Description:
By the editor of The New Republic, a side-splitting, super-smart story of a voyage from the future to the past aimed at forestalling global calamity in a single stroke.
In the year 2141, the planet is ruled by billionaires, democracy is a relic, the environment is collapsing, and Illinois is home to thirty-foot alligators. When a ragtag team of scientists discovers the secret to time travel, they set their sights on history's most infamous villain: baby Adolf Hitler.
The mission doesn't go quite as planned.
Because rewriting history is never simple. Instead of preventing the rise of fascism, they trigger a bizarre new timeline in which Hitler grows up in America, editing one of the country's most hateful newspapers, and history warps in strange and unsettling ways. What begins as a darkly funny scheme to fix the past spirals into a mind-bending journey across centuries, as the time travelers confront unintended consequences, shifting timelines, and a future that may be even worse than the one they left behind.
Part sci-fi thriller, part biting satire, Killing Baby Hitler is Michael Tomasky's first work of fiction--a wildly original novel that skewers power, questions the logic of hindsight, and reminds us that the present may be the hardest time of all to change. Bold, provocative, and disturbingly plausible, it's a time-travel tale like no other.
Review Quotes:
"...fabulous in every sense, a super-smart romp through the history--histories--of the last and next century or so...fun, thought-provoking, Kurt Vonnegut-Dr. Who-Connie Willis-Douglas Adams kind."
--Kurt Andersen, author of True Believers
"Savagely funny, unexpected, creative, inventive--and it really explains the dark times we live in."
--Molly Jong-Fast, author of How to Lose Your Mother
"A philosophic thriller like no other--will make you rethink everything you thought about Hitler, history, evil, and the future."
--Ron Rosenbaum, author of Explaining Hitler
"What a gripping, funny, and wildly plausible tale this is. Mixing humor and fantasy and political rage, Michael Tomasky has produced an urgent, darkly magical fable."
--Joseph O'Neill, author of Netherland
"A witty, madcap tour through history and the future--and a biting commentary on our contemporary political situation."
--The New Republic