Missile Gap
2005 novella by Charles Stross
"Missile Gap" is a 2006 English language science fiction novella, originally published in the anthology One Million A.D. 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.
Plot
On 2 October 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 (give or take 100,000 to 200,000 years). In the sky, the stars of the Milky Way are reddened and metal-depleted, evidence that it is now controlled by a Type-III civilisation capable of controlling the resources of an entire galaxy. Three theories for the change are suggested within the novella:
the atoms making up the surface and people of Earth have somehow peeled off the Earth and shipped to a new location.
Marvin Minsky suggests that a snapshot of the world was taken and the snapshot has been used as the basis for a physical recreation.
Hans Moravec suggests that a snapshot of the world was taken and the snapshot has been used as the basis for a simulated reality.
The first hypothesis would indicate that the characters of the book are the original humans of the 20th century Earth.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Missile Gap” as 2005 novella by Charles Stross. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as 2005 novella by Charles Stross. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 3, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6878266. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2006, 2009 and 1962.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Missile Gap” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.