Back in the late 1980s, a friend of mine who worked for HM Customs & Excise (now HMRC) went to Moscow as part of an EU delegation to talk to the Soviets about harmonising trade tariffs. This was a part of Mikhail Gorbachev's long-term plan to position the Soviet Union to join the European Union, in furtherance of his soft power policy of promoting "our common European home". This in turn was shown to be possible because of the umbrage the West Germans took over the NATO exercise Able Archer, which the Soviets interpreted as a Cuba-style attempt to place nuclear missiles on German territory, and which the Germans saw as an attempt by America to keep a nuclear war off their doorstep. Having been bombed almost back to the Stone Age a generation before, they were rather upset at a proposal that might see it happening again, only this time much more permanently. Gorbachev saw this opportunity and was prepared to take it. However, his opponents within the Soviet establishment weren't prepared to wait that long, saw it as a personal threat to their own positions, and acted accordingly. The rest really is history.

Norman Spinrad was working on this novel, taking those events forward into the near future, at the time that the entire balance of world power was changing. He started writing it in 1988; by the time it was published in 1991, the August Coup had happened and the book was (so he thought) obsolete.

Reading it some thirty years later, at about the time that the book was set, I'm not so sure. America has descended further and further into authoritarianism, diverting massive sums of money into the military-industrial complex and taking increasingly repressive measures to stifle dissent and opposition at home. Americans need exit visas to travel outside the country. The nation has been involved in a number of counter-insurgency wars in Latin America and is quite prepared to deploy force to bring about regime change in countries such as Mexico. Meanwhile, exotic weaponry has been deployed into low earth orbit under the general project title of 'Battlestar America'.

Meanwhile, the Soviet Union has become much more commercialised, with many more freedoms for its people - free elections with a choice of candidates, the streets of Moscow bright with Western multi-national storefronts, and a major Russian trading company, Red Star, operating in Western Europe, trading in raw materials in one direction and consumer goods in the other. There are no shortages and Russia holds its head high in international relations. In space, the Russians were first to Mars, have a permanent base on the Moon and a number of permanent space stations - Cosmograds - in orbit. There are Russian sub-orbital passenger liners - Concordskis - monopolising intercontinental travel, except to North America.

Europe is Common Europe, pretty well the same as now, save that the European Space Agency (ESA) is a major player in space industries. The novel concerns the story of one Jerry Reed, born 1965, who was captivated by the Apollo landings as a child and grew up with a vision of space travel. He devoted his life to aeronautical and astronautical engineering; but all the Americans are interested in is getting him to design missile platforms. He would sooner beat his swords into ploughshares and adapt those designs for civilian and exploratory use, but there is no interest in that. And so he accepts an offer to go to work for the ESA, even though it means turning his back on a country he loves, for once he has left America, he will not be allowed back and indeed will be considered a traitor. This substantial novel is his story, told through the eyes of his family and their involvement with the politics of spaceflight and international affairs.

After all that, i have to say that I found the book to be a sorry mess. The first 120 pages consist of Jerry Reed's departure from America and his decision to take up the ESA's job offer. The ESA throw money at him in a way which I find difficult to credit, and he, and his girlfriend, an equally driven Russian who uses her position working for Red Star to live the high life in the west, playing the tourist, travelling all around Europe on the ESA's expense account for what seems like ages, and having a lot of rampant sex along the way. (There is a lot of sex in this book. This may have been shocking and controversial back when Spinrad wrote Bug Jack Barron in 1969; now, it's treated as commonplace and indeed even becomes just a little boring. And very nearly all heterosexual, as well.)

Spinrad's vision of Europe is very much the tourist's. Reed's French ESA colleagues are all stereotypes, and you wouldn't know that the ESA has anything much to do with Germany, as it does in real life. Common Europe has no immigration issues or social problems, it has apparently seamlessly absorbed Switzerland and Norway, and for some reason everything centres around Strasbourg when we're not sitting in Parisian pavement cafés. I did boggle a bit when the ESA offered Reed healthcare on his contract - as all of continental Europe has perfectly adequate socialised healthcare, this is not a feature of ESA employment contracts in the real world. It would have been a nicer touch if Reed had had to ask for it as a US citizen.

Of course, there has been no 9/11, no Iraq wars, no al-Qaeda or Afghan adventures (Spinrad seems to have overlooked the Russians' war in Afghanistan, and unrest in the Caucasus is only vaguely hinted at) and Saddam Hussein only gets a name check. The author is silent on the subject of Israel.

There is a lot he gets right; his Russia is essentially ours, though with added Politburo and a less strong leader who has to balance political machinations at home. And in the latter third of the novel, pressure rises amongst various unrepresented peoples across Europe - Basques, Scots, Welsh, Slovaks, Bavarians and Ukrainians, to name but a few, and the crisis at the end of the novel is precipitated when the Ukrainian SSR elects a president who was a comedy star before getting into politics by accident. Life imitates art. And America? Five years ago, a reading of Spinrad's depiction of jingoistic, bigoted Gringo America would have looked like overcooked, broad-brush satire from the writer of The Iron Dream and Bug Jack Barron. Now? In many ways, Trump's America looks more extreme, more detached from reality than Spinrad's. And in the course of the story, when Reed's son (born and brought up in Paris) hitches across the Midwest to find himself and the real America, he discovers what really makes America great - the warmth of the people and their underlying generosity of spirit, though Spinrad's vision of the media landscape still seems rooted in the manipulation he wrote about in the 1960s rather than the embrace of fantasy and mistruth in the real 2020.

Like so many novels of this era, the technology remains stuck in the 1980s; no mobile phones, Internet or large-scale miniaturisation. The space technology is way in advance of what we have in the real world, though there is nothing in the novel that would be technically impossible, just politically impossible. And the ending of the novel descends into a breadth of vision that is tinged with sentimentality. Reed's son has a sentimental streak a mile wide for America, and Spinrad wraps himself and his characters in the Stars and Stripes at regular intervals. The Russians are no less sentimental for their own national iconography, but at least they are portrayed honestly, their own personal and national ambitions shown to be no less valid than the Americans'.

It's a thick, dense novel to get through - around 650 pages - and given that we have to acknowledge it as representing what is now an alternate history, it might be seen as a curiosity now. But the picture of world politics, albeit a US-centric one, is remarkable for how much prescience Spinrad shows, if only accidentally. But I was ready to give up by the time Reed accepted the ESA job, as there was little in the first 120 pages that was new to me and a lot that looked like a tourist's eye view only. Definitely a product of its times. ( )