Oppenheimer Alternative

The Oppenheimer Alternative is a science fiction novel by the Canadian writer Robert J. Sawyer, published in June 2020 in Canada by Red Deer Press and in the United States by CAEZIK SF and Fantasy. It was nominated for the Aurora Award for Best Novel.

The book follows J. Robert Oppenheimer's part in the Manhattan Project during the Second World War and his security clearance hearings in the middle of the 1950s. Sawyer states that many of the events described are factual and that most of the characters are dramatisations of real people, among them Albert Einstein, Hans Bethe, Edward Teller, Enrico Fermi, Leo Szilard and Wernher von Braun.

The fictional element is a discovery that the core of the Sun is unstable and will shed its outer layer in the late 2020s, engulfing the inner Solar System, Earth included. Oppenheimer and the physicists who built the bomb therefore have to decide what to do with a piece of knowledge that nobody can afford to ignore, and the novel appeared seventy-five years after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.