Astonishing alternative present circa 1962, foregoing technological concerns in favor of the tangled social and political consequences of Axis success in WW2, the no-longer-united-States divided between Germany and Japan. Sparkling with a compelling spectrum of very human characters, strange cross-cultural insights, the moral un-compassing of choosing between all-bad-political options, and Pynchonesque mysticism and death-fetishization. Stylistically fluid and tightly, economically arranged, saner and more controlled than expected (despite a few deliciously insane sequences), consistently fascinating.