Making History (Airport Ed)

Making History (1996) is the third novel by Stephen Fry. The plot involves the creation of an alternative historical time line, one where Adolf Hitler never existed. While most of the book is written in standard prose, a couple of chapters are written in the format of a screenplay. The chapters with this style of writing tend to be action-heavy and allow a lot of information to be shared in a relatively short space of time. The book won the Sidewise Award for Alternate History. A history student travels back in time to prevent Hitler's birth by dropping an infertility pill into his father's beer. The scheme backfires when a more intelligent dictator comes to power, conquering more territory and developing the atom bomb ahead of the U.S. The student, Michael Young, gets back into his time machine to allow Hitler to be born after all. By the author of The Hippopotamus. What if Hitler had never been born? An unquestionable improvement, one would reason - and so an earnest history grad student and an aging German physicist idealistically undertake to bring this about by preventing Adolf's conception. And with their success is launched a brave new world that is in some ways better than ours - but in most ways even worse Michael Young is convinced his brilliant history thesis will win him a doctorate, a pleasant academic post, a venerable academic publisher and his beloved girlfriend Jane. A historian should know better than to imagine that he can predict the future