THE NEWS
A Cold War Novel
by Marc Stuart Connolly
Connolly’s debut novel, set during the height of the Cold War, posits an intriguing alternate history.
Initially set in 1983—the year, per the author, that was “the closest the world has come to accidental nuclear war”—the story begins when members of Soviet intelligence intercept a signal from deep space that they can’t decipher. Experts like intelligence analyst Anatoly Kornev and Mikhail Pospelov, a mathematician at the Institute of Cybernetics Problems, struggle to crack the code and are eventually ordered to categorize it as instrumentation error and bury the file in some nameless data catacomb. But the highly sensitive information eventually finds its way into the hands of Elizabeth Carter, an MI6 linguistics officer, and David Harmon, a CIA analyst, who begin to decode the signal’s contents. Their findings are seemingly not possible: The signal’s transmitter shouldn’t exist. (“To place a transmitter this far out in space requires propulsion that does not yet exist. With current rockets…the journey would take generations.”) Even more unexplainable is the signal’s message, which seems to have been sent from a future with a very different global political hierarchy. Do the Soviets have some kind of highly advanced technology? If so, how will they use it to their advantage? Already high tensions and churning paranoia boil over as political leaders (including Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Mikhail Gorbachev) desperately try to avoid mutually assured destruction (MAD).
Connolly’s debut is a deeply thought-provoking alternate history set during an era when geopolitical tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union had left humankind one automated error or misinterpreted communication away from nuclear annihilation. Although the political landscape of the 1980s is well described—the narrative features historical figures like NASA astronaut Kathryn Sullivan and William Casey, who served as Director of Central Intelligence from 1981 to 1987 under Reagan—the real hook is Connolly’s perceptive and concise writing style, which makes every scene feel fully immersive: “The room smells of floor wax and stale coffee. Utilitarian. Mission diagrams cover the walls—trajectory plots, orbital schematics, payload configurations layered over one another in the way of rooms that are used rather than maintained.” Readers old enough to have lived through the Cold War will appreciate the author’s subtle ’80s historical and pop-culture references, like the American invasion of Grenada and Korean Air Lines Flight 007 being shot down by Soviet aircraft (one chapter opens with Carter jogging in London while listening to her Walkman). Connolly fruitfully explores the consequences of working in the intelligence field while trying to maintain healthy relationships with family and friends; Harmon and Carter are both married with families, and the scenes with their spouses and children are arguably as uncomfortably tense as the meetings between Reagan and Gorbachev. Missed birthday parties and dance recitals become par for the course as they work random nights and weekends and are sometimes gone for weeks at a time. One weary statement by Harmon says it all: “My wife’s in Geneva. My daughter barely knows what I do. This job takes everything that matters.”A fascinating glimpse into the workings of intelligence agents with an ingenious speculative twist.