The Novel Speaks!

The WINGED and GARLANDED NIKE  (A novel of the atomic age)

       by:  S G Scott,
             Regent Press,
             418 pp., $22 – Amazon 

         It is usually considered unwise for a novelist to try to “explain“ his novel, as the novel itself is supposed to evoke purpose and meaning more or less seamlessly. In some fiction, though, its provenance is so specialized or remote that it is useful to provide explicit declarative support however awkward and artificial it may seem. 
       Such is the case here for The Winged and Garlanded Nike whose provenance is decades in the past and is heavily documented with key technical matters well beyond the casual interest of the average reader, but integrated here with story and characters which create realistic narratives abounding in irony and humor. The saga is  carried along by the pervasive background theme - - Our nuclear weapon madness. The reader who stays with it should come away entertained, informed, and apprehensive of her future.
 
Lawrence Korb, Assistant Secretary of Defense in the Reagan Administration “Fascinating. Anyone trying to understand the real impact of the Cold War on California and the nation's psyche should read this novel." (promotional blurb by Mr. Korb for the novel’s back cover.)

Frida Berrigan, Arms and Security Initiative, New America Foundation  “With humor and precision, Scott draws us into an engaging and entertaining epic across the nuclear age” (Promotional blurb by Ms. Berrigan for the novel’s back cover)

R.S. Retired technology company president “An amazing book by an unknown author. S. G. Scott has written a compelling novel with great, great characters (I fell in love with Alice) - - love, greed, crime, and most important a gradual unveiling of the atrocity of today's nuclear threats to the world. The book was a great surprise and well worth reading.”

Scattered herein are readers’ comments. We dismiss the few “downers” as readers saddled with short attention spans, (this is a leisurely epic) or those disappointed at not finding techno-thriller fireworks and raging sex, - or perhaps the politically-offended, like those who believe President Reagan’s “Star Wars” was more than wasteful folly.

Barbara Marinacci, editor and author/co-author of seven books “This is a remarkable novel with lots of dramatic and fun things going on apart from 'The Messages'. I couldn't believe how GOOD it was.”

Ladywriter  “S.G. Scott's “The Winged and Garlanded Nike” is a remarkable debut novel that skillfully explores the Cold War military expansion and its effects on California from the 1950s to the 80s. Scott interweaves California's Gold Rush history with the rise of missile-building projects and massive Defense Dept. spending, showing how these forces shaped California economically and demographically, while simultaneously despoiling the environment. This is a sensitively written book that affords many delights. The characters are deftly sketched, each speaking in his own well-differentiated manner. Scott uses frequent touches of wit and dry humor. His protagonist is college professor Richard Hervey, who serves as a vantage point from which the reader clearly sees the pitfalls of the bomb-building era. Nike is an engrossing and engaging novel complete with romance, mystery, seduction, betrayal, corruption and the growth and transformation of several characters. But it is more than this - it is a rare glimpse into a hugely important era in American life, and as such, doubly rewards the reader.”

A Thumb-nail sketch  A sprawling and offbeat saga, the novel takes place during several months in 1955 and a week in 1986, a time span bridged by a thread of teasing correspondence between two main characters who suffer under a failed romance. These two years were the most significant and dangerous ones during the Cold War. Year 1955 saw the fruition of strategic nuclear weapon delivery systems that lent a real gut meaning to the word “annihilation.” In 1986 the most inane and expensive and confrontational Pentagon program ever was proposed – President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, ‘Star Wars’. A documented historical background provides the novel’s basic structure, but it is the multiple characters, their bittersweet relationships and personal narratives across those thirty years who are the realistic heart of the novel – wherein the glint of gold and the shadow of uranium lend poignant metaphors to the story. The novel comprises non-genre sagas whose interwoven narratives relate history, conflict and romance, and portray a slanted view into the secret military-industrial complex and its impact on California and society in general. The story takes place in the fictional town of Fernville, a hundred year-old Gold Rush town in California that is representative of cities across America that were transformed by the influx of defense spending during the Cold War period. Except for the murdered one, the cast of characters remains the same in the two time periods, but their relationships, driven by love, absence, sex and the specter of uranium, greatly change. Despite a muted tone of dread over the nuclear confrontation, this cautionary tale reads easy with humor and historical insight through AUTHENTIC voices from 1955 and 1986.

K. S. – Retired electronics company president  “Having worked for an aerospace company during the early time period of NIKE, I can say that Scott hits the mark in his description of that environment and the people involved. And he does it with wit and a great command of language. The book is a cleverly entwined tale of the cold war, the reverse California gold rush, murder and just the right amount of requited and unrequited love (or lust). It slyly mesmerizes the reader.”

Mike Moore – Former editor of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists - Author of Twilight War: The Folly of U.S. Space Dominance. “Wow! I had not expected an epic, but that’s what I got. - - The sweep of Nike is staggering - - but intrigue, quirky characters, greed, murder and even adultery are really just bits of spice in Nike. The novel is about how we humans came close to ending life on Earth as we know it.”

Genre? Labeling  a novel "non-genre" these days, in the crowded universe of genre fiction, might suggest that the novel floats in a kind of limbo, flirting with classification, perhaps in want of a narrowing to a well-defined category for easier access by a readership. "The Winged and Garlanded Nike," though, comprises a soup of so-called genres, a cleverly integrated mix which permits the lofty "literary" label to be applied. The reader, depending what she herself brings to it, may see "Nike" as an historical Saga across the Cold War nuclear confrontations, a metaphoric tale of gold and uranium, murder mystery, Romance, or simply as broadly sentimental and witty narratives overlaid by a hideous pall of our nuclear madness – all with a cast of original characters. Take your pick - if you must.

Midwest Book Review “Deftly written, the novel is highly recommended for community library collections dedicated to literary fiction. California’s Gold Rush began in the late 1840s. Through the 1950s, the lesser known defense industry “rush” went into full force. The Winged and Garlanded Nike links the two rushes in their financial impacts from the money flowing out and into California. Scott takes a hard critical look at the defense era in its heydays of 1955 and its aftermath thirty years later in 1986, with thought-provoking narrative.

B and S – former bookstore owners “For several days we’ve have been trying to create the perfect review for this wonderful book (which, by the way, scared the daylights out of me) - - ”

A brief spotlight on two prominent characters.  Defense Company Maxtar, moves to the Fernville region in 1955, bringing an unsettling milieu of engineers, scientists and executives. Dick Hervey, acerbic associate professor on the career skids, whose scholarship is the nuclear genie, worries over his nubile daughter’s chaotic entanglements with Maxtar engineers. Alice, the spirited and alcoholic wife of Maxtar’s executive, suffers boredom, prompting her to engage in a torrid romance with Hervey. She desires authorship and discovers long-buried Fernville “skeletons.” Thirty years later we rejoin the characters, kept on stage by a tenuous correspondence between Hervey and Alice (now a published murder-mystery author). Hard realities in 1986 contrast to the novel’s slightly whimsical nature present in the 1955 narratives. Conflicts are resolved: Hervey’s final joust with the nuclear genie; those hot-blooded romances of 1955; resolution of a 1921 murder – or are they?

R. K. Colonel, U S Army, Retired “A stunning portrayal of what it was like in the 50's as the world tried to grasp the meaning of this new global threat and the dire consequences of its use. Scott has vividly described the interworkings of the Military-Industrial Complex. His characters are real human - -”

B. B. Real Estate Executive - “I bought the book, flew to Maui, read the novel – voraciously. I appreciate the Green and Nuclear Messages, loved the characters and plots, and could hardly wait to find the murderer. - - I relate to the travails, trysts and ageing of the characters.”

H. H. “This is a compelling story of human folly, of a small California town made over by the 49'ers and again, a century later, by the nuclear weapons industry - - ”

Pertinence and the nuclear option  Here "nuclear option" means what it did for fifty years or so - that is, the HIDEOUS option, not the eviscerated meaning when the term is applied today to political actions. A possible ratified START treaty with Russia, with more reductions in warheads and delivery vehicles, would seem to make "Nike," an alarmist novel about the nuclear threat in the 1950's and 80's, not so pertinent anymore. But not so fast. When worldwide nuke arsenals drop to a level of a two digit number, a long, long way to go from the thousands still more or less on alert, the novel may then be deemed "historical." In the long meantime "Nike" should continue to strike fear and anger in the perceptive reader - that wise men of those past decades enabled deployment of nuclear warheads in their obscene thousands. Those readers who don't wish to dwell on that "option" are welcome to ride the novel's rollercoaster of sentiment, wit and romance instead, and try to figure out the murder.

L. C. – retired physicist “Well, I read The Winged and Garlanded Nike and I think it is fantastic!!! The story is great, character development terrific, and I couldn't put it down. - - I loved the structure: 1955, Intermezzo, 1986, and Epilogue.”

M. C. C. “It isn't easy to write an entertaining novel about recent history, and there are not a lot of books that illuminate the enormous danger we still face from atomic bombs that were built to keep the military-industrial complex running at full tilt. Putting those two objectives between two covers might seem unwieldy, but S. G. Scott makes it all work. The Winged and Garlanded Nike is an entertaining, sexy, mysterious yarn that leaves you with a better understanding of how the hell we got into this mess in the first place. Highly recommended.

Thanks for asking about the genesis of this novel. Reaching back in time (1957) to when some readers might believe is somewhere in the Middle Ages, a distant relative of "Nike" tried to make an appearance - a too-broad satire on the secret defense missile industry. But satirizing something about which the public knew little, was highly classified to boot, and with the Cold War getting serious - was a literary endeavor doomed from the start. After a few months bouncing around in the literary establishment, the manuscript returned to its final resting place in the closet. In 1985 a distant cousin to the 1957 manuscript tried to make the scene in response to President Reagan's "Star Wars" absurdity. This effort was correctly criticized as too immediately topical and didactic for the readership. Around 1990 I decided to take some of the important or unique genetic material from these earlier relatives and produce a hybrid, a long saga with a broader historical theme, more "character driven" (as they say in the business) and grounded in place and time periods which were highly familiar to me. Fifteen years of on and off research, writing and countless revisions produced the modern "Nike."

K and M, librarians “ - - loved The Winged and Garlanded Nike. Kudos to Scott. He writes brilliantly and included something for everyone. We certainly learned a lot and truly savored all of it – even managed to keep track of the characters. We’ve told friends about it as well and I sent a request to purchase to the library -- not a quick read, but a great one.”

K. R. “What you never knew about the cold war and beyond! An eye-opening glimpse into the heretofore murky world of the atomic age. Should be read, not only as an historic novel, but as a viewpoint of the current world-wide precipice. The thought of 10,000 armed and aimed nuclear warheads should scare the hell out of all of us!”

A long commentary
“We have gone on piling weapon upon weapon, missile upon missile, new levels of destructiveness upon old ones. We have done this helplessly, almost involuntarily: like the victims of some sort of hypnotism, like men in a dream, like lemmings heading for the sea . . . . . ” George Kennan 1981

Comments on the novel by R. L. Nelson

A publicist for this hybrid novel would likely be challenged to come up with a zinger of a short cover blurb. He might puzzle over its narrative counterpoint or be uncertain how to convey its intent, and so would resort to a broad-brush promotional such as: “Offbeat twists and turns and a host of colorful characters carry the day in this rollicking saga of the hideous Cold War epoch.” Short touts, though, fall well short of a meaningful entrée into this insightful and busy work. A novel, whose sideline is the morbid issue of nuclear weaponry yet avoids violent hyperactive constructs and well-worn characters typical of the formulaic techno-thriller, is out of the ordinary and invites a closer look. And even after a more lengthy discussion, a reviewer may come away feeling she’d really like to take another crack at it.

This story takes place during two key years of the Cold War, 1955 and 1986. The rambling 1955 part introduces the characters and teases at the main themes, while providing the staging for their dénouements in the second part. Along the way Nike, with sly humor and backlit with flashes of irony, manages to skewer the logic of several real Department of Defense (DoD) missile programs, Scientology, “Professorship,” President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, sports mania, nuclear deterrence. and to toy also with the tortuous machinations of sex and romance. These, however, are second-order matters to the book’s not-so-subtle background theme espoused by associate Professor Richard Hervey: ‘Uranium – Nature’s unforgiving and unforgivable mistake.’

Although The Winged and Garlanded Nike deals accurately with certain real and deadly issues involving Cold War weaponry, it’s a ‘salad of genres’ mixed up and dealt chapter by chapter: Murder mystery? Yes, albeit decades in the past; a slanted documentary into the military-industrial complex; out-of-kilter romance, requited and not quite so; a strong environmental cry symbolically represented by a four-thousand-year old pine tree and an extinct salamander; and historical fragments of two significant years of the Cold War. The novel is character-rich, including those outlandish, nicknamed ones in minor roles: Extra-Virgin Virginia, Heat Wave, Alex Plutonium, Breeder Mannoy, THE Bernadette, and Meriweather, the cockatiel that won’t die.

I’ll term as sentimental realism the feel of story and character in Nike – slightly cockeyed, but realism most certainly. Its narratives portray a convincing historical backdrop as well as a muted sense of horror about the ominous presence of those maximum nuclear weapons. The novel’s approach to the arcane nuclear weapon world is skewed, easy to take, yet it projects a hard edginess illustrated by one character’s pithy observation in 1986: ‘You couldn’t deny technological revolution and evolution, but when you had the ultimate explosion, a megaton, packaged in something your arms could surround, maybe all this tinkering with it and the rest of the hardware over the thirty years amounts to little more than technological busy-work –  a gilding of the bombs and their delivery means.’

In the early 1950’s, when confrontation with the Soviets was heating up, the DoD issued procurement instructions favoring those competing defense companies which dispersed some of their operations away from coastal regions of concentrated industry. It was then a time of great anxiety. America became vulnerable to Soviet developments in strategic weaponry, notably their long-range “Bison” aircraft, carrying the new H-bomb. With the implementation of “Industrial Dispersal,” DoD’s largesse spread over more parts of the country. Just how entrenched and political have variations of this procurement policy is illustrated by a bloody political battle over the proposal to cut back on F-22 fighter production. Most of the fifty states had some sort of contractual stake in its production, thus making any such cuts politically difficult. In S. G. Scott’s novel, a minor character, economist Dr. Norris Deepak, makes the pragmatic and cynical argument in 1955 that selling the growing Pentagon budget in Congress would be politically impossible if multi-year contracts were funneled into a handful of geographic locations. ‘- - but contract the money around the country, into the likes of Utah and Mississippi, and then the DoD budget becomes a politically locked-in entitlement program, its monetary stimulus not unlike that of Social Security.’

Maxtar Missile Systems Division, builder of the realistic SPICA strategic missile, is transplanted from Los Angeles to the invented town of Fernville in the heart of California’s old Gold Rush region. There, the novel’s wicked, witty but documentary peek into the secret defense establishment in the fifties introduces the ongoing theme of "Gold and Uranium – equal in Weight and maybe in Consequence." (Densities of the two elements differ by less than five percent – close enough here for metaphorical merit). Gold signifies greed over a metal with a quite limited utility, and, by inference, humankind’s heavy hand in worldwide environmental devastation; and uranium symbolizes the hideous possibility we don’t talk or think about much these days. Decades after the end of the Cold War we still have several thousand nuclear warheads targeted at Russia (and others?) – and likewise, theirs at us – entrenched weapon bureaucracies that refuse to fade away.

Fernville, with its underpinnings from the state’s Gold Rush times a hundred years earlier, is the fulcrum of Nike. The gold rush in the Sierra Nevada foothills was the most powerful transformative force ever to impact California. Similar to its dynamics were the demographic, environmental and financial effects from the hundreds of billions of dollars – if not trillions – that the Department of Defense pumped into California through defense contracts for over thirty years of the Cold War. The gold rush era led to the frenzied extraction of California’s riches. The “missile rush” produced the opposite – a tidal wave of fortune poured into the state. Fernville’s roots are in the nineteenth-century gold rush, but its twentieth-century sustenance is the “missile rush.”

The Winged and Garlanded Nike is a morally instructive novel, certainly, with its nuclear and environmental themes hinted, sometimes hammered at. Palliated, though, by original story, wit, and lively characterizations, it goes down easily for the reader. In fact, if read as simply a colorful story of life in a small city in California’s Sierra Nevada foothills with its drawn-out murder mystery and several poignant romantic entanglements, it would warrant a passing grade as a slight genre novel. Risk and chance weigh in too as metaphor. The novel’s protagonist, Dick Hervey, hauntingly sums up the inane culture of nuclear weaponry: That given enough time and societal inattention to those remaining arsenals of a nuclear Armageddon, “Probability will eventually speak.” He views uranium with its “bad seed,” the fissionable U235, as the “mother of it all,” and aptly says of the weapon buildup in the fifties decade: “It was like an intractable and fast-dividing bacterium, already beyond human will or ability to control.”

Professor Hervey’s meager published work include 'Politics Around the Atom (Failure by Personality)' and 'Hiroshima (Revising History),' titles that suggest his political lean. Both are discredited in academia and are little read as a conservative, post-McCarthy climate prevailed in 1955 California. John Wickware, whose scholarship is herpetology, is a professor “character” perhaps on the stereotypical side. (depressed, alcoholic, loner, specialist in recondite animals like newts). He antagonizes and embarrasses the college administration by espousing extreme anthropomorphic views. Dick Hervey jokes at him, ‘- - the jealous frog - - the salamander’s sense of humor?’ Wickware’s worry over environmental doom includes despair over humankind’s fooling around with the atom. During a discussion about the “nuclear stranger,” and stimulated by the “evocative lubricant of Hervey’s bourbon,” the professor offers a trenchant but mordant observation: ‘Isn’t it ironic that the physicists’ wonderful nuclear word, “fission”, was stolen right out of cell biology … the multiplication of life. And now the term suggests a means for eliminating it.’ In a discussion about the flawed logic behind the huge weapon buildups, Wickware abruptly interjects a conversation-stopper with, ‘I’ve enough survival problems with newts and the like. Yours looks to be hopeless.’ It’s not surprising that thirty years later, with his wife gone (THE Bernadette) and career over, we find Wickware, in Hervey’s words, ‘holed up, drinking, and listening to Bartok.’

Wickware once took Hervey and his young daughter on a biological field trip. For Clarissa, the only non-boring part of the trip was reading Burma Shave signs along the highway. They venture to California’s remote bristlecone pine forest, the earth’s oldest living things. With help from a little brandy, Wickware and Hervey ponder whether these same trees, already four-thousand years old, might outlive the human race now recklessly pursuing out-sized nuclear weaponry. The author’s touch is oblique, skeptical and droll, whether addressing thirty-year affairs of the heart, environmental degradation, nukes, or a zany, lifelong gambling adventure.

Nike’s cast of ten or so major characters are introduced in 1955 when, after a drunken party, they witness an atmospheric nuclear bomb test conducted at dawn at the Nevada Test Site 200 miles away, its flash and aurora easily seen over the mountains from Fernville. Their lives’ orbits cross then, ‘a kind of nodal point,’ as they will again thirty years later at another. This nuclear “hook” is re-introduced in a flashback when, as soldiers, Hervey and future nephew and aspiring nuclear physicist, Howie Stadler, witness the first atomic test in New Mexico in 1945. Hervey first sees the uncanny flash as a ‘three-second persuasion’ that teaches him everything about the nuclear stranger. But on further reflection, he realizes that ... ‘no, it was not even three seconds, but was no longer than the instantaneous flash of that first atomic fire.’ For Stadler, next to him in the bunker, ‘the brightness went to his intellectual heart and he saw, not terror and annihilation, but an exciting future romancing the atom.’

The author veers close to parody in several of the narratives which carry over from 1955 to their tidy conclusions in1986. A ruinous betting scam at Maxtar - that ‘solved’ thirty-five year old murder - a surreal college football game played during a hundred-year rainstorm - “Probability” subverted by a roulette wheel - and other zany doings – all would seem to cloud the reality lens that the bulk of the novel urges us to look through. Such constructs are not grafted-on extraneous plots or textual paddings. If we persevere, we will see them as realities at the margin, and as the various plots work their way toward the novel’s end, they nicely fit into a kind of master puzzle, like those few remaining pieces in a jigsaw that suddenly complete the whole. Several matters, however, will remain as loose ends; one involves the vagaries of sex and romance, tentative and insecure anyway; and “Uranium,” Hervey’s deep-seated symbol of the world of nuclear weaponry, hangs yet as the nuclear sword of Damocles.

Alice Smith, spirited, alcoholic, erratic, and the wife of Maxtar’s CEO, is one character of whom the reader might readily think: “Yes, I know a woman like that,” perhaps suggesting someone flamboyant and special. Stereotypes? Fictional beings can’t avoid being pigeon-holed to some degree by the reader. The author deliberately defuses the matter early on by having Alice Smith, neophyte author who uses Fernville and its denizens in her first murder mystery, declare about the matter: ‘You, Hervey, and Wickware too, and even Fernville itself – you’re all stereotypes. That’s what I must overcome.” Refreshingly, few psychological issues or the details of messy interpersonal relationships burden the pages, even though we know they are being experienced. The author deliberately underdetermines character, and whatever interiority the reader reads into the characters comes mostly through the suggestive natures of dialogue and plot. And so we ride the surfaces of the characters, yet we can feel the pain when young, unworldly, and introverted missile engineer, Arthur Sonett, is dumped by his nubile girlfriend, Clarissa Hervey, a clerk at the company, and described by a co-worker as, “nice legs, tits - - and not bad in the face,” 1955 guy talk, to be sure. Sonett’s emotional disaster is especially poignant considering that he was that close to his first sexual experience and to delivering a subsequent marriage proposal, but instead ended up around a group campfire ‘- - with aching balls, mouthing words to old songs – funny how Clarissa didn’t seem to mind at all.’ And we are led to suspect that more is yet to come from this callow couple. Such a back-story turns out to be pertinent to the thrust of the novel, as Nike juggles and juxtaposes narrative threads.

One of the post-war’s earliest defensive missiles was the Army’s Nike Ajax, developed in the forties and early fifties. Its publicity material featured the figure of the winged and garlanded Nike, Greek Goddess of Victory, underscored with the puzzling slogan, “She not only Thinks but She Dreams.” That is the source of the novel’s expressive title and cover art. The Nike missile becomes a symbol in the novel for thirty years of futility, waste and hubris in the realm of defensive missile weaponry during the height of the Cold War. The Nike Ajax was the precursor of a series of flawed defensive missiles and programs that extended into the seventies (i.e., Nike Hercules, Nike X, Sentinel, Safeguard, Nike Zeus, and the Sprint and Spartan missiles, the latter tipped with a five megaton nuclear payload!) It took over two decades to kill off Nike Ajax and its nuclear-tipped descendants as all were finally recognized as ineffective against the perceived threat of thousands of modern Soviet missiles. But their rationales, though hopelessly flawed, never quite received a political stake through the heart. This fallacious thinking was resurrected in the eighties by President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, dubbed “Star Wars,” a derogatory tag appropriate for the proposed costly, vast, and unworkable scheme. Throughout this period the U.S. and the Soviets played an escalating nuclear weapon chess game which became increasingly arcane as thousands of missiles with nuclear warheads were placed on alert. “- - - Nuclear Strategy had become the stuff of a living dream world,” an apt quote in the novel’s introduction, taken from Fred Kaplan’s book. 'The Wizards of Armageddon'.

Nike addresses this nuclear posturing in a dramatic and realistic episode, by drawing on an actual agenda of a conference of nuclear and atmospheric scientists in1986 concerning the possible effects of a ‘Nuclear Winter.’ It is a far more chilling episode than one might experience from that in a genre novel because it highlights a numbing disconnect between the depicted horrors of all-out nuclear war and the utterly detached and banal demeanor of the scientists who deliver presentations about it. (“They were just coming up with the numbers,” one explains). Again, an offbeat, dramatic and humorous event occurs, an excoriating intrusion into the assembly that rescues us from more nuclear messaging and leaves the scientists short the light pointer, the slide projector, the microphone, and the podium itself, without which … “they were just helpless up there.”

In an historical missile display, an old Nike missile is placed on a hill above Fernville. It is both a real and a symbolic icon, and is where the two star-crossed lovers, Arthur Sonett and Clarissa Hervey, reunite after thirty years. Sonett, drawn more strongly to the moonlit missile than to the woman next to him, sees the Nike not only for its failure of purpose but also as representing his long, misguided career in the weapon culture of the Cold War. Now, he thinks, ‘Boy Scouts and casual visitors look with some awe at the Nike relic, few realizing its concept was rendered obsolete even as it was being developed.’ But that’s not the last of that missile in these pages. At the very end Dick Hervey sees it in the reflected setting sun. He thinks that the ‘likes of Nike must no longer be worshipped as monuments, but rather consigned without sentiment to the large scrap heap of military folly and hubris – and then he would see Goddess Nike where she belonged – in a museum – and winged and garlanded as before.’ A fitting end, indeed, for this moral adventure, and a frustrated outcry at our nuclear-weaponed world of today.

We’ve bypassed here most of the secondary and entertaining narratives which serve in supporting roles. Some readers might catch allusions to eighteenth century English literature, specifically to Samuel Richardson’s novel 'Clarissa'. The author not only lifts names from that novel (‘My uncle Hervey’ and ‘Clarissa’) but also makes use of Richardson’s epistolary technique in the Intermezzo section of the novel, where Hervey and Alice communicate by short letters or notes over thirty years. These apprise us of Fernville’s physical changes (and by projection also California’s) and its characters’ lives. Finally, an elderly Dick Hervey, exhausted by his Sisyphean battle with the nuclear genie, wonders whether he might instead return to his literary roots and write a revision to the classic tragedy that would bring a happy ending rather than Clarissa’s sad and untimely death. He smiles at the prospect of the tailing off of his academic scholarship … from Hiroshima, Revisited to 'Clarissa', revised.’

Toward the end of the 1955 part, Hervey and Alice attend an opera, Die Frau ohne Schotten (The Woman without a Shadow) where he struggles with the realization that the shooting star of an affair with Alice has burned out, and soon she would be ‘a shadow without a woman – a long and lingering one.’ They meet later in a final tryst in “romantic” Bakersfield, California. The author slyly tells us little of this encounter, only that it began with celebratory double martinis, and implying later that they ceased writing to each other for two years! Knowing the volatile nature of these two, we can readily infer that a ferocious lover’s quarrel ensued, perhaps with objects hurled. The author’s hands-off here follows Alice’stricture on sex and mayhem in her mystery novels: ‘- - behind closed doors – trusting them to the readers’ fertile imaginations over the writer’s graphic effusions,’ a disappointment for some readers, but fresh air, certainly, for many others. During the opera Hervey, in his cramped seat, works over the other matter weighing on his mind – the lecture he will deliver the next day about the uranium extravaganza. His key point, he at once realizes, will be: that the exculpable credo expressed by several of the early atomic scientists – “Atomic weapons were not only arms of terrible destructive power, but, more than that, they were also SUPER PHYSICS!” – was the tap root of the nuclear blunder!

Nike may prove troublesome as a dilatory read. Rather, it wants the reader to get into and stay with it. Laying the groundwork for of its several plots and many characters could frustrate the impatient reader who is conditioned for the immediate hook and action. And a reader who dabbles over the book will likely remain off balance, if indeed she finishes it at all. When the characters are in place for the patient reader, though, the novel turns into a bit of a romp. If the technical diversions or 1955 political matters begin to burden, Nike shifts gears, for example, to a wild Halloween party where croaking bullfrogs and shrieks of Howler monkeys blast out over an early “hi fi” system; or to a Las Vegas casino where a fortune is lost just as the casino shakes from the nuclear blast waves from the nearby Nevada Test Site (‘coursing over the desert like invisible tsunami waves’); or even to a bawdy scene in a seedy bordello across the border.

The difficult issues addressed in Nike remain unresolved. Those relationships doomed to fail by definition, do so. The romance of Hervey and Alice was always so destined through the practical and insurmountable differences of temperament, age and status. Arthur Sonett, a late-comer to maturity, sees the forty-nine-year-old Clarissa through separate conflicting lenses: one of riveting erotic memories from his hot-blooded youth thirty years before; the other from his cooled-down age of fifty-seven as he regards her array of cats and the library of New Age Self Help he spots from her bed. We don’t know, and neither does he yet, how compelling is his observation that her naked body, now before him, compares favorably with the nineteen-year-old-one of thirty-years before, which then he could only imagine a hundred times over. Will he return to Fernville – to Clarissa? The bets are on: Dave Cornwell, the master gambler, gives fifty-fifty he won’t, while Hervey, bitterly claiming he’s the ‘authority on love,’ bets two to one that he will. Uncertainty, again, applies to the ongoing murder mystery, a lightweight variation of the common and resolving genre. Its thread in the novel serves as a means to explore Fernville’s earlier times and to keep several colorful characters in view.

As the media today serve up more celebrity, sex and sports, the public seems to grow increasingly numb to the grave and seemingly intractable nuclear weapon issues still with us since 1945. The Winged and Garlanded Nike, in its long, winding, and quirky path into the heart of the nuclear genie, might sway or even frighten a few of that indifferent public to acknowledge the lurking disaster still with us after over a half century of hiding from them in plain view.

At the novel’s end in 1986, Dick Hervey, observes the old Nike Ajax missile on the distant hill, still revered by some. He sees it, though, as a relic from the time when the hand of uranium rendered it and other such exotic defensive weapon concepts obsolete. Hervey carries that thought further, and in a burst of optimism over the issue of the millennium, he thinks: ‘Surely, by the twenty-first-century, even the most myopic of humans will have finally comprehended the overriding peril threatened by uranium and its offspring – and humanity will then have them under a tight and controlling leash.’

The novel, however, does not end on Dick Hervey’s sanguine expectation of a coming nuclear sanity. Instead, the author subverts the old curmudgeon’s exhausting, half-century struggle with the nuclear genie, pulls the rug out and has the last word – author’s prerogative, we guess. The non-fiction Epilogue simply lists terse and real headlines from newspapers and pertinent quotations published since the turn into the twenty-first century. And there is little reason for optimism seen there. The litany of scary quotes, specific to worsening nuclear matters, builds up to the last two; the pessimistic advance of the minute hand on the Doomsday Clock’s pictured in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists – and lastly a quote from the late Philip Berrigan, former priest and anti-nuclear activist, that goes directly to the agonizing heart of the matter:

“I die with the conviction held since 1968 … that nuclear weapons are the scourge of the earth; to mine for them, manufacture them, deploy them, use them, is a curse against God, the human family and the Earth itself.”

It is a perfect exclamation point to The Winged and Garlanded Nike.


            
A note from the commentator

Above are my comments about the novel, The Winged and Garlanded Nike (A novel of the atomic age) by S. G. Scott. To my knowledge, no one has written a novel about the major impacts on the environment, the demographics and at the human level, owing to the defense industry's buildup and its influence over forty years of the Cold War. These effects were especially pronounced in California, where the novel is set. Having worked for many years as a defense-industry technical writer and editor, I was intrigued by this one-of-a kind novel which, so graphically brought to life my experiences in the classified recesses of the missile industry. I quickly realized that the novel is much more than an entertaining, if offbeat telling, of the period’s life and times. With its many facets and broad scope, it has much to say and will appeal to a broad range of readers. My comments about Nike grew long because anything less would short-change the novel’s essence, which speaks through its multiplots, its ingratiating characters and its two overriding themes: those of the nuclear genie let loose and our myopic mistreatment of the earth’s sensitive environment.

S. G. Scott and I both spent many years in the defense/missile industry and are longtime friends. We both chose to quit that secret for reasons that the novel may well illustrate – I, to develop educational programs, and Scott to a career at N.A.S.A. and authorship. I have tried to stand aside from our relationship in commenting on this novel which, besides its immensely entertaining novelistic features, has vital relevance to today’s unstable world.

Robert L. Nelson  (650-349-2195)

     For copy information:   scottbird9@sbcglobal.net    650-325-0279