What if - Or Worse

Alternate History in Context

In the article "Remembrance of Things to Come" I showed that the smallest units of meaning within a story, units as small as the individual word or tense of verb, and then the individual sentences within which those words are used (such as the first sentence of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty Four), contribute more than might be supposed to the effect of the whole story. Now I want to explore the opposite - that certain types of texts gain their effect, indeed, could not exist, without the whole text being able to call on the existence of other works, the existence of complete genres. The best example of this is SF's sub-genre, Alternate History.

This article came to mind when I was fortunate enough to be invited to join the 1998 Eastercon panel discussing Alternate History. My ideas have been tempered by the presence of John Whitbourn on the stage, as an author along with Tony Cullen and me as readers and critics. Whitbourn is knowledgeable about the genre he writes; he was interested in history and the theory of history; and he writes a different kind of Alternate History. We did not cover the field, though, and one of the points we did not mention, among others we missed on the day, is that Alternate History is one of SF's sub-genres where "the idea as hero" is seminal. We did agree, though, that Alternate History sometimes moves SF close to academia (as the recent collection of essays Virtual History, edited by Niall Ferguson, suggests) because it is or can be an intellectual exercise, both in writing and the reading.

Most significantly, though, none of us (nor any member of the audience - I have only found a mention by Brian Aldiss to show that this has been realised before) mentioned the single underpinning fact of Alternate History: every Alternate History actually has another genre as its skeleton. It is a genre like a disembodied spirit that has to steal some other flesh in order to appear on Earth⁽¹⁾.

Let me prove it, by examining as wide a range of Alternate Histories as I can.

Most obviously, there are Alternate Histories written as detective stories. These are the kind which tend to become cross-over best-sellers, with examples including Len Deighton's SS-GB (1978), Robert Harris's Fatherland (1992), and Richard Dreyfus and Harry Turtledove's The Two Georges (1996). An Alternate History exists to describe its alternate world and a detective hero, of course, goes everywhere. From the days of Dashiel Hammett and Raymond Chandler the private eye has moved from the bedrooms of the rich to the gutters of the poor, which makes the detective story an ideal genre for the Alternate Historian to co-opt, allowing suspects to exist in every new cranny of civilization and getting in everything an author could want to describe in his or her alternate world. Critics have pointed out how Fatherland can be read in parallel with Philip Kerr's A German Requiem, a historical thriller set in 1946, featuring the same historical characters.

Dystopiae, too, are very popular. In fact, one of the first, Sarban's The Sound of his Horn (1952) falls into this category, based on the common premise that the Nazis won the Second World War. One of the latest, Eugene Byrne and Kim Newman's Back In The USSA (1997), is dystopian, too, but supposes that it was the USA which went communist in 1917, so that today capitalist Britain is allied with the Tsar. And the classic, Philip K. Dick's The Man In The High Castle (1962) belongs in this group.

Utopias are much rarer - Brian Stableford has suggested that Harry Harrison's A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah (1972) is one such, if a trifle ironic, and taking Donald Tucker's description of The Two Georges ("the American revolution didn't happen. The sun never sets on the British empire ... No large scale wars at all since the late 18th century") some might regard that as a world to be longed for, as well⁽²⁾.

Then there are the historical novels - Harry Turtledove's Guns of the South (1992) is a good example, which scarcely moves out of its Civil War setting. Guns of the South must belong to an enormous genre read exclusively in the USA - the civil war novel, which has almost no British equivalent except the Napoleonic sea-stories of Hornblower, Ramage etc. Guns of the South revolves around Afrikaners smuggling AK47s through a time machine to the Confederates. The advantage of this to Turtledove's story is that the AK47 remains a small arm which cannot end the war immediately so that the battlefields, skirmishes and firefights of the Civil War remain open to him to describe in detail. Tedious detail. Harry Harrison and John Holmes' The Hammer and the Cross (1993) is set in the wars between the Saxons and the Viking invaders, which includes a homage to a true historical novel set in the same period, Henry Treece's The Green Man (which recounts the events that were re-told as Hamlet, in a shorter and more readable length). And some of the British one-offs such as Kingsley Amis's The Alteration (1976) and Keith Robert's Pavane (1968) are historical too, able to answer questions such as How did a semaphore station work; or, How did the Roman Catholic Church supply and treat its castrati. Answering questions is not necessarily the first purpose of these authors, but in practice that is what happens. In his autobiography L. Sprague De Camp describes how he came to write the classic Lest Darkness Fall (1939), by reading Robert Graves' Count Belisarius (a straight-forward historical chronicle of the sixth century Roman empire published the year before) and then allowing for the effect of small changes. Juveniles will have been reading the novels of Joan Aitken for years without realising that they were reading Alternate History, too.

At the opposite end of the space-time continuum come the works which exploit space opera, sci-fi and the "sensawunda", which would include (the near-ubiquitous) Harry Turtledove's World War quartet of the early '90s. And I would put Harry Harrison's earlier Eden trilogy (1984-1988) here, too, as Harrison explores a world of dinosaurs who escaped extinction millions of years ago and evolved into sentience and a bizarrely different technology.

When, Stephen Baxter wrote the much more realistic Voyage (1996), in which Richard Nixon allows NASA to send a manned vessel to Mars, he chose to write a blockbuster. His models, I guess, were Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff and Norman Mailer's A Fire On The Moon, mixed with Arthur Hailey's Wheels and perhaps even Harold Robbins' The Betsy, both of them best-sellers set in the boardrooms and bedrooms of powerful industrialists. At least some of Baxter's heroes are accountants.

Now these genres are skeletons, and few of the titles use them pure. For instance, Sarban includes a bit of soft porn, Story of O style as I recall, while Harrison and Holmes' inclusion of the historical detail of the tortures inflicted by the Viking puts part of their book into a field close to gore and slasher horror. And Amis's The Alteration has bits of comedy of manners in the style of Benson's Mapp And Lucia. So nothing is perfect and penultimately, a list like this one has to make room for one-offs and works otherwise incapable of categorization such as Norman Spinrad's The Iron Dream (1972), a heroic fantasy novel written by an Adolf Hitler who emigrated to the USA after World War One and became a pulp author. But the text of Hitler's novel is actually only a part (though the largest part) of Spinrad's novel, so it is not a pure fantasy as such, and the text with its commentary by "Homer Whipple" actually appears just as other unattractive texts are published with explanations by academic publishers (Zone Books now publish Sacher-Masoch's Venus in Furs with a commentary by Felix Guattari longer than the fiction, for instance). I suppose, that other works such as Gibson and Sterling's The Difference Engine (1990) must be included here, too, as works which almost consciously categorize themselves as being outside of a category, so that works under this penultimate heading might be called Challenging Russell's Paradox⁽³⁾.

And finally there is a small exceptional group of works whose skeleton is phantasy, such as Ford's The Dragon Waiting, and the novels of John Whitbourn. Whitbourn, who has been writing since the early 1990s, chooses to suppose both that some historical incident happened otherwise, but also that some scientific standard is not fixed: in John Whitbourn's world magic works. (Magic is not such a problem, Byrne and Newman use a different kind of magic glass in a long chapter in which James Bolam and Rodney Bewes meet Likely Lads Terry Collier and Bob Ferris after Bob and Terry return from duty in Vietnam). So this world can react with both the magical and the fictional in Alternate History with no problem.

I may not have listed all the genres inhabited by Alternate History above⁽⁴⁾, but the list must come close. Obviously, there are very few titles which challenge my thesis.

Most Alternate Histories are based on the premise that there is only one time stream and that, in the world of their fictions, there was a single Point of Divergence. That is, that the Armada succeeded, or that the Wobblies came to power in America, or that one man could introduce double entry book-keeping to the Romans. Other novels move into other theories of time - that there are parallel time lines in each of which each possibility of what might happen does happen, for instance (see the entries on "Alternate Worlds" and "Time Paradoxes" in The Encyclopaedia of Science Fiction) and some authors have been troubled by the theory underlying their divergence. For instance, Philip K. Dick started a sequel to The Man in the High Castle, and wrote two chapters before he gave up. In the original novel his characters are helped in their opposition to the Nazi/Japanese Axis by reading a samizdat novel, "The Grasshopper Lies Heavy", which is an alternate history in which the Allies won, but the characters do not suppose that the Allied had won somewhere. In his sequel, though, Dick has Goering and Goebbels discovering "the parallel universe, which we then called die Nebenwelt ... an alternate Earth to ours in which the Rome-Berlin-Tokyo Axis mishandled the war and allowed the Allied Nations of Communism and Plutocracy a victory by default." Dick apparently could not maintain a theory of alternate and simultaneous worlds and abandoned the project⁽⁵⁾.

If parallel worlds do not exist the responsibility on an author to work with historical realism increases. John Whitbourn, for instance, looked at the world of today and asked, What more than anything else has given it to us? and decided that it was the victory of William III over James II. Often presented in the history books as the victory of Protestant liberalism over Catholic authoritarianism, (what is sometimes called the Whig Theory of History), Whitbourn thought it was actually the opportunity of some proto-capitalists to use a Dutchman with a nominal claim to the throne to give their coup d'etat an air of respectability as they set up the Bank of England, took over the financial control of the country and introduced capitalism. The Royal Changeling (1998) was the result of Whitbourn's historical re-consideration⁽⁶⁾.

When Whitbourn mentioned this on stage, others recalled the words of the eighteenth century historian Edward Gibbon, when Gibbon mentioned in passing what might have happened in 732CE, if the Arab invaders had won the Battle of Tours, and not the French leader Charles Martel. Whitbourn quoted the passage verbatim: "Perhaps the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelations of Mahomet". Truth, like the Whig truth challenged by Whitbourn, might be no more than the winning orthodoxy, as the cynical Gibbon recognised two hundred years ago.

There are some areas of SF where what is meant by "science" is actually "logic" and in the construction of Alternate Histories, logic matters. Whitbourn's logic is good, demonstrating that a Point of Divergence does not have to be a major battle - in Lest Darkness Fall de Camp saw that it could be something as simple as the introduction of distillation, the flat-bed printing press or training Roman merchants in Double Entry Book-keeping.

To change from a list of genres, to a list of problems threatening Alternate History, I can identify three.

Firstly, Alternate History is about providing what did not happen, and using this opportunity some Alternate Histories run close to becoming defences of the unreasonable (and the risk of neo-Nazis using this as a means of advancing their cause has meant that the internet news-group soc.history.what-if has strong rules on posting). Discussing Nazi dystopiae, after listing works such as those of Sarban, Brian Stableford says, "An interesting exception is Budspy (1987) by David Dvorkin, where a successful Third Reich is presented more evenhandedly", which seems a strange suggestion, for apart from trains running on time, I am not sure what else there might be to present more evenhandedly about the Third Reich⁽⁷⁾. Other authors go through stranger hoops to avoid defending the indefensible and giving offence. A minor example of this is Turtledove's Guns of the South, where Robert E Lee wins the war with the aid of his AK47 rifles, becomes President of the Confederate States but is troubled with the "peculiar institution", eventually turning on his AWB allies in another civil war, winning and manumitting the slaves - this seems unhealthily close to a desire to have one's cake and eat it too.

Secondly, the rate of production threatens quality, if only because authors deny themselves time to think. After his World War quartet Harry Turtledove has now started on a new series set in the First World War. That is a subject which has tended to be ignored, but as Interzone has pointed out Turtledove's rate of production is so high one cannot help feeling he will not do justice to the subject. Similarly, Harry Harrison has now started a new series with Stars and Stripes Forever, based on the premise that the Britain invades the USA during the Civil War of the 1860s, to fight major land wars. Britain and the Union, of course, faced tension during the war over the Alabama Incident, but the whole series is based on a premise that Britain would fight a major land war, which is not historically accurate. National policy, what the military historian Basil Liddell-Hart called "The British Way in Warfare", was to control the seas and allow allies to provide the mass armies. Harrison has to do more than suppose that army X rather than army Y won the Battle of Factium, or suppose that inventor A invented the Pesudophone in year Z and got his invention mass produced, he has to suppose that the years before his Point of Divergence had been different, too. This challenges the logic I mentioned above.

There is a third possible problem area, too, which is only appearing in recent fiction. In Back In The USSA Byrne and Newman, like many writers (not limited to SF), have a mingling of the real and fictional (Bewes and Bolam meeting Bob and Terry, for instance, rather as BBC TV's Goodnight Sweetheart has had Nicholas Lyndhurst travelling back to WW II Britain and meeting Mr Mainwaring and Frank Pike from Dad's Army in their bank). This is reasonable, but Byrne and Newman's characters also meet both William Randolph Hearst and Charles Foster "Citizen" Kane - one Orson Welles' portrait of the other - and Hearst's and Kane's co-existence seems impossible. (Since the characters are mentioned only in passing I take the continued existence of one or the other as a slip in the sub-editing that should have ensured better consistency). This is unlikely to become a serious problem, unlike that of the overproduction.

Kingsley Amis, editor, critic and author, years before he wrote his one Alternate History saw the promise and the threat, when he wrote about the prospects for SF in New Maps of Hell (1960):

"The economics of science-fiction writing are obviously important here, demanding as they do a huge output in a medium that calls for a sustained flow of novelties; it is no wonder that some of these get inflated to book-length. One hopes that as the audience for science fiction increases, and with it the author's remuneration, there will be less of this forced expansion, but I cannot foresee any change in the basic fact that this is a short-story or at any rate a long-story mode, with hundreds of successes in these forms against a bare couple of dozen in the novel. These are commonly the result of the a writer having to come up with an idea, in my special sense (KA means Ideas as Hero), that is not exhausted in a single demonstration; one thinks, for instance, Ward Moore's Bring The Jubilee, which takes us on a tour of a powerful and prosperous Confederate States of America and a penurious, backward, agricultural United States. The hero, a military historian, gets a time machine built and goes back to check on his theories about the Southern victory at Gettysburg. His appearance on the field disconcerts an advanced element of General Lee's troops to the point where they refuse to advance and occupy a vital height. Thus the world we know is set in train, with the hero trapped in its 1860's, for the scuffle his presence precipitates leads to the death of a Confederate officer who was later to have fathered the men who put the money for the time-machine."

Amis was too prescient - the world did not diverge as we might have hoped and we did not escape the forced expansions, as Turtledove unfortunately proves. Fortunately, there are enough of the other kind. Among others, Byrne and Newman have shown that works can be constructed that are not exhausted in a single demonstration - that stand, like The Man in the High Castle, repeated reading. And writers have realised, too, that novelty does not lie just in identifying a historical period previously avoided by Alternate Historians and annexing it. The divergence that occurs has to have an underlying rationale, which implies that the authors have reasoned what might happen, and more importantly can produce justifications for their reasoning. Now each of those authors' initial premises might be peculiar (that magic works, say), but their logic in following its conclusions must be good. Which means that when readers finds a new, good Alternate Historian that writer is likely to be not just a good SF author but a good historian as well. However, no matter what Divergence occurs and at what Point of Divergence on the calendar a book is supposed to take its driving power, an author still has a story to tell, and that story will take the form of another genre. Whether it is a historical novel of what England would have been like if the unattractive Vikings had been even more successfully rapacious, or a detective story investigating the disappearance of Nazi insiders, authors must find a way in which readers can explore the Nebenwelt. It is as they read a history or a detective story or a dystopia or whatever that readers discover that this fictional world is not congruent with their own. Readers know the premises of genre - they are unsettled by the history within it, which is why they chose to read Alternate History. Still, readers will recognise good invention and will search for it. Writers have to satisfy that demand.

If they can be found. If, as John Whitbourn (and Byrne and Newman) have shown, new authors can develop new and rewarding explorations of possible worlds.

If. Or in this genre:

What if.

1. Brian Aldiss's note on genres occurs in his essay "Judgement at Jonbar" in S.F. Horizon's #1 (1964): "There is no sf novel that is purely an sf novel. At some stage all sf novels turn into something else" (p.22)

2. Donald Tucker is quoted from his Pteranodon's View website: "http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/4123/ah.htm"

3. (Bertrand) Russell's Paradox asks whether something which defines a group also defines or excludes itself. For instance, should a library catalogue which is a book be included in itself since it is book or should the catalogue list all books in the library except itself, even though it is a book physically in the library?

4. 'I wonder if there is room in the letter column to add a note to my article "What If - Or Worse" (VECTOR 202). In that article I pointed out that all Alternate Histories take the form of other genres (detective stories, histories, fantasies etc), but luckily covered my back by

saying that my list was not complete. I have now discovered a genre I missed: the Romance (or Trashy Novellete as Para Handy called it).

'I have not extended my research to reading any of these works, but THE ROCK on-line magazine (15th March 1999 issue) had a long interview with Astrid Cooper, whom it describes as "coordinator of the Australian Network of Futuristic, Fantasy and Paranormal Romance Writers and editor of Realms Beyond, the bi-monthly newsletter of the network."

'From Ms Cooper's descriptions of her work I get the impression that Robespierre does not lead the Terror, but instead spends too much of his time ripping the bodice of Lady Jacintha Bottibombe, when he should be sending Louis XVII's imperial fleet somewhere to beat the English again.' - letter to the editor of VECTOR Sat, 03 Apr 1999

5. The abandoned chapters appear in THE SHIFTING REALITIES OF PHILIP K DICK: SELECTED LITERARY AND PHILOSOPHICAL WRITINGS. Edited and Introduced by Lawrence Sutin (New York: Pantheon 1995)

6. INTERZONE has now published a long interview with John Whitbourn, which does not seem to contradict the views I attribute to him here.

7. Brian Stableford is quoted from THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF SCIENCE FICTION edited by John Clue and Peter Nicholls (London Orbit 1993)