The Disintegration Loops - by Ray Nayler (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

This new novel from a Hugo Award winner asks: What if the United States won World War II not with an atomic bomb but with alien technology scavenged from a UFO?

It's 1956, and Sylvia Altstatt is a World War II veteran serving her country as an OSS contractor. She is the only American known to pilot the alien technology called the Loops and survive. The Loops, along with a trove of remarkable tools reverse-engineered by American scientists, came from a crashed UFO found in the desert before the start of the war. A prosperous world order of flying cars, single-dose cancer cures, robots, and rocket travel institutes tenuous peace. But this new world is unsettled by rumors of Russian spies and traitors at the highest level of government.

Human machinations are not the only threats that Sylvia has to contend with. A second crashed saucer and its potential weaponization could break US hegemony for good and usher in another global war. And Sylvia is the one with the power to investigate its whereabouts before it falls into the hands of America's enemies.

Against a backdrop of alternate twentieth-century history, Ray Nayler's The Disintegration Loops is a speculative political thriller that wrestles with the existential questions that have shaped the modern world, all the forces that imperil and sustain democracy. The result is a high-octane adventure through a world hurtling toward destruction, rendered in a sleek speculative style with philosophical depth that illuminates the loops that nations cycle through again and again, until they disintegrate.

About the Author

Ray Nayler is the author of the novels Palaces of the Crow, Where the Axe Is Buried, and The Mountain in the Sea, which won the Locus Award for Best First Novel, and of the novella The Tusks of Extinction, which won a Hugo Award. Born in Quebec and raised in California, Nayler lived and worked abroad for two decades in Russia, Central Asia, the Caucasus, and the Balkans. He most recently served as an international adviser to the Office of National Marine Sanctuaries at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and was a visiting scholar at the George Washington University's Institute for International Science and Technology Policy. He lives in Washington, DC.