The Berlin Project

This is one of the great "B" Sf writers that I have been reading for a long time. My expectations were high since the subject also interested me. Unfortunately it did not live up to my expectations in a number of ways.But lets start with the good things first. Gregory Benford knows all the science you need to explain how the atom bomb was invented and he uses that knowledge in this book to cover this in great detail. Not only does he know the science, he used to know almost all of the most important people involved and is actually married to a daughter of one of them. His portraits of all these legendary scientists are probably very close to how they actually were. He also knows a lot of history concerning the Second World War and makes the story fit into what actually happened. There is a lot to learn from reading these parts of the book.What is less good is that in some sort of way he also makes the story in the first part of the book almost boring. You keep reading hoping that something will happen but you have to read half of the book in order to make the story start moving into alternative history. Even then it is rather slow. Some of what he brings up feels to artificial only to add some famous names into the story. A minor problem but somewhat irritating is that he knows all about nuclear science but makes simple mistakes when it comes to military equipment that were part of the Second World war. The Messerschmidt Me-410 was not a jet fighter and US Half-Tracks did not carry 0,6 inch machine guns as two examples. Proof reading of someone with military history as background would have fixed that.Also once the story ends he leaves some very important questions unsolved (like what happened to Stalin?) and you keep wondering how it all really ended.It is a book for those interested in how the atom bomb were constructed but less so for those thinking about alternative ends to the Second World War.