Rat Race

An atomic blast annihilates the battleship Alaska, and somehow lands Lieutenant Commander Frank Jacklin in the body of Winnie Tompkins, a dissolute New York stockbroker with a wife, a mistress, and a secretary who all want something from him. Jacklin must navigate a world of ticker tapes and triple beds while carrying knowledge of a disaster that hasn't happened yet, knowledge that makes Washington very, very interested in who he really is. The real Tompkins is somewhere, and the search for him pulls Jacklin into a labyrinth of Cold War intrigue where anything can happen, and does. Written in 1950s America, Rat Race captures a moment when the bomb was new and identity felt fragile, when a man could literally lose himself in the machinery of modern life. It's part body-swap comedy, part geopolitical thriller, and wholly a product of its paranoid,Atomic Age moment. For readers who want their sci-fi with a side of domestic chaos and their Cold War paranoia served shaken.