(no subject)

When I picked up Stephen Fry's Making History on a whim, I have to admit, I did not expect to find myself in the middle of a novelistic game of Chrononauts, but there I was. The plot of the book centers around history student Michael Young, who, after a chance encounter with a physics professor tormented by ancestral guilt, decides to play about with Changing History Forever. There are chapters set in the past, detailing both real and alternate history, and other chapters written in script format when Fry decides he wants to fast-forward into action movie mode, and some chapters that are in fact meant to be part of the main character's thesis, making the whole thing kind of meta in places.

I have mixed feelings about the book as a whole. Parts of it were very good and very funny - those were the bits where as I read I could actually hear Stephen Fry's voice in my head, drawing out the comic timing. The srs bsns bits, especially some of the early historical chapters, were often not as interesting; also, as someone who's read and seen lots of works dealing with the "AUGH NO DON'T" of messing about with history, when characters wander blithely into it without pondering the consequences it makes me start facepalming repeatedly. (I also spent a lot of time thinking about that conversation a few of us had in NY about common alternate history tropes.) The book did pick up a lot about halfway through, once Michael stopped meandering around in typical literary self-centered grad student land and started having to deal with the unexpected (to him, at least, if not to anyone who's read a Meddling With History book before) consequences of his actions, not to mention American-English culture clash.

( Spoilers. )

Overall, I probably would have liked this book a lot more if I was less of a jaded geek. Sorry, Stephen Fry, I still love you!