Number 25 is Making History by Stephen Fry. This is one of G's books that I noticed sitting on the shelf, and I noticed it mainly because G and I were watching Stephen Fry's 'game show', QI, which was a lot of fun, interesting, but also kind of silly. I had no idea who Stephen Fry was previous to watching QI, although I did recognize his name, and afterwards discovered that it was because he was the narrator of the children's show, Pokoyo, which is a terribly sweet little show. I also found out Fry is a good friend of Hugh Laurie's, who is someone I know from watching a couple of season's of House.

So anyway... Making History. I'm not entirely sure why I picked it up, other than because I did enjoy the sense of humour Fry displayed on QI, as you see, Making HIstory is about timetravel, and timetravel is generally a genre I stay far away from. I'm not fond of timetravel tales, in either books, comics, movies or role playing games. Strange thing though, is while I don't really like timetravel stories, I'm quite fond of alternate timeline stories. I LOVE the Elseworlds comics from DC, where they take the known timeline and tweak it just so, and tell a story spun out from the differences in the new timeline. I find that stuff fascinating.

So, while I don't like time travel, I was pleasantly surprised to see that the timetravel stuff was relatively low key and not headache inducing, the story was really more about the alternate timeline that is created.

Michael Young, a young PHD candidate at Cambridge University, England, answers for us, the age old question (well, age old since the late 1930s), what would happen if HItler was never born? Young, whose PHD thesis is all about Hitler's early childhood, runs into a scientist, Leo Zimmerman, whose father was an SS officer at Auschwitz. Consumed by guilt over his father's actions in the second World War, Zimmerman (whose name is actually Axel Braun), invents a machine that lets him 'look' into the past. So he and Michael hatch a plot to introduce a pill into the drinking water of Hitler's hometown that will render his father sterile. The plan works perfectly, but unfortunately, the world doesn't become what Michael (and Leo) invisioned.

"Nature abhors a vaccuum" is the old rule, and in the case of Germany after WWI, this would seem to be true. Another man, one Rudolf Golder, steps into the spot Hitler historically filled and still manages to perpetrate the Holocaust on the Jews of Europe, as well as starting WWII. How is this worse than HItler, well, Golder does what Hitler couldn't manage; he wins WWII. All of Europe, Russia and Great Britian fall before the German war machine. Jews are completely eradicated from Europe, the only Jewish population remaining in the world is that which escaped to the USA and Canada during the War. Germany becomes the other world Super Power and eventually enters the Cold War with the US.

The world Michael finds himself in, where he's an American now, his parents having fled England in the 60s, is not necessarily a better one; fewer Jews, a conquored Europe, a USA where homophobia and racism are tolerated and accepted. There was no black rights movement in the 60s, and the US seems to be stuck in the rather puritanical 50s, never to move to equal rights for African Americans, women or gays. Being a homosexual is tantamount to being an enemy of the state.

So of course, Michael, when he realizes what he has done, immediately sets out to make the world 'right' again, by ensuring that Hitler is born.

Its a very... Marxist idea that if something is meant to be, you can remove one certainty, but another will always take its place. You remove Hitler from history, but there is someone to take his place. But, its also a rather interesting book that way, as most of the 'what would the world be like if there was no Hitler' always seems to take for granted that the world would be a better place, which , as this book demonstrates, may not neccessarily be the case.

Michael Young is a likeable character, if a little flighty, but he means well. He is very endearing this way, and his internal monologues are very funny. The ending of the book, as Michael embarks on his plan to set the world right again, is very well done, with tension actually mounting nicely. Its not that you doubt he'll change things again, but you wonder if he'll be able to change them to what had been, or has he irrevociably broken the timestream?

I think though, that what drew me in, happened a few pages into the book, when Fry basically made fun of my university degree:

You could only write successfully about books and poems and plays if you didn't care, really care about them. Hysterical school boy wank, for sure, an attitude compunded of nothing but egotism, vanity and cowardice. But how deeply felt. I went through all my schooldays convinced of this, that literary studies were no more than a series of autopsies performed by heartless technicians. Worse than autopsies: biopsies. Vivisection.

I had to laugh out loud at this paragraph, because while I could see his point, I also know that I (and most English majors I know), were drawn to literary studies precicesly because we loved literature. We wanted to wrap ourselves in it, immerse ourselves in it, find out how it worked, what made it tick. We wanted to examine it becuase we had a deep love for it. I know that the best papers I wrote in school were on books or poems or plays that I was most passionately interested in. If I attempted to write a paper on a work I didn't really care about, well, it generally showed. You couldn't be dispassionate about literature while studying it so intimately.

So screw you Stephen Fry :)