First let me say, this book will not be for everyone. But for those that get it - man, what a wonderful story this is! I couldn't put it down, read it in a day and now regret that I consumed it so fast!

It begins with a man driving through the city, seeing a homeless man on the street and stopping to give a helping hand. It turns out that he knows this homeless man and so he brings him home. After a bit of time, the homeless man begins to tell his old friend about his life and from there, the whole story is flipped on its side.

See, this old friend worked at Area 51 in his youth. And he's got some interesting tales to tell.

The story bounces around through time. There are multiple POV's which are sometimes misleading. I felt a bit like a magician was performing a slight of hand trick on me at times and marveled at the effect once I caught on.

There were several times where I felt overwhelming emotions from the story and had to stop and take a breath to get my feet under me again. So many times where I laughed out loud and then wondered if the author meant that passage as sarcasm or if there was a different message altogether he was trying to impart that skimmed just over my head.

If you, your sibling or your child have ever had an imaginary friend, you will find this even more deeply emotional.

At the heart of this 'alien' story is Love. Love in all its forms. Love from one human to another, from a child-self to adult-self, from one species to another, love for life, love for knowledge, love for humility, and on and on. But that in no way describes this tale.

The best I can offer is that this strange, beautiful, humorous, confusing, fantastic sci-fi/mystery/love story/literary fiction is a must read!

And upon finishing the last page, I immediately wanted to start again to capture all the nuances I know I must have missed the first time through!

Published by Tachyon Publications on February 8, 2022

Patrick O’Leary has a day job. At one point, he worked for Steve Jobs. Prior to 51, his most recent novel was published almost twenty years ago. His first two, Door Number Three and The Gift, are wildly imaginative, although The Gift is more fantasy than science fiction. O’Leary says it took him sixteen years to write 51 (and even longer to write The Gift). He’s produced some short fiction in the interim, but not all that much. O’Leary is deservedly proud that Harlan Ellison called him science fiction’s J.D. Salinger.

Speaking of imaginative. Remember the imaginary friend you had when you were a little kid? You probably can’t remember any details about your friend, but the friend was real. Every imaginary friend (IF) is real. We imagine them into existence. They make us forget them as we grow older, yet they exist for the sole purpose of having people believe in them. They exist because children need them. They provide comfort, inspiration, love. They help children fight their fears when they are most vulnerable. They disappear when we no longer need them. Or they did before things changed. For the last several decades, our IFs have continued to exist, invisibly, living in closets, long after we forget them. That’s a clever premise.

It’s not just IFs we forget. Forgetting is one of the novel’s themes. We forget the Native American tribes that were wiped out to expand white America. We forget the slave labor that built white America. We forget the bombs that have been dropped, the wild animals that have been caged, the democracies that have been toppled, the species we made extinct. Our IFs are invisible because so much is invisible that we can’t see what we’ve become — or so one of the IFs tells a character named Nuke.

Alcoholism is another prominent theme, related to the theme of memory and its loss. Alcoholics often drink to forget. To forget how to feel pain. To endure a personal tragedy that friends have barely noticed until “not one of your friends, colleagues, or drinking buddies can recognize the man you’ve become.”

The IFs aren’t in the closet during most of the novel’s time frame (mid-1950s to 2019). They’re in Area 51, where they’re washed and stored and become the subject of experiments. Winston Koop begins working at the base in 1972 and quickly spots an equation on a blackboard, an equation that accidentally made a door to a place called “the Anywhere.” Scientists don’t know how to close the door. Koop is one of the few who understands the equation. He’s also one of the few who can retain a memory of the IFs he sees at the base. To Koop they look like kids in nightgowns. To others they look like white cats. Their true form is something different. They are masters of camouflage.

The door and the atom bomb have something to do with why IFs no longer fade out of existence when the children who imagine them grow up. Now everyone sees them but nearly everyone instantly forgets seeing them. At Area 51, they help the defense establishment create advanced weaponry. In exchange, one of their number (nicknamed The Pope) is put in charge of the portal and allowed to set a certain number of IFs free each year.

Koop’s job eventually evolves. He learns how to make others forget. He’s responsible for security, for making sure that nobody with knowledge of Area 51 remembers. Sometimes they need to die to make that happen.

The narrator, Adam “Nuke” Pagnucco, was a college friend of Koop. Nuke was the best man at Koop’s wedding. Nuke has forgotten the wedding. He’s forgotten Koop. The forgetting was Koop’s doing. Nuke starts to remember him after a chance encounter in 2018. At that point they are both 73, “long past our denials and excuses.” Koop fills Nuke in on forgotten details before enlisting him in a mission — to close the door. And there’s your plot, although it makes multiple detours on a nonlinear path before it finally zeroes on its destination.

In addition to its creative exploration of intriguing themes, 51 is notable for its unpredictable moments. Some are funny (the Pope’s interactions with American presidents are priceless). Others are poignant. All are surprising and a few are downright weird. They give the plot an offbeat, unbalanced, ever-changing rhythm. The story is a bit more muddled and a bit less amazing than Door Number Three, but it is similar in its complex structure. Both novels probably merit a second reading to fully understand their meaning.

The appearance of 51 gives me hope that O’Leary will retire from his day job (if he hasn’t already) and pull other projects off the shelf, or create new ones, without making us wait another twenty years for a finished product. O’Leary has a story-telling perspective that is uniquely his own. I’m grateful that he shared that perspective again in 51.

RECOMMENDED

Instead of Men in Black there’s just one black man tasked with keeping the government’s biggest secret, that the infamous Roswell incident was NOT a badly covered up alien crash landing on Earth. Instead, the incident was itself a well-conceived coverup of something much more dangerous. Experiments at Area 51 have opened a door into the multiverse, and the government has spent decades covering up their illegal experiments on the beings from the other side - and the resulting technical advances that have been gleaned as a result. Winston Koop’s job is to make people forget they know anything about anything the government doesn’t want remembered. But he’s an old man now, and his misdeeds are wearing him down. It’s time for atonement. All he needs to do is tell his best friend a story that Winston has made him forget so they can ride to the rescue in one last hurrah.

VERDICT: This is a story that can be read in any number of ways, as science fiction exploring the multiverse, as fantasy dealing with creatures of the imagination made real, as commentary on how badly humans treat each other and everyone else, as a bit of political satire, as an over-the-hill-gang rides again, and an exploration of the human psyche and just how badly we all need to be seen and understood. Or all of the above. Recommended for readers of philosophically and psychologically bent SF.

The Men in Black on acid

Wow, I can't even begin to describe this book other than it's unique, hilarious, and well worth reading.

Highly recommended if you have a warped personality.

I received this book from Tachyon Publishing through Net Galley in the hopes that I would read it and leave an unbiased review.

There is no one good way to describe Patrick O'Leary's new novel, 51, just as there was no one good way for O'Leary to tell the story itself. Between Lavie Tidhar's THE ESCAPEMENT and this novel, I've had an interesting time getting my head around stories recently. 51 defies a reviewer to say "51 is this meets that". It's more like "51 is this meets that meets the other thing meets something else", and even that's simplifying the issue.

People have been fascinated for decades about Area 51. The U.S government runs an Air Force facility at Area 51, and its operations are not made public. From Wikipedia, "The base has never been declared a secret base, but all research and occurrences in Area 51 are Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information". This has led the general public to believe that the government is hiding the existence of aliens and UFOs there. Which brings us to the story of 51.

In 51, O'Leary posits that the story of aliens and UFOs is itself a cover up for something more sinister and frightening. Yes, there's a conspiracy going on there, something secret and foreboding. But it's something different that we've ever seen before - at least that I've ever
seen before. And the cover up has been going on for decades.

The story starts off with Nuke (Adam Pagnucco) driving home from an AA meeting in a brutal winter snowstorm. He encounters an old homeless guy on the road, and, in an act of humanitarianism, pulls over to get him out of the cold. As they talk, Nuke realizes that it's his old college buddy Winston Koop. Nuke takes him home, cleans him up, and in return Koop begins to tell him the most bizarre story about Imaginary
Friends. Imaginary Friends that came through a portal called the Door to Anywhere that opened up, most likely, at the site of the Trinity nuclear bomb test back in the neighborhood of World War II.

And that's just the start of it. Koop's story is woven back and forth through time, back to the 1940s, of course, through the present day across a number of varied locations. The story is told in a non-linear fashion, jumping around in a seemingly nonsensical way but which ends up supporting the weirdness of the tale itself.

And the tale is indeed strange. Koop is hired - more like selected - by the government to erase the memories of people who have encountered IFs (Imaginary Friends) by a process that apparently was taught to him by his own IF (see what I mean about this being strange?). Every U.S. President is told about the Door to Anywhere, of course, and Koop is present at every one of these meetings (it should be pointed out that an IF is along for the ride to actually make the revelation to the President) because, after all, he needs to make the President forget
about it.

No, we're not done yet.

There's something else going on here, involving Koop, Nuke, and Koop's ex-wife and getting the IFs back to where they belong and closing the portal behind them. But of course there's more to it than that, and to say any more would be spoiling it (And no, what I've written here so far doesn't even scratch the surface of what's going on, so I'm not spoiling much of anything - trust me).

O'Leary packs a lot into this relatively short novel, but it doesn't feel rushed or cramped in anyway. He also finds time to make this a story of friendship and growing old, among other things. Koop and Nuke are in their 70s at the time of the story, and yet the two of them, loyal to each other, go on one last adventure together to save humanity. We all should have someone like Koop and Nuke have each other, to tell weird stories to and have adventures with. I'd like to think that those stories and adventures would be just as weird as the tale O'Leary tells us in 51. I think I would like to live that kind of life.

My thanks to NetGallery and the publisher Tachyon Publications for an advanced copy of this science fiction novel.

Sometimes a book exceeds every expectation that you have for it. Patrick O'Leary in his book 51 surprises amazes, confuses, delights, scares, awes and makes the reader question everything from the last chapter to the next, with a skill that has been missing for quite a while in science fiction and fantasy. Maybe it is the time that this book took to create, Mr. O'Leary mentions this in the end notes. This book is so good, so full of ideas that at the end the reader not only wants to start again and see where and how everything fits, but asks how do I hook this book right into my veins.

A man, Adam, coming from a regular meeting at AA stops to be a good Samaritan to a poor guy who falls in the street in front of his car. Adam is surprised to find that he knows this man, Kopp, who he lost touch with years ago. He thinks. Bounding over their previous problems with alcohol and failure, Kopp starts to tell a tale of his life. And things get weird.

This book is crazy in the best of ways. The story seeps out, and what seems at the beginning to be possibly a been there read that book about little green men at Area 51 in Groom Lake, becomes something more. An amalgamation of the Invaders, Cthulu and every possible conspiracy featured on The X-Files as directed by David Lynch and Christopher Nolan, in black and white, and music by the Velvet Underground and the Flaming Lips remixed by Harry Partch.

The book has narrative flips, untrustworthy narrators, POV changes, art, science, math, passages on the unique sadness on alcoholism and why people need addiction, failed dreams, love, imaginary friends, the price that children pay because of adult failure, and much more. I could tell more of the plot, but why take the beauty of this book away from future readers. If books that make you think, and take you by surprise, in a good way, are rare and wanted in your life, try this one. Just give it time, and if you start to go I don't get this, you won't in the beginning, Maybe not even at the end. However it is a great trip to take.

I've not read anything else by Mr. O'Leary, but I plan to remedy that. This book is perfect for these confusing end times we seem to have let ourselves allow to happen. However there is hope in this book. And even redemption. One of the best books I have read in along time. One I can't wait to reread.