Michael Tomasky Wrote a Novel, and It’s Not Remotely What You’d Expect

Killing Baby Hitler is a witty, madcap tour through history and the future—and a biting commentary on our contemporary political situation.

Alex Shephard: I’ve always wanted to say that our guest needs no introduction, but I have never been able to do so, because it has never been true. But now it is. Our guest is Michael Tomasky, the editor of The New Republic. Michael has written a funny, biting new novel, Killing Baby Hitler, that is more or less about just that, although it is a little more complicated. Set in a dystopian 2141, the world in the future looks a lot like ours, just worse; divided into spheres of political influence and ravaged by climate change. A group of scientists discover time travel, and they go back to late nineteenth-century Austria to try to set their worlds right by killing baby Hitler. What follows is a sharp and sometimes scathing satire, and a novel that hopscotches between genres— speculative sci-fi, thriller. It’s also just a fun and funny novel. I’m joined by my colleagues Emily Cooke and Kirsten Denker, and also Michael Tomasky. Welcome.

Michael Tomasky: Hey, that was great, thanks.

Alex: I was wondering if we can start just by talking about the genesis for the novel itself. When did you get this idea, and when did you start to work through it?

Michael: I seem to remember that I got the idea in late 2022 and I don’t remember exactly how. It just popped into my head one morning, I think, while I was exercising. The question obviously isn’t original to me. I did go and immediately Google to see if anybody had written a book about it. I didn’t turn up who anyone had, although I have subsequently been told that none other than Stephen Fry wrote a novel that was built around this idea back in 1996. I looked it up: It’s true, Michiko Kakutani absolutely savaged it in The New York Times. I haven’t even bothered to read it, because I’m just going to live with the idea that mine might actually be funnier than Stephen Fry’s. So anyway, I had the idea late 2022; it was my New Year’s resolution to sit down on New Year’s Day and just start writing and see what came out and see what happened. I was immediately confronted by the reality, which I hadn’t thought of, I admit, that if I’m going to write a novel about time travel, it probably needs to be set in the future when time travel might theoretically be plausible. So I just kind of picked 2141 randomly out of the air, and that’s when it’s set.

Then I realized I have to build this world of 2141. You referenced how dystopian it is, although the idea, for example, that men like Peter Thiel or his heirs literally own countries, which is the case in my novel—that seemed a lot more far-fetched in early 2023, when I was writing that bit, than it seems now. So anyway, I created this world of 2141, and then the characters travel back to 1889 Austria, or at least two of them do, so I had to create that world. I actually did a lot of reading and research about that world. It’s a novel, so I make a lot of stuff up, but a lot of it is grounded in reality, too. Then of course there’s the question of whether they succeed and so on, but we’re not going to give that away.

Emily Cooke: I’m curious—it’s essentially a comic novel. I found it really funny, but of course it describes all these very disturbing developments, not least the division of the world into these horrifying spheres owned by the mega-rich. Of course, it’s fiction, and also tonally it’s quite different from the sort of thing that you’re doing every day as the editor of this magazine and as a writer. I was wondering, was that difference part of the motivation to write it? Did you want a relief from the work that you normally do, or was there some way that engaging with this different form that performed that function for you?

Michael: Yeah, it’s a really good question. In some ways it was a release from what I do, and from thinking about Donald Trump for 14 hours a day, and it was fun. I wrote it in this chair where I’m sitting, and I would come down here on Saturday morning at 7 o’clock before other people in my house were awake and start pounding it out, and I had a lot of fun writing it and letting my imagination run in that way. At the same time, it wasn’t that different from the work I and we do at TNR. It’s still a pretty political novel, as we’ve already established, and it deals in a lot of the stuff that we all have to think about, the way the world is turning very dark on us very fast. I wrote an exaggerated version of that, and it was fun to write, but it’s also sort of frightening to think about the fact that the world that I conjure up in 2141 (and there’s another section that’s in the 2060s) is also really bad. My own daughter will still be alive then, presumably, so it was kind of unsettling in some ways too. Kirsten Denker: You were saying how between your writing it and it being published, some things are actually seemingly a little bit less absurd than they were when you wrote them. I copyedited this book, but I also gave it another little read to sort of refresh my mind on the details before this session, and the thing that jumped out at........

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