The Trinity Paradox

by Kevin J. Anderson, Doug Beeson

Activist Elizabeth Devane wished for an end to nuclear weapons. Surely, she thought, if they'd known what they were unleashing, the scientists of the Manhattan Project would never have created such a terrible instrument of destruction. But during a protest action, the unthinkable a flash of light, a silent confusion, and Elizabeth awakes to find herself alone in a desolate desert arroyo ... and almost fifty years in the past. June 1944. Los Alamos, New Mexico. While the Allies battle in the Pacific and begin the Normandy invasion in Europe, Nazi Germany deviates from the timeline Elizabeth knows and uses its newfound nuclear arsenal against America. Somehow, someway, Elizabeth has been given the chance to put the genie back in the bottle ... yet could she—should she—attempt the greatest sabotage in history?

Genres: Science Fiction, Time Travel, Alternate History, Fiction, Historical Fiction, Mystery

352 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published October 1, 1991

About the author

Yes, I have a lot of books, and if this is your first visit to my amazon author page, it can be a little overwhelming. If you are new to my work, let me recommend a few titles as good places to start. I love my Dan Shamble, Zombie P.I. series, humorous horror/mysteries, which begin with DEATH WARMED OVER. My steampunk fantasy adventures, CLOCKWORK ANGELS and CLOCKWORK LIVES, written with Neil Peart, legendary drummer from Rush, are two of my very favorite novels ever. And my magnum opus, the science fiction epic The Saga of Seven Suns, begins with HIDDEN EMPIRE. After you've tried those, I hope you'll check out some of my other series.

I have written spin-off novels for Star Wars, StarCraft, Titan A.E., and The X-Files, and I'm the co-author of the Dune prequels. My original works include the Saga of Seven Suns series and the Nebula Award-nominated Assemblers of Infinity. I have also written several comic books including the Dark Horse Star Wars collection Tales of the Jedi written in collaboration with Tom Veitch, Predator titles (also for Dark Horse), and X-Files titles for Topps.

I serve as a judge in the Writers of the Future contest.

My wife is author Rebecca Moesta. We currently reside near Monument, Colorado.

Reviews

[Eric Mesa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Got this in the Time Travel Storybundle

This book was a good read. That said, I was disappointed, given the title of the story - The Trinity PARADOX. I thought it was going to be like Back to the Future 2 where our main character ended up in the alternate timeline and then had to somehow stop herself from creating the alternate timeline. Or multiple people would try to change it or something like that.

Instead, what we had was more akin to A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court or Timeline in which, like the former, someone is knocked out and knocked back in time. Our main character used to work in the atomic industry then became a protestor. Then the time travel results in her working at Los Alamos during the atomic tests.

The book does a good job pointing out how the war split the scientific community. In modern times research transcends national borders and it was more of a government enforcement that splits them apart during the war. This has consequences as it's one of the ways that our main character ends up accidentally passing information to the Germans.

The author does a pretty good job of showing how things would have changed and how the war was going from both sides. Good character studies of various historical figures. I liked learning about some of the bickering among scientists on the German side. Although I can't stop thinking of Fermi and Feynman as depicted in The Manhattan Projects, Vol. 1: Science. Bad.. A fun read although, again, slightly disappointing considering the title.

[Katie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This one pulled me in unexpectedly and then I just went along for the ride. I loved the alternating character views, from both the German and American sides. The attention to detail and to characterization was wonderful, and things moved at enough of a clip that I never felt as though the science dragged anything down. I am definitely happy I found this one.

[A~ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Trinity Paradox

A nice little tale about nuclear powered time travel. Was an enjoyable read.
Spoilers Ahead

Characters

Elizabeth Devane: Anti-Nuke protester. She got a degree in physics and then started to work on nuclear weapons until a friends death made her question her life. Also a time traveler.

Jeff: Elizabeth's boyfriend. Don't get attached to him.

Graham Fox: Elizabeth's other boyfriend. He manages to die twice in this book.

Dr Abram Esau: Nazi German nuclear scientist. Friend of Graham Fox. In charge of all of the nuclear research in WW2 Germany.

The prologue has an old Graham Fox trying working at White Sands testing the settings on an old piece of equipment. They probably should have kept him at home because he plugs the wrong cord into the wrong doohickey and vaporizes himself.

Elizabeth and Jeff hear of the accident and that White Sands is still planning on doing further testing of a new bomb. They decide to sabotage the prototype. Sneaking into White Sands at night the walk up to the bomb where it is sitting out on a tarmac. Yes the top secret prototype is sitting out in the open with just a chain length fence protecting it. And as dumb as this sounds it's not the dumbest thing in this scene.

Elizabeth and Jeff start to work on the bomb. Elizabeth with her scientific knowledge works on the wires and computers hooked up to the bomb. She gives her boyfriend a sledgehammer and he starts whacking on it. This works as well as expected. Somewhere between denying a high explosive device it's cooling fluid and randomly subjecting it to sharp blows doesn't agree with the bomb and it goes off.

The next morning Elizabeth wakes up to find herself on the desert ground. The White Sands site is no where to be seen and her boyfriend is laying dead with his legs fused together. After a bit of a walk she finds herself in Los Alamos circa 1942. And very quickly Elizabeth finds herself involved in the very project that created the nuclear industrial complex that she hated.

In war torn Germany Abram has just been named plenipotentiary of the German Atomic research. It's a fancy term that means he's in charge. Currently there are three different groups working on it and he is supposed to pull them together. The issue is they do not want to listen to him and he can not find an edge to take more than paper control.

Los Alamos is draining but Elizabeth quickly games the system to get her set up as more than just a file clerk, she is now part of a human computer. She also makes friends with Graham, and lets it slip that Heisenberg has an issue in his cross section of graphite. Graham is morally concerned with the work he is doing and figures the best way to make sure America does not become a super power is to have Germany also gain the bomb. So slipping away during a daily pass at a local town, he mails this information to his old German drinking buddy Abram. Of course as a letter going from one town full of physicists working on a bomb to a German physicists working on a bomb would be suspicious so he sends it circuitously. Meanwhile Elizabeth realizes that she is in the perfect opportunity to stop the development of the nuclear bomb and begins to introduce consistent errors in the math she is running.

Abram receives the letter and uses it to get Heisenberg interrogated by the German secret police. Pretty soon he is trying to answer whether a Heisenberg in a box with or without a bullet in his head is dead or not dead...hint he's dead. Because of the letter he is able to correct a mistake that happened in the real timeline where Germany was not able to create a nuclear reactor because they discounted graphite as a reactor buffer. With Heisenberg dead, a working idea and the fear of all the other scientists Abram begins to make progress that never happened.

Testing a design created using the bad math Elizabeth has been using a major pioneer in nuclear theory ends up missing one head. This means that of the two different designs that America used, the gun method and implosion becomes none as the gun and implosion were from his head and even if you hook up a head to wires it's really hard to get anything out of them other than blood. On his end Graham decides to do what ever possible to stall progress sure that on the other side of the ocean his friend Abram is doing the same.

On the other side of the ocean Graham is working as fast as possible and is well on the way to having enough material for a bomb. But it is still too slow. However, an idea and an encounter with a strange little man named Wernher von Braun results in a dirty bombing of NY City. This kills thousands and makes the city uninhabitable, well except for the Bronx, nothing kills people in the Bronx.

Elizabeth realizes that the timeline has drastically changed and that a Hitler with an atomic bomb might not be the best idea and gives the lead scientist a clue on how to make the compression method of nuclear explosions. Work intensifies and Elizabeth is sent on a cross country trip to help with overseeing production of parts. Graham feel's betrayed but is still confident that he can slow down the process and that his lifelong friend old Fritz Graham is doing the best to make sure another New York does not happen.

In Germany Graham is determined to makes sure another NY does not happen, instead he wants a bigger explosion. In the concentration camp of Dachau an atomic reactor is producing the material needed, but a few Jews working on the reactor know that their time is up and decide to hurt the Nazi's in any way possible. This ultimately sets up a critical meltdown that ends any aspirations Graham had of Hitler taking him to a baseball game.

Done with her tour Elizabeth returns just in time for the testing of the first atomic bomb. Once on site Graham Fox, despite being angry at her, convinces her to leave the bunker and check out a sensor with her. Once far away from the bunker and bomb he tells her he has set up explosives under the bunker set to go off the same time the bomb does. Also he loves her and wants to be more than friends. Devastated by the news, the bomb not the love part, she jumps into a jeep and rushes back, running over Graham on the way breaking his leg and causing him to die of dehydration in the desert. She manages to save one scientist before both bombs explode. Despite knowing a fuckton of info about nuclear explosions Elizabeth looks at the explosion and goes mostly blind.

The story ends years later with Elizabeth living in the small town of Los Alamos. She's poor, if you travel back in time, drastically changing the time line makes it really hard to play the stock market, especially if you accidentally turned the building that the stock market is in into a nuclear waste-ground and almost blind but has a better Earth now....Well except for all of NY being dead, and America using the bomb in Germany, Japan and to win the Korean War...and America working on fun uses for the bomb such as digging holes. I personally think she probably should have seen about getting a hammer and find a nuke to hit the reset button with.

[Pc MacDonald · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a work of fiction, however there are aspects of nuclear material production that are misleading or just plain false.

One does not need a passle of U235 to make plutonium. Under some circumstances it is possible to produce a properly moderated reactor operating on pure, raw uranium. What little U235 in it will fission, eventually turning some U238 into plutonium.

It is true that these reactors are sometimes SEEDED with small amounts of U235 to make the design and startup less critical.

The Chicago pile CP-1 designed by Fermi was a pure U238 reactor, as nobody had separated sufficient quantities of U235 in 1942 for it to be anything else.

I'd have given the book four stars but for this misleading physics. It is a good story, and don't let the faulty physics keep you from reading it.

[Roman K · Rating 5 out of 5]

An underrated alternate history novel dealing with moral repercussions surrounding the creation of the atomic bomb.

Makes for an excellent companion piece to the 2023 "Oppenheimer" film, while delving into the what-if scenarios of having NOT dropped the nukes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Lots of food for thought, which is extremely relevant to the World were living in right now.

[milos lacika · Rating 3 out of 5]

take prijemne, co by bolo keby bolo. zaroven troska k takemu naivnemu pohladu na jadrovy vyskum.

[Mervi · Rating 3 out of 5]

A stand-alone time travel SF book. Part of the time travel bundle I bought from Storybundle back 2015.

Elizabeth Devane used to work for United Atomics but after a friend of hers died from a cancer he got from his work in United Atomics, she quit her job and became a protester. She and her boyfriend break into a testing site at Los Alamos and try to dismantle Magnetocumulative Generator. Instead, there’s a huge explosion which kills her boyfriend and hurls them both back in time to 1943 and to the secret atomic test site at Los Alamos. Elizabeth is alone and at first she thinks that she’s hallucinating everything.

At first, she not sure what she should do but soon she realizes that she has a good chance of sabotaging the atomic testing. She doesn’t have papers, of course, but with her background she’s able to forge papers. Instead of working as a simple clerk, she becomes one of the calculators in the war effort. She meets the men working on the Manhattan project, including Oppenheimer, general Groves, Feynman, and Graham Fox. She tries to remember what she knows about WWII but isn’t sure about many things.

Meanwhile, the Germans are building their own bombs. At university, Fox was good friends with Dr. Esau who is the head of the German atomic project. Because Fox talks with Elizabeth, he sends a letter to Esau which pushes German research forward more than it should.

Elizabeth is the main POV character. Esau and Fox are also significant POV characters and there are a couple of others, as well. I thought the descriptions of 1940s US was well done and Elizabeth has to get used to minor things being very different, such as food (which was very greasy) and how everyone smoked indoors. She’s an independent woman and so stands out among the other women. Initially, she’s very much against building the bomb or advancing atomic science.

Graham Fox is one of the engineers. He wants the world powers to maintain a balance of terror and so, he sends that letter to Dr. Esau. He’s convinced that the German engineers don’t want to use any weapons but that they, too, want to maintain the same balance.

Dr. Abraham Esau is a Nazi scientist. He’s worked long to overcome his Jewish sounding names. He wants power and recognition, especially in the scientific fields. At the start of the story, he’s just been appointed the Plenipotentiary for Nuclear Physics. However, he’s still working under other ruthless men who don’t know much, if anything, about physics and he resents that. He’s also jealous of other scientists. When Armaments minister Speer orders him to use concentration camp prisoners to work with the radioactive materials, Esau has nothing against it.

This was an interesting book. It’s a drama where Elizabeth, and to lesser extent Fox, struggle with their conscious. Elizabeth knows the outcome but wants to change it, stop the bombs from being dropped to Japan and the Cold War from ever happening. But she doubts how much she can do. Interestingly, I don’t think she ever considers what would happen if she stopped the US research but Germany continues with theirs.

I wasn’t really interested in the later POV characters. Otherwise, this was a good read. People who know more about WWII than me will get more out of it.

Despite the name “Trinity Paradox” this doesn’t deal with time travel paradoxes but rather the emotional paradox that Elizabeth finds herself in.

[Tim · Rating 4 out of 5]

How appropriate I was reading this over the 70th anniversary of the real Trinity atomic bomb test. The story here, reasonably quickly setup, has anti-nuclear activist Elizabeth accidentally thrown back to 1944 Los Alamos, New Mexico. With no way back to her own late 20th Century time line, she infiltrates the Manhattan Project as a short term survival tactic in the desert. Could she stop, or at least delay, the atomic bomb being completed until after the war finishes? With her modern education in mathematics, physics and history she soon finds a job in the calculations department where maybe small errors can be subtly introduced ...

Meanwhile in Europe, unknown to Elizabeth something she says has enormous consequences. The Nazis accelerate their nuclear program using cheap concentration camp inmates as expendable labour with the added bonus of not caring about costly radiation shielding. These chapters of the book are very cold, and I think the author Kevin J Anderson got a little too under their skin. Brrr.

Of course Elizabeth doesn't stop The Project nor the manufacture of The Gadget (the first bomb), but history is changing faster than she can keep up. Boooom! (It is in the cover art.)

I mostly enjoyed reading this novel and the careful use of real physicists, army and political figures added to a well thought through what-if story.

[Chip · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fun book to read if you are looking for alternative history mixed with slightly harder science. The book mainly deals with the ideas of "What if you could change history, what would you change or accidentally change, would that be better than the current timeline?" Gives storyline of many renown World War II scientists from both the American and German sides.

[Stefan · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent historical and alternative history novel of the American atomic bomb project. The authors experience with physics, the historical setting, and the two main narrative characters make this an excellent light science fiction read. Recommended.

[Daniel Borochovitz · Rating 5 out of 5]

a good what if story