledge gives him the foundation for establishing an extremely plausible premise, yet it is skills as an author which turn this premise into an entertaining work of fiction. Building his novel around the pivotal figure of Karl Cohen, he walks readers through the development of a more efficient atomic bomb program, one that has a bomb ready to use in concert with the Normandy invasion. In a lesser author's hand the reader might get bogged down in the details of the physics and chemistry of nuclear weapons development, yet Benford knows how to interweave intelligible explanations of the science with plot and character development in such a way as to keep the reader engaged. His postulation of the historical effects of the use of such a bomb are a further tribute to his ability, as instead of a Pollyanish outcome he works through some of the likely ramifications of using a weapon upon an advanced industrial power capable of responding in kind. It all makes for an alternate history novel of the first rank, one that deserves to be regarded as one of the finest examples of its kind. ( )

A very enjoyable Alternate History of the Manhattan Project. For me part of the enjoyment was trying to determine where it deviated from real history, as it relies on a somewhat subtle change from our history. For nuclear physicists or engineers or students of the history of the Manhattan Project, 'subtle' is probably wildly incorrect, but for me, it was a subtle and gradual change. The book follows Karl Cohen, a brilliant chemist turned nuclear engineer as he meets all of the famous physicists of the time - Einstein, Fermi, Teller, Dyson and many others. We learn a little about the personality of many of these famous scientists as Mr. Cohen first works on the project, then the bomb, then even goes on a little cloak-and-dagger spy adventure.
Fascinating, well written and enjoyable. ( )

Such a great, thought-provoking book. Well written, well researched (it helps that the author's father-in-law is the main character), and quite deep in concept.

In the afterward, the author mentioned the possibility of a nuclear conflict between India and Pakistan or in the Middle East. The narrative was very striking to me, and actually brought tears to my eyes when the bomb was dropped on Berlin in the book, as I sit and watch the news of President Trump and Kim Jong Un ratcheting up the rhetoric in a dangerous game of one-ups-manship. It wasn't planned on my part to read a book about nuclear war at this point in time, but it was great timing nonetheless.

This book should not be approached as a quick read. If you choose to read this book, and I highly recommend it, take your time with this one. You won't want to, but you'll appreciate it all that much more. ( )