num_pages: 205
description: In Kingsley Amis’s virtuoso foray into virtual history it is 1976 but the modern world is a medieval relic, frozen in intellectual and spiritual time ever since Martin Luther was promoted to pope back in the sixteenth century. Stephen the Third, the king of England, has just died, and Mass (Mozart’s second requiem) is about to be sung to lay him to rest. In the choir is our hero, Hubert Anvil, an extremely ordinary ten-year-old boy with a faultless voice. In the audience is a select group of experts whose job is to determine whether that faultless voice should be preserved by performing a certain operation. Art, after all, is worth any sacrifice.How Hubert realizes what lies in store for him and how he deals with the whirlpool of piety, menace, terror, and passion that he soon finds himself in are the subject of a classic piece of counterfactual fiction equal to Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle .The Alteration won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best science-fiction novel in 1976.
language: English
title: The Alteration
titlecomplete: The Alteration
characters: Hubert Anvil
genres: Fiction, Science Fiction, Religion, British Literature, Speculative Fiction, Literature, Science Fiction Fantasy, Alternate History, Historical Fiction, Fantasy
ratings_count: 1434
awards: awardedAt: 220953600000
name: John W. Campbell Memorial Award
category: Best Science Fiction Novel
publisher: Penguin Books Ltd