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Making History by Stephen Fry (1997) (read in 2016)

Published by marco on

Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I’ve pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I’ve failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I’m happy for you.

This is the story of Michael Young, a doctoral student who is on the verge of delivering his oral presentation of an obscure bit of history involving Adolf Hitler and his mother. Through a series of coincidences, he meets Leo Zuckerman, a physicist who has invented a machine that can look back in time. Together, with a shared interest and passion for the era of the rise of Hitler, they set about modifying the machine to enable them to not only look but to make slight changes. The slight change they make is to pollute the water supply of Brunau (the town in which Hitler was born) with an experimental male contraceptive, preventing Hitler’s birth.

Part two begins with Michael awakening not in England but in Princeton in America in an alternate future engendered by his and Leo’s meddling. The alternate history is one even worse than the one with Hitler in it, a world dominated by a charming, brilliant anti-Semitic polyglot who not only survives WWII but leads Germany and his Nazi party to victory over the world. He exterminates all Jews using the Brunau water to sterilize the lot of them.

Michael is horrified and endeavors to locate Leo, who is also wracked with guilt and has, once again, developed a Temporal Imager. They once again modify the machine and concoct a plan to poison the Brunau water with a dead rat, preventing anyone from drinking the water and therefore the contraceptive in it. The timeline is restored, with Michael waking to a more familiar reality, albeit it with some slight changes again.

Citations

“Below me, Jamie and Double Eddie leaned forward from the bank, tugged on a fishing line and hauled in a bottle of white wine from the water. Whatever happened to them, I thought, they would have days like this to look back upon. In dank provincial libraries in February as, balding and bitter, they fussed over their mugs of Earl Grey; in local news production offices, fighting for budgets; in classrooms, floundering in the chaos of contemptuous thugs; at the Crush Bar in Covent Garden, twittering over a diva’s tessitura—wherever they might wash up, always they would have a memory of being nineteen, with flat stomachs, dazzling hair and bottles of river-cooled Sancerre.”
Page 96
““You are looking,” says Leo pointing at the screen, “at Auschwitz Concentration Camp on the ninth of October, 1942.” I frown in puzzlement. So slow. I am so slow. “How do you mean?” “I mean how I mean. This is Auschwitz on October ninth. Three o’clock in the afternoon. You are looking at that day.” I stare again at the lovely billowing shapes in their sweet rippling colors. “You mean . . . a film?” “Still you ask what I mean and still I mean what I mean and still you do not grasp what I mean. I mean that you are looking at both a place and a time.””
Page 122

He disparages him for not immediately leaping to the conclusion that he’s looking at a time machine. What a jerk.

““If you keep making that horrible hawking noise to clear it I’m going to leave the country and never come back,” says Jane. “You won’t even get a postcard.””
Page 138
“Kurfürstendamm”
Page 175