Publisher's Synopsis
In times of communism, party members received updates from the great Soviet Encyclopedia every month. When in July 1953 the dreaded Beria was finally arrested, the encyclopedia still contained a long and laudatory entry dedicated to him. A few days after the arrest, the comrades received an envelope with a page and some instructions: they were asked to, with great care and the help of a razor blade, cut out the text about Beria and replace it with the one attached to them, referring to the Bering Strait. Thus, Bering replaced a disgraced Beria, who, following the usual method of the Soviet authorities, disappeared without a trace. This essay, which won the Grand Prix of Science-Fiction, talks about history in the conditional, what could have been and was not. He talks about uchronia: what would have happened if Cleopatra's nose had been shorter or Napoleon had emerged victorious from Waterloo... Carrère mixes chance and causality, reality and fiction, and proposes a most provocative game.
