Alternate History

One of several things I discovered this week is that when you have 31 hours of driving (spit over several days), a convention gig, and most especially a bunch of editorial revisions to do on a collection of blog posts, remembering that you also have to write a new blog post is easy to forget. I mean, I was (re)writing blog posts! Tons of them!  So my apologies for skipping Wednesday. We should be pretty much back to normal after this, at least, I hope so.

Octopodicon was a small but energetic steampunk convention, and I had fun. One of the things they wanted me to talk about was alternate history, and since that’s all right at the top of my brain now, and I haven’t talked about it here for a while, I thought I’d do that today.

For those unfamiliar with the genre, alternate history or alternate universe (AU) fiction is where the author changes the outcome of some historical event, or introduces some new non-historical event or thing into real history, and then works out (or pretends to work out) how this change affects the background of the story. Sometimes, the author is looking at the world years, decades, or centuries after the change, as in Randall Garrett’s Lord Darcy stories, which are set in the early 1900s in a world where the point of change was that Richard the Lion-Hearted did not die from the crossbow wound, but instead recovered and reigned for a good many more years, during which somebody discovered how to make magic work reliably. So that author has roughly 900 years for that one alteration to affect the history we know.

At the other end, you have stories like Harry Turtledove’s The Guns of the South, in which some time-travelers give Robert E. Lee modern machine guns in a deliberate attempt to change history. This novel covers the actual moment of divergence – the arrival of the time-travelers – and then follows the changes that it makes in the American Civil War (which are not quite what the time-travelers expected).

The farther back in time the point of change is, the bigger the impact it is likely to have on history-as-we-know-it. This means that writers who want their AU background to be just a bit different but still recognizable either have to pick a point of change that is relatively close to the time when they are writing their story, or else they have to fudge. I fudged the Frontier Magic trilogy rather heavily; if the changes I made to human pre-history had actually occurred, there is no way the world of 1852 would be at all recognizable (except possibly for the geography). This is probably true of any AU in which magic or magical creatures like dragons or unicorns or werewolves exist, or where magic works and has been known and developed since the very beginning of human history.

People who write really strict alternate history do their level best not to fudge anything, but to make as realistic and believable a projection of the changes that happen as a result of their one basic change as they possibly can. This is often easier if the writer picks a really obscure battle or discovery or person as the divergence point, because if it is really obscure, hardly anyone will know enough about its significance to argue with you. On the other hand, if it is that obscure, you will probably have to have some kind of end-note or appendix that explains what the divergence point is and why you chose it, or almost no one will realize how clever you are being.

Some writers take the other approach, making their divergence point some well-known historical event. The trick here is to make it specific. “The South won the American Civil War” is an instantly recognizable divergence point for anyone living in North America, but if that’s what the writer takes as a jumping-off point, they’re going to run into trouble, because there are too many Civil War buffs who want to know exactly how and why the South could have won. That means that if the writer wants the South to have won, they probably need to do enough research to find something that was a turning point in the war, and have that go differently.

Because even though alternate history is alternate, all of the usual worldbuilding caveats and principles apply, plus a few extra. To be believable and effective, the alternate history has to be internally consistent…but it also has to be consistent with those parts of actual history that the author isn’t changing. In an AU, anything that the author mentions as being different from real history is presumed to be both significant and derived from whatever changes result from the point of divergence. If the author doesn’t know when safety matches were invented and gets the date wrong, it will throw off a certain part of the readership who will be sure it was done deliberately. This is frustrating, because it means you have to do a lot of research to find out how things really were, just so you can change some of it but not all of it.

Nevertheless, alternate history can be a lot of fun, especially if you enjoy research and/or are a history buff. Still, if you are going to try it you should be aware that there are a lot of highly opinionated history geeks out there who not only will argue about whatever path you decide your new history will take, but also will be able to cite historical sources to support their contentions. This can lead to all sorts of arguments, because unless the author is showing the divergence point itself (as in The Guns of the South), the characters in the story cannot know what the differences are between their world and ours, or why they occurred. Their history is just how it happened for them, and there is seldom reason for them to talk about alternative possibilities they don’t even know exist. This means that a lot of the writer’s development work is invisible to the reader, and people will complain that you didn’t think about X when you have twelve pages of notes on why X is the way it is, only there’s never any way to get them into the story.