The Boys from Brazil (novel)
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The Boys from Brazil (1976) is a fiction thriller novel by Ira Levin. It was subsequently made into a movie of the same name which was released in 1978. This is one of the earliest pieces of science fiction to deal seriously with the prospect of cloning.
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[edit] Story line
Yakov Liebermann is an elderly gentleman who is known as a Nazi hunter: he runs a center in Vienna that documents crimes against humanity perpetrated during the Holocaust. The waning interest of the Western nations in tracking down Nazi criminals has forced him to move the center to his lodgings.
Then, in September 1974, he receives a disturbing phone call from a young man who claims he has just finished eavesdropping on the Angel of Death, Dr. Josef Mengele, the concentration camp medical doctor who performed horrible experiments on Jewish victims during World War II. According to the young man, Mengele is activating the Kameradenwerk for a strange assignment: he is sending out six Nazis to kill 94 men, who share a few common traits. All men are civil servants and all of them have to be killed on a certain date, give or take a few days.
Before the young man can finish the conversation, there is a muffled sound of sudden action, then icy nothing, then the line goes dead.
Liebermann hesitates about what to do: he gets so many prank calls. But what if what the young man said is true? He decides to try to find out what's going on. A crazy hunt for Mengele and his boys ensues.
[edit] Notes
The book claims that the characters, with the exception of the 'persons of note', are not intended to represent specific living persons. However, the Liebermann character bears a more than passing resemblance to Simon Wiesenthal.
The meaning of the title only becomes evident later in the book when Yakov Liebermann begins to discover why the 94 men are to be killed.
[edit] Trivia
The controversial song Angel of Death by heavy metal band Slayer about Mengele uses direct phrases from The Boys from Brazil.
[edit] See also
Alternate history novels that deal with the Nazi regime:
The theme of a clone produced in order to give "a second life" to a dead VIP is dealt with (in a quite different way) in the Science Fiction novel Cyteen by C. J. Cherryh, and in Joshua Son of None by Nancy Freedman.
