First Cosmic Velocity is a bizarre and wonderful book that tells us the story of the Russian cosmonauts, but not really. Imagine that the scientists could not quite get that reentry thing to work. Knowing what happens to people who fail in Stalin’s Soviet Union, the leaders of the project conceived of an audacious fraud, recruiting identical twins who would grow up to be cosmonauts, one to die in space, the other to tour and talk about what it was like in space after the flight.

The story focuses on Leonid whose brother has just been sent into space. Interstitial chapters tell the story of his childhood and how he and his brother came to be part of the project. He is closest to Nadya, the first to “go into space” and the only one who was trained to do so, but her sister was sent in her place.

During the tour after Leonid’s successful “flight”, Khruschev suggests that his dog go on the next trip along with the beloved Kasha, a dog descended from the dog the Leonids brought from their village. While on tour, Nadya and Leonid set themselves the task of finding “twins” for the dogs.

I loved First Cosmic Velocity even though I sometimes wondered where it was going. It is just such an original story. What is odd, though, is I can see this as a funny camp movie, but reading it, the tragic sense of life seems uppermost. How I visualize the story and how I feel it while reading it is so disparate, something I cannot explain. I think this is on me, though, not on Zach Powers.

This book defies classification. There is the satiric takedown of the bureaucratic brutality of Stalinism, such as the man who resents not getting a much-deserved promotion but realizing that the promotion would get him sent to the gulag. There is the complicated relationships of the Chief Designer, the General Designer, and Ignatius, the KGB handler. There is a bit of romance. In a way, it makes me think of the magical realism in how Powers presents truths through the absurd. It carries a lot in its 300 pages.

First Cosmic Velocity will be released August 6th. I received an ARC from the publisher through Shelf Awareness.