All Those Vanished Engines

Paul Park returns to science fiction after completing his impressive four-volume fantasy, A Princess of Roumania, with an extraordinary, intense, compressed SF novel containing three parts, each set in its own alternate-history universe. The sections are all rooted in Virginia and the Battle of the Crater, and are also grounded in the real history of the Park family, from differing points of view. They are gorgeously imaginative and carefully constructed, and reverberate richly with one another. The first section is set in the aftermath of the Civil War, in a world in which the Queen of the North has negotiated a two-nation settlement. The second, taking place in northwestern Massachusetts, investigates a secret project during World War II, in a time somewhat like the present. The third is set in the near-future United States, with aliens from history. The cumulative effect is awesome. There hasn't been a three part novel this ambitious in science fiction since Gene Wolfe's classic The Fifth Head of Cerberus.