Weekly Short Story Review: The Pacific Mystery by Stephen Baxter

I read British science fiction writer Stephen Baxter's short story The Pacific Mystery from the anthology The Mammoth Book of Extreme Science Fiction (Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2006) that I bought a few years ago from Books-a-Million, which featured (at least back then) a barrage of different Mammoth books containing short pieces from just about every genre of fiction...and even some nonfiction.  Baxter's contribution of The Pacific Mystery in Mammoth was surprisingly the first-time publication of this very intriguing story of alternate (or if you prefer, alternative) history...

Alternate history fiction delves into what might have happened if a crucial turning point in history had gone a different way, such as the South winning the U.S. Civil War or the Axis powers being triumphant in World War II.  The latter scenario was the backdrop of Philip K. Dick's alternate history masterpiece The Man in the High Castle...and it also underpins The Pacific Mystery.  But Stephen Baxter's story explains that the "bad guys" win because of a phenomenon that we in our own real world do not have: an endless Pacific Ocean...

When I was a little kid first learning about geography (and I was a fanatical map reader), I easily picked up on the duality of the vast Atlantic Ocean being on the eastern shores of the United States and the vast Pacific Ocean being on its west side.  Also, being a frequent visitor back then with my family in South Florida to the beach (first Haulover in 1958-60 and then Hollywood during the 60s and 70s), I internalized the idea of the "endless sea" by looking out at the distance over the Atlantic.  Yet in truth, the Atlantic Ocean, if you hold up a globe of our Earth, takes up a relatively small surface area while it's possible, if you look at that globe from the correct angle, to see the Pacific Ocean as occupying nearly half of it!  It is this monumental size of the Pacific, along with the strange two disjoint combat theaters of World War II, with the Japanese in the Pacific and the Germans in the Atlantic, that probably inspired Stephen Baxter to conjecture how the conflict might have turned out had the Pacific not just seemed "endless"...but actually was...

An advanced nuclear-powered airborne aircraft carrier takes off in the late 1940s from Nazi London and heads eastward, across Eurasia and out over the depths of the Pacific in search of America...kind of like a reverse Columbus.  It is this journey, recorded in a diary by British journalist Bliss Stirling, that forms the plot of The Pacific Mystery.  This story could well have been lengthened into novel form for the possibilities within it, but keeping it short like this, in my opinion, made its premise...and the probable explanation for the great mystery revealed at the end...much more impactful and memorable.  It has been one of my favorite short stories for several years...