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Making History
Audio cassette
Main Details
| Title |
Making History
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| Authors and Contributors |
By (author) Stephen Fry
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Read by Stephen Fry
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| Physical Properties |
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| Category/Genre | Modern and contemporary fiction (post c 1945) |
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| ISBN/Barcode |
9781856865692
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| Classifications | Dewey:823.914 |
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| Audience | |
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Publishing Details |
| Publisher |
Cornerstone
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| Imprint |
Random House Audiobooks
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| Publication Date |
1 November 1997 |
| Publication Country |
United Kingdom
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Description
This story is in essence about briefcases, but it also explores the themes of high-energy physics and its impact on male contraception; love and the morality of joint car ownership in the late-20th century; and the consequences to world history of altering the water supply of a small Austrian lake.
ReviewsKirkus Review US:Would the world be better off if Hitler had never lived? British TV personality and novelist Fry (The Hippopotamus, 1995, etc.) inflates a speculative idyll into an overlong, glibly caustic - and often hilarious - social satire. Interfering with history is a shopworn science fiction conceit that, as everyone from H.G. Wells's Time Traveller to Captain Kirk of Star Trek has discovered, is not time well spent: The most absurd paradoxes (murdering your grandfather, etc.) must be resolved to leave everything more or less as it was before the story began. In his third novel, Fry fashions an elaborately contrived plot so that the nebbishy Michael Young, a snide, pop-culture - quoting Cambridge University doctoral student in German history, will meet the guilt-ridden German physicist Leo Zuckermann (whose father was an Auschwitz physician) and use Zuckerman's fancy laptop time machine to drop infertility pills into Hitler's father's morning beer. Then, after some Spielbergian special effects, Young wakes up across the Atlantic to find that he's been circumcised and is now majoring in philosophy at a brutishly conservative Princeton. America is in a Cold War conflict with a German hegemony that spans most of Europe and Asia. In place of Hitler is Rudolf Gloder, a far more intelligent Nazi who encouraged his nation to develop atomic weapons in advance of the US, smashed Russia's Communist revolution, and found a way to make Jews persecute themselves. Young, determined to return the past to its untampered state, learns what history always teaches: Even in a world without Hitler, things can always be worse. An amusing, sophomoric, hyperbolic, academic send-up, timed to coincide with Fry's upcoming role in a film about Oscar Wilde. (Kirkus Reviews)
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