Making History is a fantastic example of alternate history. I particularly enjoyed how Fry shows the same scene, set during World War I, twice, once from the original timeline and once from the timeline after Michael erases Hitler. It’s an “oh shit” moment as the reader realizes the magnitude of what Michael has done. It’s a foregone conclusion that the new world is going to be somehow less preferable to the old one, but it’s not immediately obvious how that’s the case. Fry reveals more about the new timeline gradually, giving the reader time to acclimatize alongside Michael, who must pretend like everything is cool to throw off some suspicious G-men even while he secretly freaks out and wants to find a way to restore the original timeline. Can you have a mid-life crisis at twenty-four? Or is it just the usual crisis of adulthood, something I was going to have to get used to until I doddered into oblivion? For the past year, I realised, I had been suffering from this pain, this leaking of hot lead in my stomach. Every morning when I awoke and stared at the ceiling and listened to Jane’s gentle snoring it flooded my gut, a dark swell of recognition that here was another pissing day to be got through as me. How can you tell if that’s freakish or usual? No one ever says. The ceaselessly expanding Christian Societies in the university would tell you that it was a sign that you needed room for Christ in your life. That your ache was a vacuum in the soul. Yeah, right. Sure. It was the same void that drugs filled, I supposed. I had thought too that maybe this was what Jane was for. No, not what Jane was for, what Love was for. Then either I didn’t love Jane as I should or this was another blown theory. The longings of a creative spirit then? Maybe my soul craved expression in Art? But: can’t draw, can’t write, can’t sing, can’t play. Great. Where does that leave me? A kind of Salieri deal perhaps. Cursed with enough of divine fire to recognise it in others, but not enough to create anything myself. Aw, rats . . . Together they realise that they have the power to alter history and eradicate a great evil. But tinkering with timelines is more dangerous than they can imagine and nothing - past, present or future - will ever be the same again.

Israeli researcher Asaf Ben Vered [3] noted that "The protagonist of Making History gets told that "There are no Jews left in Europe". That result could not have been achieved solely by sterilizing Jewish men through the "Braunau Water". In that case, in the 1990s there should have still been a big number of sad old and middle aged Jews with no progeny, and the Nazis could not have kept them completely hidden from the world. Plus, if only Jewish men were sterilized, at least some Jewish women would have let themselves be impregnated by non-Jewish men; in fact, Jewish religious law specifically stipulates that such children would be considered Jewish. (...) Anyway, why would Gloder do it at all? To be sure, he is an anti-semite, like many Germans of his time. But as seen from his cynically frank wartime diary, he is above all a completely ruthless and totally unprincipled opportunist, for whom German Nationalism and wartime heroism are simply tools to be used or discarded. He needed the Jewish nuclear scientists to develop nuclear bombs by 1938. He still needs them when entering a nuclear arms race with the US. Were the Jewish scientists and their families exempted from deportation to the "Jewish Free State"? Would they go on working for him when all other Jews were deported? (...) The book avoids the real moral dilemma which it could have easily posed and which would have made it a far more profound and thought-provoking work. Suppose the opportunist Gloder had altogether avoided the Final Solution, and contented himself with some anti-Jewish rhetoric. Which world would be worse? Our world - or a world with an entrenched Nazi dictatorship in Europe and a racist and homophobic America, but no gas chambers and ovens, six million Jews able to live out their life, even if under Nazi rule? Putting it this way, the protagonist would have needed at least some serious thinking and inner debate before proceeding as he does in the final chapters." Uchronia)র আবির্ভাব; এবং বর্তমানে শুধু অল্টারনেট হিস্ট্রি বইয়ের তালিকা রাখার জন্য আখ্রনিয়া ডট নেট নামে একটা ওয়েবসাইট আছে। So why did I read, finish and rate this reasonably well? inspite of the stylistic faults, there were some truly good moments between characters in the story. There was also a valiant effort to utilise time travel and history in a very un-scifi way in my opinion. This was a bit of fun and refreshing. McPherson’s involvement extends to directing with speed and panache, as well as a wonderfully designed set, whose looming portraits of historical figures both great and terrible conceal a multitude of cupboards, gizmos and handy plot devices. We haven't arrived at our own moral and ethical imperatives by each of us working them out from first principles; we have inherited them and they were born out of blood and suffering, as all human things and human beings are. This does not stop us from admiring and praising the progressive heroes who got there early and risked their lives to advance causes that we now take for granted.Even tho I love Stephen Fry's books (and pretty much everything else he shares with the world), Making History has been lingering on my kindle without even tempting me to start this. Why is that? In the end, I suppose history is all about imagination rather than facts. If you cannot imagine yourself wanting to riot against Catholic emancipation, say, or becoming an early Tory and signing up to fight with the Old Pretender, or cheering on Prynne as the theatres are closed and Puritanism holds sway ... knowing is not enough. If you cannot feel what our ancestors felt when they cried: 'Wilkes and Liberty!' or, indeed, cried: 'Death to Wilkes!', if you cannot feel with them, then all you can do is judge them and condemn them, or praise them and over-adulate them.

Or history is heritage studies: cotton mills, marshalling yards and collieries smartened up as 'resources' for school trips; take the kids into the kitchens and servants' quarters of the stately home and ignore the saloons and great rooms above stairs for fear of giving offence. British culture, besieged on all sides by guilt: guilt at empire, guilt at English domination of the United Kingdom, guilt at slavery, at industrial wage-slavery, at Boer Wars, Afghan Wars, mutinies, massacres and maladministrations. translated roughly as "mismatched light seriousness." Despite Fry's light touch, he does hit on some thought-provoking issues. "What-if" exercises are interesting when you've got someone to give you proper context along the way. A polymath like Fry certainly knows enough European history to do that. In my mind, his knowledge of the German experience between the wars more than made up for the inherent flaws in time travel logic. (I doubt even Stephen Hawking could make the physics behind such machinery sound plausible.) A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.After all, isn't that what poetry and novels show, that humanity is best comprehended by understanding humans rather than ideas? But for some, this leads to the worry that history can now only mean witness. And some of us fear that even the most respectable documentary programme now cannot get through two minutes of screen time without some preposterous reconstruction involving wigs, candles, actors, ponderous music, scratching quills and even more wigs, so afraid is television of telling without showing.