Tipping points

Alternate history is one of my favorite things, both for reading and writing. There’s something about taking real-life history/culture/politics/etc. and twisting it in a different direction that I find enormously appealing and interesting.

The thing is, I keep running across people who define “alternate history” a lot more narrowly than I do. By their definition, alternate history seems to mean only those books that alter one specific event (usually a battle won or lost by a different side [bonus points if it was a really obscure battle that had a really major impact] or the unexpected death/survival of a key historical figure) and extrapolate how countries, cultures, and society generally would develop if this “tipping point” had gone differently. Harry Turtledove is a master of this kind of thing, because he is an actual historian with a writer’s eye for those “what if” points.

People who work from this definition always start by asking me what “tipping points” I’ve used in my fiction. The problem is, I’m not a historian. I also don’t write the sort of alternate history that depends on a single event tilting in a different direction and having everything develop logically and linearly from then on. I write fantasy, and if I were going to be logical about it, the simple existence of magic would logically change history into something completely unrecognizable very quickly. The only thing that would probably stay the same would be the geography.

Consequently, when people ask “What tipping point did you use?” I always feel as if they either didn’t bother to read or think about what I actually wrote, or they have only the vaguest idea of what constitutes “history.” Because in order for wizards to be an accepted part of society in a recognizable Regency England, magic has to have been around for a very long time, and if it’s been around for a very long time, the odds of there being a recognizable Regency England (complete with Napoleonic wars and the Battle of Waterloo in the background) are very, very slim.

I write the kind of alternate history that isn’t a strictly logical “if this one thing changed, what would history look like?” development. It’s more “if the world worked like this, and history was still kind of recognizable but not really the same, what bits do I want to be recognizable and what fun stuff can I do?” Tipping points are, however, a perfectly good way of working up an alternate history background. They’re just not my way.

In my experience, people who want tipping points often seem to look mainly for human-based events, frequently political ones (e.g., Napoleon won at Waterloo; Julius Caesar survived his attempted assassination; Richard the Lionheart survived his real-life fatal injury; assassins killed pick-a-ruler-or-general), but sometimes involving other major historical events (Columbus’ ships sank before they got back to Spain, Buddhism spread north and west instead of east, the Library of Alexandria was never destroyed).

The trouble is that human history has a lot more to do with chaos theory than with straightforward cause-and-effect. People don’t always make the choices that seem most obvious or logical, and individual actions (even those of powerful political figures) can take decades to make a difference on a continental scale (let alone a global one). Human-centered tipping points are perfect for writers like Turtledove, who are interested in exploring the butterfly effect of initially small changes over the course of centuries (or in pointing out that seemingly major changes don’t necessarily have the expected result, because people are complicated—as in The Guns of the South). A single human-based tipping point may not be as good a fit for a writer looking to make a point about society. The butterfly effect takes a while to propagate, and it isn’t as predictable or linear as these writers would usually prefer.

A writer who wants a believably major, fast, widespread, lasting change to history is often better advised to look for plausible natural disasters—for example, having the Black Death kill off 90% of the population of Europe in the mid-1300s as Kim Stanley Robinson did in The Years of Rice and Salt, or having a large meteorite impact the Earth in 1952, resulting in a 50-year deadline before climate change makes the planet uninhabitable, as Mary Robinette Kowal did in The Calculating Stars.

Natural disasters can affect a wide area very quickly. (The 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora caused a worldwide “year without a summer” in 1816, resulting in famines but also in a burst of scientific investigation and inventions to cope with it. An alternate history in which the eruption happened a few decades earlier, later, or to a much lesser extent would likely have a significant effect on the speed of development of science and technology). Earthquakes, tidal waves and volcanic eruptions can wipe out cities (Pompeii, the Krakatau volcano/tsunami combination). In the absence of medical knowledge and/or effective treatments/prevention, plagues can decimate populations (estimates are that the Black Death wiped out 30-50% of the European population), and diseases like typhus had a significant effect on warfare (on several occasions, entire armies turned around and went home because too many were sick—see Hans Zinssner’s Rats, Lice, and History, which contains my all-time favorite footnote: “If the reader does not know the meaning of this word, it is too bad.” [The word in question is “saprophyte.”])

As tipping points, natural disasters can be harder to target if the author wants to make a point about society. On the other hand, natural disasters are totally believable and very difficult to predict, making an invented disaster as plausible as increasing the death toll from the Black Death. Human-centered events can be a bit easier to aim, but require more of an understanding of how history develops if the writer wants the result to look and feel believable (and, again in my opinion, things like inventions and scientific discoveries are under-utilized as potential tipping points).