Tuesday, April 26, 2005

Book 17

"Making History" by Stephen Fry

If the words time travel, Stephen Fry and alternate history don't get you excited, then this is not the book for you. If, however, you are a person of taste and wit, who enjoys reading masterful prose (and screenplays) and wants to see what the science fiction genre can do, then you'll love "Making History". The basic gist of the story is that a PhD history student whose thesis is about the early life of Hitler runs into - literally - a German ex-patriate physics professor whose work is in temporal phsyics. Oh, and his father was in Auschwitz. Get where this is going?

The writing is, as you would think, amazing. The plot moves smoothly and cleverly, and there are more than a couple of genuine twists. The temporal phsyics work well, and ther are no staggering paradoxes that leapt out at me. Oh, and it's really funny, too.

Four and a half time machines out of five.

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Oh yeh - Stephen was very on form with this book. A lot tighter a plot than he usually goes for, as a 'time-travel' story generally needs.

He also had some nicely different ideas on the 'changing history via World War II' trick. (Some of his ideas (which I shan't spoil here), are quite controversial, though supported by a number of historians.)

11:48 PM  

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