Making History

Stephen Fry tackles alternate history, asking: What if Hitler had never been born?

 

Michael Young is a graduate student at Cambridge who is completing his dissertation on the early life of Adolf Hitler. Leo Zuckerman is an aging German physicist and Holocaust survivor. Together they idealistically embark on an experiment to change the course of history. And with their success is launched a brave new world that is in some ways better than ours-but in most ways even worse. Fry's sci-fi-tinged experiment in history makes for an ambitious and deeply affecting novel. Praise for Making History

"A bright, engaging, learned novel . . . Terrific."

-The Washington Post



"Witty and eccentric . . . The ever astute actor/author asks the question: Does man make history or does history create the man? And [he] answers with a jolt of surprising insight."

-Elle



"Making History tears along like a cinematic thriller, building suspense with each fresh scene."

-Baltimore Sun



"Exuberant . . . brilliant and convincing."

-Minneapolis Star-Tribune



"Part academic send-up, part zany screenplay, and part invented history, the novel dives headfirst into the trashbin of history and roots around with alternating elan and solemnity . . . Imaginative."

-BookPage



"Clever, throught-provoking and very funny."

-Library Journal

"[Fry's] best novel yet . . . An extravagant, deeply questioning work of science fiction."

-GQ Stephen Fry is an actor, producer, director, and writer who has appeared in numerous TV series and movies, including Jeeves and Wooster, Wilde, Gosford Park, V for Vendetta and The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug. He is the bestselling author of four novels, as well as several works of nonfiction, and divides his time between New York and the UK. MAKING COFFEE

It starts with a dream . . .

It starts with a dream. This story, which can start everywhere and nowhere like a circle, starts, for me-and it is, after all, my story and no one else's, never could be anyone else's but mine-it starts with a dream I dreamed one night in May.

       The wildest kind of dream. Jane was in it, stiff and starchy as a hotel napkin. He was there too. I didn't recognize him of course. I hardly knew him then. Just an old man to nod to in the street or smile through a politely held library door. The dream rejuvenated him, transformed him from boneless, liverspotted old beardy into Mack Sennett barman with drooping black mustache tacked to a face hangdog long and white with undernourishment.

      His face, for all that. Not that I knew it then.

      In this dream he was in the lab with Jane: Jane's lab, of course-the dream was not prophetic enough to foretell the dimensions of his lab, which I only got to know later-that is if the dream was prophetic at all, which it may well not have been. If you get me.

      This is going to be hard.

      Anyway, she was peering into a microscope and he was feeling her up from behind. He stroked between her thighs inside the long white coat. She was taking no notice, but I was outraged, outraged when the soft veef of hands rubbing nylon stopped and I knew that his fingers had reached the uppermost part of her long legs, the place where stocking ended and soft hot private flesh-hot private flesh belonging to me-began.

      "Leave her alone!" I called from some unseen director's corner, behind, as it were, the dream's camera.

      He gazed up at me with sad eyes that held me, as they always do, in the bright beam of their blue. Or always subsequently did, because I had, in my real waking life at that point, never so much as exchanged a single word with him.

      "Wachet auf," he says.

      And I obey.

      Strong light of a May morning whitening the dirty cream of cruddy curtains that we meant to change months ago.