Last year Wilber introduced wartime baseball player Moe Berg as more than the “brainiest player in MLB” (wikipedia.) Whilst in our world Berg did work for the Office of Strategic Services during World War II, Wilber’s ‘Something Real’ (review here) took that involvement further, putting Berg in a position, in his world, where he has to find out whether Heisenberg and his team are sufficiently close to creating an A-Bomb to need assassinating.
The story gets picked up against, and dialled up several notches in this equally engaging follow-up. Berg finds his services called on again, an in a quite memorable train journey, several changes of alternate versions of Earth are flicked through. Fortunately I know enough about baseball to spot the reference to a lithe pitcher called Babe Ruth as being a quite radical departure from our reality.
There’s another task for Berg, with several complications, ending with a cliff-hanger leaving this reader looking forward to more.
