Turtledove is known for his alternate history stories but they've not appealed to me.  I prefer my alternate history to be a bit more fantastical and Turtledove's stories are thoroughly grounded in both history and science.  But this one caught my eye.

Jerry is a grad student at UCLA in 1974.  He also writes short SF stories and researches whale song.  He is approached to join a team on a marine research ship; ostensibly to study whale song.  Once he signed an NDA, he discovered both the cover story and something quite a bit more fantastic.  The ship was originally designed and intended to lift a sunken USSR submarine that the Navy found; they hoped to learn more about the USSR's capabilities.  But when they got there, they found something else.  Something that might have lain on the ocean floor for generations; something that obviously was responsible for sinking the submarine.  Now the mission is very different.  The project is now being run by the CIA, who have no idea on earth what they are dealing with, but actually had someone smart enough to gather together a team that could maybe answer questions.  Jerry, with his imagination, was expected to pose questions that less-imaginative people wouldn't even consider; allowing them to create contingencies.

Because Jerry, by his own nature, always thinks outside the box, he becomes a significant contributor to the team and is the one who figures out how to get inside the alien spaceship. But he eventually runs afoul of bureaucracy and politics and his cautions go unheeded.  He is unceremoniously let go with the words of his contract running around in his mind: terminate with extreme prejudice.  He figures those aren't just words to scare; the CIA means what they say. So he is terrified; both of what might happen when the CIA starts poking at the spaceship and what might happen to him should someone decide he knows too much.  What they don't seem to be considering seriously is that the spaceship destroyed a nuclear submarine with little effort and no warning.

The story was quite dry by my tastes.  Turtledove made sure that every detail was authentic to the time period but much of the detail wasn't even interesting coloration for me.  It was a bit dull.  I limped through two-thirds of the book (and it's not that long) until Jerry started to get interesting.  And then I couldn't finish the last third fast enough.

As the tension grew near the end, I really wanted to know what Jerry was going to do. And while the plot was logical and well-drawn, the conclusion read more like an old-fashioned spy thriller. I hate to be negative but this story had nothing original in it; it felt like an exercise to place a story (that could have happened in any timeline) in the paranoid 1970s and see how a character would react.  For me, the most fantastic element was the idea that the CIA of the 1970s would actually consider a long-haired hippie who wrote fiction and studied whale song to be a scientist.  ~~  Catherine Book

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