The Alteration
Kingsley Amis
New York Review Books
<span>BOOKER PRIZE–WINNING AUTHOR<br><br>Set  in a world in which the Reformation failed, this award-winning science  fiction tale is “one of the best . . . alternate-worlds novels in  existence” (Philip K. Dick)</span><span><br></span><span><br>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.<br><br> 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 </span><span>The Man in the High Castle</span><span>.<br><br> </span><span>The Alteration</span><span> won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best science-fiction novel in 1976.</span>