Old stories, new boundaries: What-if questions are answered in different worlds

Have you ever lamented the road not taken, the kiss not stolen or the harsh word spoken?

If so, and who hasn't, you understand on a personal level the appeal of a category of speculative fiction, or science fiction, known as alternate history.

There are no mulligans in the real world, no do-overs in the game of life. But what if there were? What would you do differently and how would it change who you have become?

What if Hitler had survived and Germany had won World War II? What if Lincoln had not been assassinated? What if the South had won the Civil War? What if the U.S. had invaded Britain during the Civil War? What if England had won the Revolutionary War? What if the dinosaurs still lived?

And what, asked Steven Barnes in his novel "Lion's Blood," if Africa had colonized the New World.

There are even more imaginative scenarios. What if aliens had landed at the start of World War II? What if racist South Africans traveled back in time to arm the Confederacy with AK-47s?

These last two ideas are from the fevered and prolific mind of Harry Turtledove, regarded as the dominant writer in the genre today.

The first scenario has resulted in, so far, a seven-book saga under the "WorldWar" and "Colonization" umbrella titles. An eighth is due soon. The South African premise is examined in "The Guns of the South," regarded as a milestone in the genre.

Libraries and bookstores stock alternate history novels in the science fiction section, although Harry Harrison's "Stars and Stripes" Civil War-era trilogy about how the North and South unite to defeat England also can be found in the general fiction section.

You won't find such books in the history section, although that is likely where their authors spend time browsing. Many of these volumes are intellectually rigorous.

Turtledove has a doctorate in Byzantine history, which, he recently said, qualifies him as "one of the most unemployable human beings on the face of the planet."

"But one thing (academia) did teach me was how to do research. The imagination knows where it wants to go, and the research is the car that takes you there. Research is what makes the imagination feel real."

So when the words he puts in the mouth of Abraham Lincoln in "Guns of the South" or "How Few Remain" sound uncannily like the president himself, it's because they were taken or adapted from what he really said in speeches and letters.

Turtledove is a Los Angeles native, the son of blue-collar parents and the first in his family to go to college. He chose to study Byzantine history as a direct result of reading, at the age of 14, L. Sprague de Camp's 1939 "Lest Darkness Fall," about a historian who travels back in time to ancient Rome.

Turtledove said that he "wanted to find out how much was real and how much the author was making up. That book changed my life." Today, Turtledove said, his ideas come to him "in the shower and while doing the dishes."

"Guns of the South" "happened by accident" when a colleague described something being as anachronistic "as Robert E. Lee holding an Uzi." Turtledove's response was "Who'd want to give it to him? Time-traveling South Africans?" And then he realized, "Wow, I can do something with that."

Turtledove has written about 50 novels, including the upcoming "Ruled Britannia," about an Elizabethan England ruled by Spain. Its main characters are William Shakespeare and the Spanish playwright Lope De Vega.

"The Gryphon's Skull," about a dinosaur skull discovered in the 4th century B.C., was written under the pseudonym H.N. Turtletaub. It and the fifth volume in his "Darkness" / "The World at War" series, about World War II, waged with magic instead of technology, are both due in December.

Award-winning science fiction writer Steven Barnes spent a year and half of "very intense research, plotting and planning" to create "Lion's Blood," which envisions a New World colonized by Africans.

Barnes said the genre's unbending tenet is that "you can change one (significant) thing and one thing only and everything else must flow from that and must flow logically." For example, the industrialization of Africa is the major change that makes the "Lion's Blood" timeline possible.

He described alternate history's narrative arc as, "What if," "If only" and "If this goes on."

For "Lion's Blood" and its just completed sequel, "Zulu Heart," Barnes wondered "what would be necessary to create a technological situation in Africa" that would allow such a scenario and then took "a step back from there. You have to ask what prohibited it in the first place. And once you have a theory for that, then you can come up with ways to postulate" its opposite.

He knew his Islamic and African-centric New World depended on a Europe decimated by plague. Christopher Columbus had to have "drowned in the public baths" and St. Paul had to have been "kicked in the head by a donkey on the road to Damascus. Certain people did not live to be important." But in this story about a white slave and his African owner who become friends, these "facts" are a sort of backstory Barnes said he created for his own amusement.

Barnes, who is writing a new "Star Wars" novel and two books set in prehistoric Africa, is one of the few major African-American science fiction writers.

He said he turned to sci-fi as a fatherless youth "desperate for images of masculinity and power and sexuality."

Not seeing any characters who looked like him "created a drive for me to do something about it. I wanted to create a world that mirrored the world inside me."

While writing "Lion's Blood," Barnes identified with the "musicality and culture" of the Irish slave forced to live under adverse conditions and had difficulty relating to the slave's African owner "until I found the key to understanding Islam" through Sufism, a mystical form of Islam.

Barnes called his book's portrait of racial role reversal "social dynamite" because race remains the "largest unhealed wound in the American character. There have been hundreds of movies about the Civil War but almost never a single successful motion picture has been made that (explored) the one issue that made the war inevitable. It's too painful a legacy."

In fact, major alternate Civil War histories by writers like Harrison or Turtledove seem to concentrate on battle strategy, political machinations or the larger than life personalities of the participants, perhaps because those are the same interests of the target audience.

The Civil War is the subject of endless speculation "because there are so many 'what ifs,' " said Lance Herdegen at the Civil War Institute at Waukesha' Carroll College and the author of "Four Years with the Iron Brigade: The Civil War Journal of William Ray, Seventh Wisconsin Volunteers."

"Civil War buffs are pretty well read and are always looking for a new spin on a topic that's familiar to them." Such books can "make you think about history in a different light and that's always good because history has a reputation of being dull and not very informative. In fact it is the most fascinating subject we have, because it's about us."

Turtledove said that the Civil War was "the great choke-point in American history. What happened or didn't happen has influenced us ever since for better or worse."

He said World War II is a popular subject for alternate histories "because the Nazis have an enduring fascination to them. And also because people falsely imagine it also to be a great choke-point of the 20th century, although World War I was a lot more important and set up everything that followed."

Russell Letson, a reviewer for the science fiction magazine Locus who has written about and taught science fiction for 25 years, said that because alternate histories tend to deal with "pivotal and world-shaping events," Sept. 11 eventually will attract the attention of writers, especially if it leads to bigger and more dramatic events or movements.

But exploring smaller, more obscure, "for want of a nail" events, Letson said, is a valuable way for writers to exercise ingenuity and imagination, while getting deep into the details and subtleties of the historical process. Letson said that many "very good alternate histories look at smaller things and see them as crucial."

Turtledove traces the history of alternate history to the 1st century B.C. Roman writer Livy, who speculated on what would have happened if Alexander the Great had not died and had led the Greeks on an attack on the Romans.

Another oft-cited reference is a French writer who speculated on what would have happened had Napoleon won at Waterloo, said Robert Schmunk, who runs a Web site on the alternate-history genre at www.uchronia.net. Schmunk uses "uchronia" as a euphemism for the genre and said the word literally translates to "no time" or "no when."

Schmunk said an English anthology published in 1930 featured speculations by well-known historians, including Winston Churchill. And the success of de Camp's "Lest Darkness Fall" "let other writers know (such material) was acceptable."

Civil War stories like MacKinlay Kantor's "If the South Had Won the Civil War" became popular around the time of the war's centennial.

Schmunk said there are some pitfalls with the genre. One is when a writer creates a historic divergence "that changes history at some distance in the past," the effects of which "are going to widen to the point" where certain historical figures "will not have existed" yet the writer includes such figures in his narrative. And, he said, sometimes writers in the genre have a flawed sense of history.

Turtledove cited an example of this in an alternate Civil War novel in which the South had won the war and Jefferson Davis was campaigning for re-election as its president.

"As soon as I saw that," Turtledove said, "I didn't want to read it. The Confederate constitution called for one six-year term and he was not eligible for re-election. If the author didn't know that, he doesn't know what he's talking about. So why read it?"

My favorite "what ifs" involve two little obscure points in the history of the Christian Roman Empire (maligned with the false name "Byzantine Empire" in most recent histories):

What if Otto III, the German Emperor, had not died before he married a princess of the Roman Imperial house?
What if someone had followed up on the invention of the reciprocating steam engine? (It was invented long before Watt in Constantinople, but only used to simulate an earthquake, not to drive machinery.)

The first is very interesting: the struggle between the Popes of Rome and the German "Holy Roman" Emperors which defined the late middle ages could have transmuted into a struggle between a diminished Latin Church and unified Germano-Roman Orthodox Empire. No Reformation, no post-Reformation wars of religion racking northern Europe, a Renaissance beginning in Germany three centuries before the Italian Renaissance began, . . .

The second is simply wild: steam driven armored chariots spewing Greek fire meeting the Turkish advance into Anatolia, Manzikert becomes an Imperial rather than a Turkish victory, Imperial steamships dominate the entire coast of the Mediterranean and beyond,. . .

Well I'll say I was. Don't like the aspect he's taken in WWI if the South would have won. Basically slavery continues 50 years later and the October Rebellion that happened in Russia in 1917 happens in the Confederacy. Last book I read in that series is after the war and a Hitler type figure is on the rise. The problem being is that he did so well on the first few books, I continue to read even though I disagree with the faulty premise.

Good to see his WorldWar series is continuing too. Last book brought it up to the 60s

And by 1881, lincoln who lives in Turtledove's world, starts the American Socialist Party. Imagine that!!

the kiss not stolen

Are stolen kisses still around? I thought
by now they would be seen as assault,
and as purely a violent act, having nothing
to do with sex. Maybe my computer clock
is set too far into the future...

What if the Chinese had invented guns 1,000 years ago and not just used gunpowder for fireworks? What if, instead of dismantling their navy and merchant marines in the 1600s, the Chinese had colonized the Americas?
What if the library in Alexandria had never been destroyed?
What if the Moslems had been victorious at the Battle of Tours in 732 A.D. and had conquered the south of Gaul and all of Italy?

You are probaby right.

For alternative universes, Norman Spinrad's "The Iron Dream" is a bizarre tale, snip>

Ostensibly THE IRON DREAM was written by one Adolph Hitler, who, rather than remaining in Europe and starting WW 2, emigrated to the United States in 1919 and made a career as an artist and writer of science-fiction. It concerns the career of one Feric Jaggar on a far-future Earth, where only he and his great weapon, The Steel Commander, stand between what remains of humanity and its annihilation at the hands of the evil Dominators and the mutant hordes they control.

"What if the library in Alexandria had never been destroyed?"

This is my big historical question, too.

One closer in time is: What if Lincoln had not been assasinated?

This type of history was always frowned upon by "real" historians. But now a type of alternate history has become the vogue. It is called counter factual and deals with the turning points or choke points in history. Niall Ferguson's The Pity of War examines WWI from a number of perspective what ifs including arguing against British intervention. James McPherson has tackled Antietam as the choke point of the Civil War and American History. Oresenting not only the lost orders, but many points in the battle where decisive action by McClellan could have ended the war without the Emancipation.

Whether done by sci fi authors, alternative history novelists, or real historians I love this stufff because it creates the need to think about what you read.

race remains the "largest unhealed wound in the American character...it should be the human character. Consider zimbabwe, rwanda, and somalia for racial strife. Then consider that Europeans like the Danish and the French and the British are now finding out how difficult if not impossible it is to be melting pots.

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