"Missile Gap" is a 2006 English language science fiction novella, originally published in the anthology One Million AD. by British author Charles Stross. It won the Locus Award for best novella of 2006. The novella was republished in Stross's short-story collection Wireless in 2009. On October 2, 1962, the universe underwent a change - instantly, the continents of the Earth were no longer wrapped onto a spherical planet but were on the surface of an Alderson disk. Measurements on Cepheid variable stars indicate that the Alderson disk is located in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud, and that the... epoch is roughly 800,000 years later than the calendar date . In the sky, the stars of the Milky Way are reddened and metal-depleted, evidence that it is now controlled by a Type-III civilization capable of controlling the resources of an entire galaxy. Three theories for the change are suggested within the novella: The first hypothesis would indicate that the characters of the book are the original humans of the 20th century Earth.
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