KILLING BABY HITLER, time-travel/alt-hist fantasy of Changing History...derailed by the Butterfly Effect

KILLING BABY HITLER
MICHAEL TOMASKY
O/R Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: 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.

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My Review: I like my silly sci-fi delivered with humor, so I'm your boy for this story's topic and style. I'm also a fan of time-travel (purest of fantasies) and alternate history (I dunno if we'll ever science our way into certainty that other timelines are real, but I think they can't NOT be), so bring your killing Hitler story unto mine eyes.

O/R is a leftist purveyor of tendentious reads mostly non-fiction; I approve of this, so seeing this novel become available I downloaded it immediately. I'm a fan of the wish-fulfillment inherent in stories of changing history, though the pop-culture "butterfly effect" is pretty inaccurate to the real subset of chaos theory. Doesn't mean I don't love to read about it. I was really hoping to love this read, too.

I enjoyed and liked it. I'd've loved it if it'd kept on with the initial tone. It's honest, abrasive, truthful about human nature; it's holding up our faults as people to us in this low-real life stakes fictional tale. It's always safe to look at existential crisis in the mirror of practical impossibility. To be able say humanity does not come off unscathed is pretty much my minimum standard for this kind of srory. Happy to say scathing is done. Pulling the punch at the end...well...I get it, I really do, and I can't tell you I thought the ending was incongruous, or tacked on to the story it was finishing off. It fit fine.

I wasn't expecting the tonal shift, so it popped me in the mouth for a minute. I don't think others who're less pessimistic, or permaybehaps don't see things through my Darkling eye. Without reservation a recommended read for summer in particular among the "if only" fantasists seeking to refashion the world. A well-paced story that makes its points without sacrificing the exuberant fun of reinvention, no matter how implausible.

Truths are told, honest self-appraisal encouraged, and a vote of confidence I don't entirely agree with is offered to send the entertainment reader away happy.

AFTER THE FALL, latest Edward Ashton outing

AFTER THE FALL
EDWARD ASHTON
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Would humans really make great pets?

Humans must be silent.
Humans must be obedient.
Humans must be good.

All his life, John has tried to live by those rules. Most days, it’s not too difficult. A hundred and twenty years after The Fall, and a hundred years after the grays swept in to pick the last dregs of humanity out of the wreckage of a ruined world, John has found himself bonded to Martok Barden nee Black Hand, one of the "good" grays. Sure, Martok is broke, homeless, and borderline manic, but he’s always treated John like an actual person, and sometimes like a friend. It’s a better deal than most humans get.

But when Martok puts John’s bond up as collateral against an abandoned house in the woods that he hopes to turn into a wilderness retreat for wealthy grays, John learns that there are limits to Martok’s friendship. Soon he finds himself caught between an underworld boss who thinks Martok is something that he very much is not, a girl who was raised by feral humans and has nothing but contempt for pets like John, and Martok himself, whose delusions of grandeur seem to be finally catching up with him.

Also, not for nothing, something in the woods has been killing people.

John has sixty days before Martok’s loan comes due to unravel the mystery of how humans wound up holding the wrong end of the domestication stick and find a way to turn Martok’s half-baked plans into profit enough to buy back his life, all while avoiding getting butchered by feral humans or having his head crushed by an angry gray. Easy peasy, right?

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My Review: I really hope y'all're catching on to Author Ashton. I confess I don't *get* why people weren't excited by Mickey17, because I thought it was a decent adaptation of Mickey7 as well as a good movie on its own; but mostly I'm a bit bumfuzzled as to how all Author Ashton's books aren't on the bestseller list. Every one I've read has been good-plus. I enjoy them, I spend time after reading them pondering about this bit that's really made me think, or that character who's so awful it must've been a big hoot to write them (specifically thinking of the one in The Fourth Consort of whom I said "'kindness and acceptance' sounds better than 'craven lickspittle sycophancy' doesn't it.") In a lot of ways this novel feels like Author Ashton taking a crack at some of the ideas not fully explored in that story.

I'm really thinking mostly of the ownership angle we delve into in this story, the ethics of cannibalism are unambiguous in The Fourth Consort whereas the Grays in this book are arguably the more vicious in their treatment of humans because they see us, say "aww how cute" and then go right on looking at us like there is nothing else to say or think. Someone who slaughters and eats you regards you as valuable; someone who views you as fungible, as a pet, does not. In a lot of ways it feels like the plays from the Roman Republic and early empire where the clever slave runs master's business better than master, saving the day and earning master's gratitude but never respect.

Like all Author Ashton's work, you're going to get some funny lines, and you'll never have any trouble remembering who said what to whom...I think that's why I like the Mickey series and why I think Director Bong did too, there's such a clear sense of the main characters' identity. What there isn't is a clear path towards resolving the conundrum the story orbits around: Is the condition of the humans going to change for the better? John and Martok are coming out of these events in a different state than they entered them but...well...is there a larger point to this larger story? If not, why bear down on it?

I enjoyed this stand-alone read, I thought it raised interesting points and gave me some good pondering to do. I was not convinced this was the best place to end the story, but it wasn't like it was poor on a craft level. It just could've leveled the read up, but chose not to.

Not the worst, or least forgivable, authorial peccadillo. I'll definitely await the next Ashton book with attentive eagerness.

THE SUPERSONIC PHALLUS, gay historical romantic story

THE SUPERSONIC PHALLUS
STEVEN KEY MEYERS
The Smash-And-Grab Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$2.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: When cub reporters Dean and Sam of the Sinai, Colorado Sentinel investigate UFOs seen over Two-Mile Mesa, they have no idea of what they’re about to face—or of what they’ll end up doing. The time is July 1947—the great flying-saucer scare, when thousands of Americans suddenly report seeing UFOs over every part of the country.

Dean is gay, but Sam (our narrator) is decidedly not! But as they interview witnesses and maintain high-altitude stakeouts, Sam begins to fall in love with Dean. Are the UFOs to blame? Is Dean merely the handsomest man Sam’s ever seen, or a space alien? And are the UFOs actually Russian aircraft out to steal U.S. atomic secrets?

The Air Force sends P-51 Mustang fighters to shoot down Sinai’s aerial invaders, even as the Government insists people are just seeing weather balloons. But one night, after a veritable supersonic phallus streaks overhead, Dean and Sam risk everything to let the world know the truth.

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My Review: Sam...married, kid, wife pregnant...wakes up to man sex when Dean enters his life. It's the Cold War, the Lavender Scare, and they're chasing the newly-named UFOs as sightings make the world news...are they Soviet spies, are they really aliens, is this some secret intelligence project we lifted from the recently-defeated Nazis? No one knows but Sam and Dean mean to find out.

It's all told from Sam's PoV and in his voice, which honestly feels light and humorous. I was surprised by that, as he is a man with some deeply unsettling issues to deal with. Not least really lusting after Dean; though that one's tough for anyone anytime. You want someone you're not married to, that's trouble; but they're same sex and the world, the Army, the government in general are all having fits because queers = bad, queers = spies...humor might not be everyone's first option of tone.

It's not comedy, it's not tragedy, it's a dramedy. I smiled more than I laughed, first when I found out out heroes are Sam and Dean and we're in a paranormal hunt for facts and truth. I wondered if it would be fanfic for Supernatural, but that was not my impression as I read along. I'd wondered also if we were to be treated to sex scene(s) but this too was not wher Author Meyers was headed. Sam's awakening was enough of a stretch, in that day and time. Plus when you live in a small town (Roswell is clearly the model) and are pursuing the armed forces to give you information they do not want you to have...well, first rule of surviving in the news biz is "never hand your enemy the gun."

It's a short read. I'm really glad I read it to keep my mind occupied with troubles not immediate to me or real but really grounded and relatable. What it did for me was make me aware that I live a deeply fortunate life as a gay man in the twenty-first century, and how very under threat that is.

Gratitude, meet vigilance, y'all're gonna be roommates in my skull.

Fun, light of tone and serious of purpose. Serves both masters very well indeed, and for three bucks as an ebook, you won't go wrong.

AN ORAL HISTORY OF ATLANTIS, Ed Park's story collection spanning 25 years-plus

AN ORAL HISTORY OF ATLANTIS
ED PARK
Random House
$13.99 ebook, available now

Time's The 100 Must-Read Books of 2025 selection

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A deadpan, wildly imaginative collection of stories that slices clean through the mundanity and absurdity of modern life, from the author of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize–winner and Pulitzer Prize finalist Same Bed Different Dreams

In “Machine City,” a college student’s role in a friend’s movie causes lines to blur between his character and his true self. In “Slide to Unlock,” a man comes to terms with his life, via the passwords he struggles to remember in a moment of extremis. And in “Weird Menace,” a director and faded movie star discuss science fiction, memory, and lost loves on a commentary track for a film from the ’80s that neither seems to remember all that well.

In Ed Park’s utterly original collection, An Oral History of Atlantis, characters question the fleetingness of youth and art, reckon with the consequences of the everyday, and find solace in the absurd, the beautiful, and the sublime. Throughout, Park deploys his trademark wit to create a world both strikingly recognizable and delightfully other. All together, these sixteen stories have much to say about the meaning—and transitory nature—of our lives. And they are proof positive that Ed Park is one of the most insightful and imaginative writers working today.

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My Review: What I have not highlighted that could make a difference to your pleasure...or not...is something I didn't notice until after I read the whole collection: There seems to be interconnection of settings and/or characters in many of the stories. As these stories have appeared over the course of years, this must reflect Author Park's real interests. It does indeed show. A collection sure to please Park fans and anyone who likes a laugh with their "hmm" sci fi. I mean, who among us does not love "His thoughts were shrouded in rumor, perfumed with adventure and abstruse interlinear controversy" as a quotable quote? One knows one's own.

Comme d'habitude, these sixteen stories will be dealt with by the Bryce Method of general remarks followed by brief responses to each one below.


A Note to My Translator is the funniest takedown of the Culture Industry℠'s bizarre effort to translate the work of an author into a local cultural property, thus causing huge misunderstanding and much ill-will:

Page eight, a little lower down: The doctrine of transubstantiation has nothing to do with pinball.
Page nine: Solomon Eveready reappears, smoking cut-grade reefer and imitating a trout. Explain this to me. Explain also the presence of scuba gear that "reeks of melon."

Honestly, I've read translations that felt as though they must've been the subject of a correspondence much like this.

It was hilarious to me, and sets an irreverent, mischievous tone I batten on. 5*

Bring on the Dancing Horses's unnamed narrator hit me with "Penumbra College in Vermont" and made me cackle, then his girlfriend's name "Tabitha Grammaticus"...and that housecoat...! Seriously, I'm still trying to sketch it to understand the topology.

The story itself, well, what a sad little incel this guy is, if I didn't know better I'd say he was fever-dreaming it all. You know what...maybe he is. 3.5*

The Wife on Ambien sketches anomie in cold relief as "the wife on Ambien" does things our Prufrockian putz of a narrator would never dare to do, I half expected her to eat a peach for gods' sake. I wished the refrain wasn't quite so Lucy-Ellmanly.

The wife on Ambien recites the poetry of T. S. Eliot, sings the music of the Jesus and Mary Chain, calculates how much we need to save to retire. Her figures vary. The wife on Ambien also tells me it doesn’t matter, that the sun will swallow the earth exactly eight billion years, or thirteen weeks, or twenty-four hours from now. The wife on Ambien hails Uber after Uber. The cars stream toward us like a series of sharks. It’s four a.m. Drivers from many countries gather on the corner, fling curses at our window, break out the booze, and promise each other their children in marriage. The wife on Ambien hacks into my Facebook account and leaves slurs on the pages of my enemies. Get a life, you’re a joke. She joins political causes directly opposed to her own. I spend an hour every morning cleaning up the digital trail.

3.5*
Machine City makes that film-student friend into a last gasp of the end-of-adolescence pretentiousness. Bethany Blanket...sounds like a manic pixie girl, right?...puts "Ed" in her student film requiring him to be honest and natural with the girl he just got broken up with by her also-Korean parents objecting to his ancestry. Now, of course, he's a lawyer with a fancy life thinking about les jadis. Not fascinating but oddly...compelling...familiar maybe. 4*

An Accurate Account proves that drama is easy, comedy is *hard*. A stand-up routine that, for me, was a real misfire...like a less-offensive Matt Rife set. 3*

The Air as Air is elegiac in tone, is the air's testator, is clearly about the processing of profound sadness, grief, loneliness: "The jukebox kicked in. Some song I used to hate, but at the moment it made me sad. It pinned me down."

It pinned down the entire mechanism of gaining, painfully and slowly, perspective. The narrator (PTSD and all) and his father, whom he calls "The Big Man" at the man's insistence:

"So you know about Uncle Buck," he said. "The movie?" "What movie? I’m talking about your Uncle Buck. He went on that show where they give you a makeover. It was Lindy’s idea, the whole stupid TV thing. She has connections. You know Buck. He dresses worse than I do. He dresses like he smeared rubber cement on his chest and rolled around in a pile of undershirts. So they show the episode and it went a little too well, if you get my gist."

Sad, funny, unfortunately very relatable...they're not communicating or connecting even a little bit. 4.5*

Seven Women has a therapist elucidating the long and grueling self-confrontation of therapy from her point of view, the way she thinks about the deep-dives into other people's emotions. "Sometimes people tell stories and they leave out the feelings—My job is to show them where the feelings are." 5* for that insight alone...Hannah the patient's a really crappy human being.

The Gift offers me a course I really want to take: "Advanced Aphorism" though not with Dublinski necessarily. The letter to the alumni magazine being written says it was never offered again. I demand a retake on all my school years so I can take this course! Fun wordplay, slight idea. 4*

Watch Your Step is a log-line for a technothriller that feels like it was being fleshed out; as the story progresses, I was trying to think of reasons Author Park left it here, when there's enough, to my story-ear, to support a novella. What gives? 3.5* because it's marooned without coming into port.

Two Laptops does nothing for me because the "man loses family through no fault of his own" trope bugs me. The wife and son he's misplaced live close but...never mind, no point really, as he is reduced to a skype face to the son, I realized he deserved it. 3* for choice of subject matter.

Weird Menace stresses the role memory can't help but play in our relationships to our past, to the people in our lives, and to this weird idea we think is a reality called the self. It's all dialogue, all the time, and all the more fun for that, since I like "Toner Low" as the director's name. DVD commentary was never like this when I was watching horror movies! 4*

Thought and Memory centers transness, but managed to make me wince by leaving in "transgendered" which ain't a good thing. I wish it had not been there like a turd in the punchbowl. Still, a decent and overall surprisingly good effort for someone not trans. 3.5*

Well-Moistened with Cheap Wine, the Sailor and the Wayfarer Sing of Their Absent Sweethearts didn't really excite me much...Tabby doesn't inspire sympathy as she is presented here...and her career is very amusing indeed, but doesn't make up for the sour note of the narrator's overall dissatisfaction, his dislike and disdain for so many around him. "My girlfriend, Tabby, reviews science fiction for a living, which just goes to show you that America is still the greatest, most useless country in the world," sums it up on the tone front; not my fave but very well-written, with some humor that broke through my dissatisfaction. 4*

Eat Pray Click might hit you differently than it did me...my boyfriend is in Chat psychosis so the way the machine comes alive, sort of, and what it does, just did not feel fictional, while feeling mentally disturbing. No rating.

Slide to Unlock might be the most unnerving story in here...almost horror...memory problems scare me leaky. It's a modern problem, trying to keep clear in one's mind the very complicated ways we're required to interface with a world gone digital...in fact, it's not much more complicated than the past, only the medium's changed from speaking to a fallible human to fallibly humanly speaking to a system made by fallible humans. I got the wry humor in here in my bones. 5*

An Oral History of Atlantis isn't so much a story as a proof of concept...every emotional register, every techno-detail, every beat in this collection gets its bones into this stew. What I couldn't find was a through-line to make me invest in it the way MtPR was meant to. 3.25*

THE PARADOX HOTEL, rollicking good time-travel story

THE PARADOX HOTEL
ROB HART
Ballantine Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$4.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: An impossible crime. A detective on the edge of madness. The future of time travel at stake.

January Cole’s job just got a whole lot harder.

Not that running security at the Paradox was ever really easy. Nothing’s simple at a hotel where the ultra-wealthy tourists arrive costumed for a dozen different time periods, all eagerly waiting to catch their “flights” to the past.

Or where proximity to the timeport makes the clocks run backward on occasion—and, rumor has it, allows ghosts to stroll the halls.

None of that compares to the corpse in room 526. The one that seems to be both there and not there. The one that somehow only January can see.

On top of that, some very important new guests have just checked in. Because the U.S. government is about to privatize time-travel technology—and the world’s most powerful people are on hand to stake their claims.

January is sure the timing isn’t a coincidence. Neither are those “accidents” that start stalking their bidders.

There’s a reason January can glimpse what others can’t. A reason why she’s the only one who can catch a killer who’s operating invisibly and in plain sight, all at once.

But her ability is also destroying her grip on reality—and as her past, present, and future collide, she finds herself confronting not just the hotel’s dark secrets but her own.

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My Review: Witty, fun dialogue describing a very standard plot. I'm not complainig, I'm explaining. If you like our Unstuck heroine,January Cole, you'll like the whole effort. I liked her; I think most of y'all might as well. If you're not all lemon-puckered about SF, you might already know Author Rob's work from The Warehouse. (Plenty of subtext in that sentence if you know what you're looking for.)

"Unstuck"? Um, well, yeah...it's a time-travel book, featuring some yucky trillionaire types without morals or scruples, who can afford their very own access to time travel:

“There’s this saying, about people who are born on third base and think they hit a triple,” I tell him. “About the way people inherit wealth and power and think that not only did they earn it, but they deserve it. We deal with a different sort in this place. People who were born on third base and think they built the stadium.”

A consequence of developing time travel is that some people come "Unstuck" from their roots in...whatever Time is...hence are "Unstuck." Think The Time Traveler's Wife, or Everything Everywhere All at Once. Like all the best time-travel stories, those and this one are about bigger things, grief, the idea of inequality, the process of identity versus the certainties most of us crave for identity to provide...y'know, Life.

Author Rob digs in, plays it out, makes us care while taking our little teeny Stuck selves through a mad, whirling, loud maelstrom of voices and ideas. January lost Mena, grieves for her, but...what does loss really mean to someone Unstuck? Why is everything everywhere here and why is now all at once? With time crimes to solve, security professional January needs to track everyone and through the everywhere that is the Paradox Hotel...which is being sold in the process of the US Government privatizing the ability to time travel, just to add some more complexity.

And who's the dead guy in room 526 that no one else can see?

All of these are questions January needs to solve/resolve. It's the only focus she has that can override her desperate, raging grief for Mena. And it might keep her employed at the Paradox Hotel.

And alive. All because she's Unstuck, so the only one who *can* do it all.

I don't offer a fifth star because the humor is often bitter, sometimes forced, and always facetious. I resonate with most of it. I love Jodi Taylor's emotionally intense, very funny books; they're happy humor, laughing...sometimes mordantly...together with the story. In Author Rob's work, we stand outside and laugh at things with January. It can feel off-putting. So no fifth star for you.

It's still a really good time for the right mood, the right reader, the right moment. Look into it!

ON EARTH AS IT IS ON TELEVISION, weirdly funny first-contact debut novel

ON EARTH AS IT IS ON TELEVISION
EMILY JANE
Hyperion Avenue (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In Emily Jane’s rollicking debut, when spaceships arrive and then depart suddenly without a word, the certainty that we are not alone in the universe turns to intense uncertainty as to our place within it.

Since long before the spaceships’ fleeting presence, Blaine has been content to go along with the whims of his supermom wife and half-feral, television-addicted children. But when the kids blithely ponder skinning people to see if they’re aliens, and his wife drags them all on a surprise road trip to Disney World, even steady Blaine begins to crack.

Half a continent away, Heather floats in a Malibu pool and watches the massive ships hover overhead. Maybe her life is finally going to start. For her, the arrival heralds a quest to understand herself, her accomplished (and oh-so-annoying) stepfamily, and why she feels so alone in a universe teeming with life.

Suddenly conscious and alert after twenty catatonic years, Oliver struggles to piece together his fragmented, disco-infused memories and make sense of his desire to follow a strange cat on a westward journey.

Embracing the strangeness that is life in the twenty-first century, On Earth as It Is on Television is a rollicking, heartfelt tale of first contact that practically leaps off the planet.

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My Review: I think laughing is a gift I'll never take for granted again. 2025 has given me few reasons to laugh. This 2023 title was one that got to be more and more fun as I read along.

Despite the c-a-ts being the first-contacting aliens' favorite Earthlings. No way could this climb past four stars after that extremely bad authorial decision.

Though playing the Strugatskys' Roadside Picnic for laffs, like they commissioned Michael Zadoorian to observe the results of the visit for a report, is *almost* enough, as the aliens arrive, depart, and pretty much act like indifferent tourists on a cruise. The Earthlings left in their wake are befuddled, asking all sorts of questions, but none the wiser as to the aliens' purpose in visiting Earth.

It sorta doesn't matter. The point of humor is to look at things that seem absurd, but are genuinely important...sometimes profound. This story isn't quite profound, but it's important: We need a perspective check. Maybe aliens exist, maybe they're too far away in time and/or space to "hear" us, or maybe they're fully aware of us and just don't care.

That hurts a lot of peoples' feelings, but if aliens exist (I think spacefaring ones don't), I'll be completely unsurprised if they, like Jane's aliens, aren't much interested in humanity as it acts the fool, messes up its room, defies reason in the name of spurious "personal autonomy," and generally behaves like spoiled, perspectiveless adolescents with too much free time.

A summertime read with enough interesting ideas to make it more than empty reading calories while delivering the sugar rush of humor to keep your mind from processing the nutritious stuff in the moment.