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.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

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.

DETOUR: A Novel, first in a proposed series, ends on a cliffhanger

DETOUR: A Novel (Detour #1)
JEFF RAKE and ROB HART
Random House Worlds (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A space shuttle flight crew discovers that the Earth they’ve returned to is not the home they left behind in the first book of this emotional, mind-bending thriller series from the creator of the hit Netflix show Manifest and the bestselling author of The Warehouse.

Ryan Crane wasn’t looking for trouble—just a cup of coffee. But when this cop spots a gunman emerging from an unmarked van, he leaps into action and unknowingly saves John Ward, a billionaire with presidential aspirations, from an assassination attempt.

As thanks for Ryan’s quick thinking, Ward offers him the chance of a lifetime: to join a group of lucky civilians chosen to accompany three veteran astronauts on the first manned mission to Saturn’s moon Titan.

A devoted family man, Ryan is reluctant to leave on this two-year expedition, yet with the encouragement of his loving wife—and an exorbitant paycheck guaranteeing lifetime care for their disabled son—he crews up and ventures into a new frontier.

But as the ship is circling Titan, it is rocked by an unexplained series of explosions. The crew works together to get back on course, and they return to Earth as heroes.

When the fanfare dies down, Ryan and his fellow astronauts notice that things are different. Some changes are good, such as lavish upgrades to their homes, but others are more disconcerting. Before the group can connect, mysterious figures start tailing them, and their communications are scrambled.

Separated and suspicious, the crew must uncover the truth and decide how far they’re willing to go to return to their normal lives. Just when their space adventure seemingly ends, it shockingly begins.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I'd never heard of the Netflix show Manifest before I picked up this DRC. I'd never heard of the imprint that publishes it, either, and I'm old enough that imprints matter to me. I track them and their subject-matter focuses so I can ask for DRCs I'm happy to read and review. Surprise! There's an entire LitRPG-inspired publishing world, that now subsumes to old movie novelizations and TV-show expansions. This had escaped my attention until now because I've never played these games. I got hooked on Dark Shadows novels and Doctor Who novels back in the day, but found most Star Trek novels pretty hit-or-miss, and gave up on them. So this rediscovery was pleasant because now I've watched Manifest and really like it. I hasten to add that this novel is reminiscent of the TV show's premise but is not directly related to the show you can see on Netflix.

This story started out with a cool-to-me hook: six random people are lightly trained after being plucked from richly deserved obscurity to travel to Saturn's moon Titan. Terrible, tragic explosions on their craft occur; they're brought safely back to Earth but them isolated from each other very stringently, instructed not to attempt to contact each other or to discuss their experiences.

From here we're in the PoV of the six people separately as they experience...oddness, off-kilter alterations in what their memories of Earth tell them should be present in the world around them. It is unsettling to them. The...can't call them changes, that implies violated continuity, can't call them alterations because that implies known agency...discontinuities in their realty versus their memories of reality are strange, undirected by a moral compass, some make things better some worse yet the people are left with a sense that they're suffering from Capgras Syndrome. I suppose you're already assuming the characters ignore, and circumvent, the orders to stay out of contact with their fellow survivors of the trip. Of course this is the case.

The *real* story here is in the returnees' efforts to provide each other with support, you aren't crazy the world is-level support. It's not a space-sci fi story at all; it's a Sliders-meets-Sliding Doors narrative of roads not taken. This ties in to the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, and the Hindu, and later Buddhist, concept of Indra's net. This is more fun for me as a reader but might very well cause some disappointment for others. Understanding going in that space travel and hard sci-fi are honored more in their absence as igniting events than bases for the continuing action will help you decide if this is the read for you.

As each character has unique struggles to adapt to their individual changed circumstances they're all, as a unit, required to look at the common underlying altered reality of the world they collectively remember. It's this facet of their experience that most recalls the earlier media franchises I reference in tge paragraph above. It creates among these six people, so randomly assorted and so very different in personality, training, and character, a found family with the most powerful ties imaginable. Their shared bedrock assumptions have been whisked out from under them.

It's in this that the authors choose to emphasize the shared nature of their trauma, and its developing coping mechanisms. The six PoVs are not dealt with chapter-by-chapter, which could easily lead to dilution and confusion among the characters, but with chapters that entertain similar attempts to cope by varying constellations of people. There are chat threads, emails, news articles, and other such media insertions into various parts of the narrative. This is a narrative technique as old as Tristram Shandy yet we still act as though this is somehow new and fresh and surprising. It worked beautifully in Stand on Zanzibar nearly sixty years ago. It still works now. Its worldbuilding is useful; the technique of said worldbuilding functions as commentary on both message and medium.

I was happy enough with the characters' varying arcs in this series-starting volume as they reached obviously temporary resolution points in some way. The story overall, of the gestalt formed by our six folks, ends on a cliffhanger. I'm now going to explain why, despite enjoying the read, I'm only giving it three and a half stars. Nowhere is it said that this is the first in a series of stories because publishers know how much many readers hate starting series that are not completed. Ask George RR Martin and Patrick Rothfuss why that might be the case; consult with Adam Christopher's novel publisher as to why amputating series before they conclude might result in blowback. (I want more Ray Electromatic stories!) So instead of learning the right lesson from this and publicly committing to the entire series in advance, greed rules and there's a tiny little detail omitted from the sales bunf in the hopes you will get hooked and buy them all as they come out. This is scummy.

I also detest cliffhangers because there is never a narrative reason for them. Ever. It's purely marketing. So, three and a half stars for those dickhead marketing-driven moves draining a lot of my pleasure in reading this iteration of a story whose bones I very much enjoy seeing fleshed out.

ESPERANCE, alt-hist/many-worlds Chicago noir thriller

ESPERANCE
ADAM OYEBANJI
DAW Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$16.99 ebook, available tomorrow

Finalist for the 2025 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Science Fiction!

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The history-bending speculative fiction from Adam Oyebanji, award-winning author of BRAKING DAY.

An impossible death: Detective Ethan Krol has been called to the scene of a baffling murder: a man and his son, who appear to have been drowned in sea-water. But the nearest ocean is a thousand miles away.

An improbable story: Hollie Rogers doesn’t want to ask too many questions of her new friend, Abi Eniola. Abi claims to be an ordinary woman from Nigeria, but her high-tech gadgets and extraordinary physical abilities suggest she’s not telling the whole truth.

An incredible quest: As Ethan’s investigation begins to point towards Abi, Hollie’s fears mount. For Abi is very much not who she seems. And it won’t be long before Ethan and Hollie find themselves playing a part in a story that spans cultures, continents… and centuries.

An extraordinary speculative thriller about the scars left by the Atlantic slave-trade, by a master of the genre.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Why you're reading this story will largely color your response to it. SFF readers might not vibe with the very significant police-procedural elements narrated by noirish Ethan the cop. Mystery readers might not love the time-travel, in the many-worlds sense, done by Abi the morally grey alternating PoV.

I'm the reader with a foot and nine toes in each of those camps, plus another entire foot in the alternate-history camp. (There are so three feet! Where? In between worlds where the vibrational body exists and has access to all body parts. Quit quibbling, this has two guys who drowned in the ocean discovered dead in their Chicago apartment!)

I'm so glad to read a thriller inflected with quantum reality, which I am all about in my reading. It felt a bit like Author Oyebanji decided this would be his book, and spent his time plotting the story to the detriment of developing either Abi or Ethan more fully. I'm okay with that because the resolution to the crime we're here to read about was so exactly aimed at me and my personal hobbyhorses. I disliked the detective Ethan's racism being foregrounded. It didn't cause any stars to disappear, but it did make me squirm. As I think that was the point of including it, I mention the fact of it for reader guidance.

Abi's intriguing back/foreground was something I'd read a whole book about all by itself. Hollie, the sidekick, was so pathetically enamored of Abi that it got a little uncomfortable. I mean, I totally get it, and I was a little bit there, too. /but really cringe, Author Oyebanji, in that last bit about gbese.

What the gestalt of the book did not have, as I mentioned above, feels as though it was designed out by the author to leave the fundamental rocks under the story...not revenge, not even forgiveness can leach sin clean...in brightest contrast. It worked for me, I think it might work for all y'all who like your stories sleek, clear, and propulsively paced.

Four and a half shiny, happy stars.

TIME WAS, short and sad and very well-done gay-male romantic novella

TIME WAS
IAN McDONALD
Tor.com Publishing (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$3.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A love story stitched across time and war, shaped by the power of books, and ultimately destroyed by it.

In the heart of World War II, Tom and Ben became lovers. Brought together by a secret project designed to hide British targets from German radar, the two founded a love that could not be revealed. When the project went wrong, Tom and Ben vanished into nothingness, presumed dead. Their bodies were never found.

Now the two are lost in time, hunting each other across decades, leaving clues in books of poetry and trying to make their disparate timelines overlap.

My Review: First, read this:

War is no reason to change your drinking habits.
–and–
I shared my world; he shares his. What I understand is that he sees a beauty—a sublime, something awesome and terrifying—that I do not.
–and–
If you want to write, you must write experience. What it is to be that thing. There is everything in a moment.

Listen to the dissatisfied bleats from MM-romance readers! This is NOT that book!

It is a fun time-travel tale, and the MM couple whose life together is really more of a life-apart treasure hunt for each other after being unhitched from Time's Arrow during a WWII experiment in quantum superposition is the animating spirit. The young straight bookhunter whose obsession with the gay couple leads him into very strange territory is much more present on the page than either man in the couple. That's disappointing on some levels because of what is promised in the marketing push. But adjust your expectations and read the story that's there and the experience is just fine.

Accepting the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is easier for most fictionphiles than is Copenhagen interpretation of it, which requires us to believe in the arrow of time or the eternal and immutable journey of all things from the past to the future. There are some cracks in the immutability of time's forward progress at the quantum level (you can look it up on your own this time) but no one is saying, at this moment in time, that gross assmblages of atoms like human bodies are about to be transportable whole, entire, and functioning in any direction at any speed of more than 60 seconds per minute.

So there's the fiction bit of the tale defined.

All written art is an attempt to communicate what it is to feel, to ask the terrifying question: Is what I experience in my head the same as what you experience? Terrifying because we can never know for certain. We hope; we risk.

The tale itself...lovers separated and striving to get back together despite seemingly insurmountable obstacles...is an evergreen because most of us have experienced it to some degree or another. The separated lovers in the story are both men and that, as I suspect does not need heavy emphasis, would've kept them apart in the world of 1940s England and not to mention the world of the military which both were in.

The tale of an obsessive quest for an elusive object is equally familiar. A man so utterly absorbed in his own world as to not notice the fact that his lover is being openly unfaithful to him is a familiar character, again as most of us have encountered this in real life relationships whether our own or those of the people close to us. (Well, I know *I* have, so everyone I know has as well.)

Weaving the two together in the way McDonald does is involving and interesting. This isn't something I'm surprised about, though, as I've read his excellent novel River of Gods set in a 2047 India that has quantum computing. He's been thinking about these matters for a long time and that makes his world-building dense and fulfilling to read.

Take the journey with him in this short work. If you like it, and I hope you will, move to the massive, excellent River of Gods and immerse yourself in just how weird the world is, and will be; this book will give you the "was."

LORD KALVAN OF OTHERWHEN and GREAT KINGS' WAR, the first two works in a Paratime Multiverse

LORD KALVAN OF OTHERWHEN
H. BEAM PIPER
Pequod Press
99¢ ebook editions, available now

Rating: 4.9 nostalgic stars of five

The Publisher Says: The Paratime Police patrolled the vast number of alternate time dimensions. Their aim was to keep the existence of the alternative Earths a secret and prevent these Earths from mixing and destroying each other.

But the Time Police made mistakes, and they made a big one when a seemingly ordinary Pennsylvania State Trooper named Calvin Morrison was accidentally switched into the Aryan-Transpacific sector, Styphon's House subsector.

In just a few weeks, Morrison was being hailed as Lord Kalvan, and was masterminding a campaign that could blow the whole Paratime secret sky high!

My Review: It has been said since there were people to say it that you have to leave home to find yourself. It was never more truly said than with Corporal Calvin Morrison, Pennsylvania State Police. He had to leave Earth as he knew it in order to feel at home at last.

Calvin, you see, ran afoul of a glitch in an alien (though still Earthly) technology, was swept into a temporal conveyor, and despite being thrust into a unique environment, still managed to defend himself against a fellow cop's energy weapon (versus Calvin's .38 revolver), and escape from the unknown but self-evident threat of that weird place.

But where in the world was he? It looks like the same spot he just left, only...not.

He comes to discover that he's traveled laterally in timespace, he's in the same geography as the Pennsylvania he left, but the people in this place aren't like him in culture or language. They're early-Renaissance level of technology, polytheistic Aryans from Asia. And their kingdom, Hostigos, is about to be swatted like a mosquito by the Big Baddies: the priests of the House of Styphon, the Gunpowder God. Thus does Calvin morph into Kalvan, the war leader, the bringer of miracles, the architect of a complete shift in this world's future history.

Now remember that alien-but-Earthly technology? Those Earthlings are from a different time-stream from thee and me, and from the Hostigos (called “Aryan-Transpacific” which specifies the direction of the ancient migration) time-stream. They developed high technology long before we did, and consequently used up the resources of their own Earth before we have. The Paratime Secret, which is the existence of aliens who can't be told from the natives, is policed by the Paratime Police, now headed by Tortha Karf who's designated Verkan Vall as his successor, and whose observation of Kalvan was supposed to be an elimination until some bright academic realized Kalvan was a rare case of a man out of time who was IN his new element, more so than he was in his native time-stream.

And so is born the Kalvan Subsector, a set of adjacent time-streams that define a new direction in history. It's a priceless chance to see how one exceptional individual can change the course of the world.

I bought my first copy of this book, published in 1965, from The Book Stall on Burnet Road in Austin, Texas, in 1970. It was a dime, and my mama blew a fuse. She had given me the dime to buy two National Geographics, and was furious I chose mind-rot over edification. As a result of this tantrum on her part, I treasured that little book until it finally and definitively disintegrated in 2006.

I loved the parallel universes in the book. I eagerly looked into strangers' faces, hoping one of them would be a Paracop and whisk me away from the life I didn't much like into a romantic, exciting life hopping the time-streams. (Not long after this, I encountered The Warlord of the Air by Michael Moorcock, and my fate was sealed...I was a chrononaut/Paracop Without Portfolio, and still am.)

I loved every pulpy, overheated sentence of the book. I said things like “yesterday at the latest” and “Dralm dammit” so often that Mama finally blew a fuse and took the book away. I didn't know then, though I strongly suspected it, that Piper was a crappy writer with a gift for the cliché. But hell, who gives the ass of a rat when you're swept away into a world different from and better than your own?

I feel the same way today. It's just that, at mumblety-*cough*, I know it's not good writing. But I still don't care, if the story can sweep my considerable intellectual and physical avoirdupois off my aching, elderly feet.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

GREAT KINGS' WAR
ROLAND J. GREEN and JOHN F. CARR
Pequod Press
$2.99 ebook editions, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Great Kings' War was first published in paperback in 1985 by Ace Books. This 2nd Edition is a revised and expanded version of the long awaited sequel to H. Beam Piper's Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen, chronicling the further adventures of Calvin Morrison, Pennsylvania State Policeman—forcibly retired.

This new edition is revised and expanded (over 60,000 words) by the authors with new maps, including Hostigos Town, Hostigos and the Five Kingdoms, and a new dramatis personae.

Calvin Morrison was a pretty good cop in Pennsylvania—until he was scooped up by the cross-time flying saucer and transported to Styphon's House Subsector, a 16th Century equivalent parallel time-line. Here the Indo-Aryan invasions went east across Asia and down the Aleutian Islands into North America, where they have stagnated for thousands of years. Dropped off into the middle of a local dispute, Corporal Calvin Morrison comes face to face with warriors armed with pikes and broadswords, not petty criminals. Lord Kalvan, as the locals call him, transforms the petty Princedom of Hostigos into a fearsome warrior Kingdom by inspired leadership and advanced military knowledge.

Now, after having created and saved his new nation of Hos-Hostigos from destruction by Styphon's House, a tyrannical theocracy that holds sacred the secret formula for gunpowder, Kalvan, now Great King of Hos-Hostigos, faces his greatest challenge—keeping what he has won.

The Holy Host of Styphon and the Royal Army of Hos-Harphax, two of the greatest armies in the history of the Five Kingdoms, are on the move and Kalvan will once again have to call upon his knowledge of military history to save his family and friends. This time it's personal!

My Review: Really more of a four-star read, rounded up because I'm a sucker for military SF/fantasy that really knows what the hell it's talking about, and I will (with reservations explored below) read on; but the structural infelicities really do bother me enough that I have to take that half-star off as fair warning to others.

Sequel to Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen by H. Beam Piper, in the Paratime Universe (see the Complete Paratime series for details).

A novella-length book, the last written by its mentally ill author (who probably starved himself to death because of some absurd sense of "honor"), spawned a series of sequels exploring in detail (see the author of this work, and successive ones, at his website Hostigos) the accidental transposition of a man out of time on his own world, into a world exactly suited to his strengths. "The Road to Hostigos" section at the website explains this with admirable brevity.

This first sequel is the story of the first year after Kalvan's metamorphosis from Corporal Calvin Morrison, apostate Presbyterian clergyman and Korean War veteran, into Great King Kalvan of Hos-Hostigos. We're in the Many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. Kalvan is the rare survivor of cross-time contamination and, in the view of the academics at Dhergabar University on First Level, is a Dralm-sent opportunity to test paratime theory's self-evident but ordinarily unexplorable real-world action. Will Kalvan, whose arrival from nowhere makes his ideas and knowledge and opinions reek of Divine Intervention, succeed in staving off the doom slated to fall on Hostigos for its impious defiance of the local theocrats? Will the multitudes of fates altered by this uncontaminated-by-planning accident change enough about the multiverse to rank as a Subsector? Is the Great Man Theory right after all?!

One thing Author John F. Carr gets absolutely right is that academics are bloodthirsty political infighters. This book contains a good bit of that world. It also contains passages from the points of view of people who were merely names in the original novella. It also contains points of view absolutely unique to the expanded world. It contains, in fact, a lot of words that I don't entirely agree are necessary to tell a cracking good yarn set in this multiverse. Points of view of the vile theocrats? They're reinforcing what I already knew: They're unbelieving con artist scumbags. ::shockhorror:: Points of view of minor players in the battles, I get; they can realistically and without obvious infodumping clue us in to important action. But all of this comes at the expense of a cohesive narrative for the two parties I came to this bar to talk to: Kalvan and Verkan Vall, the newly minted king and the Paratime Police leader whose interest in Kalvan's ability to beat out a trained, technologically advanced security apparatus and then set himself up as the new power in the Earth he's landed in, is what's keeping him alive.

The players are many; the action is constant; but the problems are real. Kalvan's impending fatherhood is the only thing that's prevented his Great Queen from leading an army to defend what was, until he arrived and changed everything and won her heart, her future realm. It is her difficult pregnancy (ie, because she's a Girl) that keeps her pinned down. Her own mother having died in childbirth, Kalvan suffers some sleepless nights wondering what the hell he'll do if she dies too. But folks: SHE WAS THE HEIRESS TO THE THRONE UNTIL HE GOT HER PREGNANT AND SHE "HAD TO RETIRE." She's already proven herself an able politician and a brave commander of men. And now she's going to be a wife and mama?

Well, as it happens, no. She's royalty. The child she bears has a wetnurse from the word go, and within a month, The Great Queen Rylla's on horseback and bringing her husband supplies and men at a siege (along with a mentioned-on-page entourage for childcare). Much to his Our Time Line 1960s-cop distress. But Author Carr did us a solid, and an unusual one considering this book was written in the SFnal universe of the 1980s. Kalvan *listens*to*Rylla* and acts on her advice. They have a bruising fight...they reach an understanding...and they roll over the opposition, in tandem, partners.

I was not expecting that. I'm glad I got it.

A lot more "of its time" is the dismissive homophobia and the gratuitous fatphobia. I don't like it, but it's there, and it's not foregrounded. I guess I like the candy of multiverse-battle-politickin' enough to screw up my eyes and wrinkle my nose at the frankly-coulda-been-worse social attitudes we don't hold with anymore.

This series has been chugging along now for almost sixty years. Wargamers took to it with cries of glee. (The maps...!!) The incels and Proud Boys see it as Aryan enough to make them happy, and while the evidence doesn't support a full patriarchal view of this world, when has that stopped them from ignoring what they don't care to see. It's not a series I will be warbling my fool lungs out to beg you to pick up, because most people will bog down in the battle scenes and the tactical details that make my geekly heart go pitty-pat.

But if you like 1632 and its myriad follow-ons, or Warhammer 40,000 et alii, this is another option for the moments you're feeling a bit done with what has held your attention a minute too long.