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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^{[citation needed]}. As of August 2006, an updated remake of this film is in the works with New Line Cinema, director Brett Ratner, and screenwriters Richard Potter and Matthew Stravitz. Production is expected to start late in 2007 or early in 2008.

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 camp 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.

Alternate history novels that deal with the Nazi regime:

• Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle
• Robert Harris's Fatherland
• Stephen Fry's Making History
• It Happened Here
• The Ultimate Solution
• 1945 (novel)
• SS-GB
• In the Presence of Mine Enemies

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. In some way it is also the topic of HP Lovecraft's Strange Case of Charles Dexter Ward.

• Review on the Ira Levin website