Idea

Maybe it’s exhaustion talking, after a tiring weekend of moving furniture and boxes of keepsakes from my mom’s house, but a speculative fiction idea suddenly occurred to me. I read a piece in yesterday’s Tribune about the atomic bomb (Saturday was the 60th anniversary of Hiroshima) and started thinking…What if we hadn’t dropped the bomb? I’ve read repeatedly that the bomb was a necessary evil, that it cut short a war that might have dragged on for decades. But what if we never had the bomb, or had it and then refrained from using it? Would the Japanese have invaded the West Coast? Would a Midwestern protagonist not be overly concerned, given the geographic distance? Would the Japanese have developed the bomb themselves (I just learned that they were indeed developing one at the time) and become the third player in the Cold War? And what about Germany? They were apparently working on one, too. In fact, one of the intriguing things I learned from this brief article is about the Jewish physicists who fled Germany to come to the U.S. to work on the bomb, urgently rushing to stop Hitler in his tracks.

Obviously, a lot to digest, and tons to research. But I’ve already thought of a title for this opus, Fat Boy Never Lived. The two atomic bombs were called Little Boy and Fat Man, with this title contracting the two and distancing it from a direct discussion of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (a tack borrowed from the House of Freaks song about Oppenheimer, “Dark and Light in New Mexico”) toward a more general look at the era that might have developed had we not dropped the big one(s).

Yes, just what I need--another novel concept.