An alternate-history novel, set in world where Martin Luther was made Pope. The West is a theocracy, electricity is the devil's work, but technology is not terribly different.

Clearly inspired by The Man In The High Castle, which makes an appearance.

Those hoping for a small helping of the wit of Kingsley Amis will be disappointed, but his fixation on sex is in full force. ( )

An example of a meta-literary uchronia. I remember coming across this word in its Portuguese equivalent “ucronia” many eons ago as I read a review of Amis’ “A Alteração”. It’s a term that did not pop up frequently even when we read stuff on SFional meta-analysis. Why? Because it's one of those “irregular verbs”: canonical literary novelists publish meta-literary uchronias; fans write homages; weirdos on the internet do some weird thing called fanfic which we will never admit does the same thing as a text written by a serious novelist and published by a named imprint. There are very interesting theories as to why people write fanfic, or meta-literary uchronias, as I'm going to call the genre from now on: one is that what motivates people to produce it is their desire for 'more' of something which is present in the text but they do not feel they have had enough of, and one is their desire to 'fill the gaps' of something which is absent in the text. So for instance fiction in which Jane Eyre marries St John Rivers might be motivated by a reader wanting more - perhaps of their interactions or of the possibility of a relationship between them which the text suggests but then cuts short.

One might apply similar theories to why people rewrite history - Robert Harris, for instance, clearly has an imagination stirred by the Second World War and has produced several texts out of a desire to satisfy that imagination in a way that the historical and fictional narratives he reads and watches do not meet.

And if it's true that what motivates people to write is to fill a lack, then perhaps the fiction which does not provoke this kind of writing does not produce a lack in its most admiring readers. I can well believe that an avid Joycean might imagine in their head an alternative version of Bloomsday, but would they dare compete with him to write it in that style? Or perhaps they read not for the plot but for the style, so why bother to rewrite the story when what you really want is more of Joyce's writing, something only he can produce?

As for why historical Alternate Universes (as the plebby fanfic writers call them, sorry, I keep forgetting, “meta-literary uchronias”) only came into being at a certain moment: well, you can't have an alternative historical novel before you have the historical novel proper, and while fiction has always been set in the past, that past was not, generally, recreated with a sense of the historical distance between that past and the writer's present until Scott. So it's not at all surprising that the genre came into being after Scott's version of the historical novel had been assimilated.

What if the Spanish Armada hadn't sunk? What if the American Revolution never happened? What if the Confederates won the American Civil War and joined the Allies and the US joined the Axis powers (or rather their alternate universe equivalents)? What if we threatened the main character’s balls? “The Alteration” looked like some of some of Harry Turtledoves’s novels where alternate history books are a bit SF, like “The Guns of the South” where time-travellers give the Confederates AK-47s (in Amis’ novel the equivalent is snipping gonads…). Amis' Uchronia, ”The Alteration”, before anyone asks, is nothing new that we haven’t read before in SF but done much, much better.



SF = Speculative Fiction. ( )

"Off With His Balls!!!"

Or maybe, another alternate title, "What PKD would have written if he was mired in Lutherism and he wanted to write something to counteract the hedonistic oddity that was [b:Gravity's Rainbow|415|Gravity's Rainbow|Thomas Pynchon|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1414969925s/415.jpg|866393]"

Seriously, this is what Philip K Dick would have written if he was focused on Popes and the total emasculation of humanity. And rather than Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, we've got a ton of snipping or at least talk of snipping going on. :)

Let me talk about the world-building. It's all way below the surface, with most of the action focused on this poor kid who's about to get his balls chopped off for the sake of his beautiful singing voice, but right below this is a bunch of straight homages to alternate histories and even a direct love letter to PKD's [b:The Man in the High Castle|216363|The Man in the High Castle|Philip K. Dick|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1448756803s/216363.jpg|2398287], only taking the switch back WAY in the past, keeping science a dirty word and the Holy Roman Church in high supremacy.

Pretty cool, right? Well, yeah, I guess it would be based on just this description, but it really just feels like a "Poor me, I'm about to get snip-snipped, all the adults around me are acting REALLY strange, and now I'm getting asked questions like 'Do I play with myself and have you ever wondered what it would be like to do that with a girl?'"

Ahem. This is such a penis-oriented 70's novel. Like, totally. But it's really focused not on the bright side of parading about with a boner, but rather, the fear of losing that big "B" forever. Alas.

And it only gets really funny by the end of the novel with the global implications.

Too bad we didn't get a bit more of that earlier on, right? Alas.

Still, it's a pretty cool book on the straight traditional fiction front, with a lot of characters and grounded explorations, but the SF portion is still kinda light. That's my main complaint. Oh, plus, all the little crazy strangenesses that have crept into Political Christianity over the last six hundred years. :)

I don't know if I'd really recommend this for anyone except fans of [b:The Man in the High Castle|216363|The Man in the High Castle|Philip K. Dick|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1448756803s/216363.jpg|2398287] and people who like weird major twists in Catholicism. ( )

My Kingsley Amis reading marathon marches on, but this latest was quite a ride; but first, a word of caution from the UK's Guardian: MOST PEOPLE THINK CASTRATING CHOIRBOYS IS INHUMANE... AT THE HEIGHT OF THE CRAZE FOR MALE SOPRANOS [19TH CENTURY], 5,000 BOYS A YEAR WERE CASTRATED IN ORDER TO PRESERVE THEIR UNBROKEN VOICES. THOSE WHO PROVED MEDIOCRE MOULDERED AWAY IN PARISH CHOIRS, BUT THE SUCCESSFUL "SACRED MONSTERS" WERE COSSETED AND ADORED. (Now, decades ago, I knew a fellow whose "side gig" was pressing bootleg LP's of great Opera performances and selling them to enthusiasts and collectors. He swore to me that he had an actual recording of one such "castrato" whom he would not identify, but after he had downed a few, he would fantasize about putting his record on the market. Well, thanks to the internet, I searched for just such an item and it exists, a recording of the very last Castrato early in the 20th Century. Now, if I found this, you can too, and that is all I will say as I barely know what I am writing about and I do not want to think any more about it, lol!)
So, imagine centuries ago, when Martin Luther challenged the Church, that rather than resisting him, thereby starting The Reformation, the Church fathers said, "Luther, come to Rome, we are making you Pope," what today's world would look like. Yep, a theocracy, perhaps a Western Iran? And that is the premise of this "counter-factual" novel, one that 'won' the award for best sci-fi novel for 1976! Now, cue up ten-year old boy soprano, Hubert Anvil, singing in an English cathedral during the funeral service of the just-deceased Pope (most Popes are English, but serve out of Rome), whose immaculate voice brings him to the attention of powerful Vatican officials. In short order, steps are taken, with Hubert's approval, to set in motion the procedures to have an, ahem, 'alteration.' But when Hubert at the same time discovers the biology behind it, as well as girls and sex, murder and mayhem ensue. Most enjoyable in this wildly entertaining literary fiction are the references to entities like the Benedict Arnold Memorial in NYC, the Second Mass of Mozart or the 20 Symphonies of Beethoven, an obscure American (the US is New England) playwright named Will Shakespeare, and, best of all, a heroic New England naval warfare hero, one Edgar Allen Poe! A fun and brilliant read! ( )

If the Vatican ruled the world....what might the world be? It’s 1976 in the novel but most of the world is Christendom and is smothered in bureaucratic tyranny conducted for the glory of God. As noted by reviewers it is a terrific study in tyranny but with a good story. Hubert must decide whether it's worth giving up a sexual life he is too young to know about for a singing career. Of course, many of the other characters have much to gain or lose from Hubert’s choice. Creative, a great read and a timeless message on government. ( )