I've recently given in to a guilty pleasure.
For those of you out there scratching your heads, consider them what-might-have-been. You know the books I'm talking about: the "what if" scenarios – the hybrid progeny of science fiction geeks and history buffs. And, since I'm a science fiction geek and history buff, such scenarios are right up my alley. To an extent, at least. I find the very concept of an alternative history fascinating. Very often, it's a single, seemingly-insignificant event that changes (a "pivot point," I call it), and consequently the world unravels, and is rewound into a form as alien to us as the interior of a star. In my own department, just stop and consider:
1. If a certain ancestor of mine hadn't switched sides (pragmatic, yet perhaps cowardly) at just the right moment during the Wars of the Roses, he would've left the Tower of London in two pieces rather than one, and you would most likely be ISleepInADrawer.com-less. And Arkansas would have lost several generations worth of dentists, doctors, and farmers.
2. If I'd taken a different route to work one day while in college, I wouldn't have met a friend of mine along the way, who told me about this internship she's applying to in Seattle. I wouldn't have decided to apply to it, too, eventually go, and fall in love with the city enough to return, and apply to graduate school. Seattle would have one less crackpot roaming the streets, and I would probably be working at Rush University, in the position I turned down to come here.
3. If I'd indeed decided to "play sick" one New Year's Eve from work as a cashier at a certain clothing store in Davenport, Iowa, I would not have met Zach.
While it's fun to ponder my own existence in such terms, I find it more sobering still, and just as fascinating, to ponder Bigger Questions. What if this had happened rather than that? How would things be different if we had done A rather than B? One can come up with all sorts of scenarios all throughout history. What if sperm/egg interactions in the parents of the following famous/infamous folks had been just a little bit different, permitting a different sperm cell to interact with the chosen egg and, consequently, make a very different human being from...
1. Fidel Castro
2. Alexander the Great
3. Jawaharlal Nehru
4. Lizzie Borden
5. Dr. Seuss
6. William the Conqueror
7. the Unknown Rebel of Tiananmen Square
8. Cain
9. Jim Garrison
10. James Oglethorpe
11. Galen
12. Alfred Hitchcock
13. Alexander Fleming
14. Tomás de Torquemada
15. Mel Brooks
Stop and ask yourselves: What would a world be like without the Reformation? Without penicillin? Without Alf? What would we be like instead?
I see much of it as a duel between Significance and Insignificance. If one single event can indeed alter history, then NO single event is insignificant. Every event has the potential to alter the outcome of history-as-we-know-it and, some would argue, indeed DOES alter the outcome. One could even dissect events to the molecular level. If neutron A moves to point B rather than point C, then event X is replaced with event Y, and, therefore, Indira Gandhi is not assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards in 1984 and instead dies peacefully in her sleep in the late 1990s.
By that model, whether or not I sit in this chair balancing myself on my left butt cheek or my right butt cheek is as important as whether I was standing an inch to the left of a sidewalk crack this morning while waiting for the bus, or an inch-and-a-half to the left.
And both hold as much importance as my undergraduate GPA, my credit score, and the brand of deodorant I wear.
This obsessive line of thought has not been my constant companion for the nearly twenty-five years of my existence. No, the seeds were planted sometime in the late 1990s, when I read Fatherland, by Robert Harris. As the title suggests, it centers on one of the more popular "pivot" events for alternative histories: what if the Nazis had been victorious? Harris' work, however, gets props, so I read in reviews, for being one of the more realistic "what-ifs." I cherished the book, read and re-read it, ignored its faults, and praised its purpose: what-might-have-been. I thought about other "pivot points" I could come up with. Some were more obvious than others:
1. the South wins the American Civil War through event X, splitting the United States forever
2. the American War of Independence fails, as the British government tightens its grip on North America
3. President Truman decides not to use atomic weapons against Japan, leading to a direct and drawn out Allied invasion of the Japanese mainland
4. the Cuban Missile Crisis escalates into a full-blown nuclear conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union
Simple pimple, right? The hard part is deciding what happens after the "pivot point," and how far after will you go? Presumably, the further into the future you go from that pivot, the more radical the changes become. Thus, in my own Gedankenexperiments, I'd often limit myself to the last two hundred years or so of human history, and try not to overstep the boundaries of my limited learning in history. Desires to push the limits, though, often fueled my interest in history. I can safely assert that many of the historical readings I've undertaken in the past ten years or so have been launched largely through pondering, "What if?..."
I stayed away from reading more alternative histories, though. Looking on the shelves at bookstores, I wasn't entirely tempted by what I saw. I'd wanted something at least as realistic as Harris' view of the U.S./Greater German Reich Cold War in 1964, not accounts of
1. Aliens invade during World War II, forcing Hitler and Japan to team up with the U.S., U.K., and Stalin to beat back the invaders, paving the way for peace!
2. Time travelers go back to the Civil War and give the Confederates twentieth-century weapons, ensuring their victory!
3. At the end of the Cretaceous, an asteroid fails to strike Earth, giving the dinosaurs 65 million more years of glory!
I realize that, sometimes, asking for pragmatism from science fiction is like asking for the moon, but... c'mon folks. I want to read about something I can relate to. That's part of the fun, isn't it? Seeing how things could change, and then comparing them to your own existence, or what you know from istory, right? Perhaps not. Anyway, the above examples, and other poorly-written accounts, turned me away. I was demanding good writing, relevance, and a relatively realistic Mirror Universe.
But, within the past year or so, I heard a story on NPR advertising Philip Roth's latest work: The Plot Against America. Very character-driven, and a quite-frankly smashing novel even without the alternative history aspects, receiving it as a gift from Zach (after a few well-placed blatant hints on my part) opened my heart to temptation once again.
Yes, James... Go for it! Read another alternative history!
I resisted for about six months, but have finally given in. The final catalyst was a non-fiction biography of the six wives of King Henry VIII (remember: Tudor England nerd, too). In it, the author made a rather insignificant, small comment regarding the relationship between Henry and Wife #4, Anne of Cleves, that made my mind jump into alternative history mode: what if it hadn't been as the author says? How would things change? And, suddenly everything changed. I went back to a point about Henry's first wife, Catherine of Aragon, and found a similar seemingly-insignificant part, and drooled.
Must... read... more.
So, I'm now halfway through How Few Remain, an account of North America in the early 1880s, nearly two decades after the South, bolstered by a great victory at the Battle of Antietam (pivot point), gains international recongition from England and France, and thus succeeds in separating itself from the U.S.A. I chose it not for any particular interest: I'd merely formed a list of four or five alternative histories that I'd like to read, and found that Barnes and Noble carried only this title. I'm guessing that many of the alternative histories are like this one, focusing on a large number of famous names, and their experiences in the Mirror Universe, paralleling how we know them in the Real World. So far, in How Few Remain, I've run into:
1. Geronimo
2. George Custer
3. Abraham Lincoln
4. Samuel Clemens
5. "Stonewall" Jackson
6. James Longstreet
7. Frederick Douglass
8. Theodore Roosevelt
9. Jeb Stuart
10. Alexander Pope
To me, it's a bit busy. Almost too busy. Too many well-known names, all philosophizing over what-might-have-been, had only the Union won at the Battle of Antietam. Of course, we know what would have happened, but the point is almost driven home too well. Too obviously. I'll finish the book, though. I'm interested in how the Battle of Louisville is going to unfold! The author has also written a sequel, set in WWI, where the U.S.A. and the C.S.A., still bitter enemies, take different sides in the conflict, bringing a European war to American soil. I may even read that, for more ideas. But, I enjoyed Fatherland and The Plot Against America partically because they steered away from a large number of well-known characters. Sometimes it's okay to invent a few new main characters, and let the differences in this world unfold to the reader by passive absorbance, rather than direct, passionate statement. That's part of the fun, isn't it?
Well, from what I've seen in the bookstores, perhaps my own personal tastes are in the minority. That said, I believe reading How Few Remain has opened a Pandora's box: I'll read more, most definitely. I'll just complain about the writing styles with a bit more vigor, if it suits me. I'll also keep up my own thoughts regarding what-might-have-been. I've two good ones already, thanks to the aforementioned biography of Henry VIII's wives, and I'd like to build upon them, and see what-happens (or, what-might-be). If I knew some nitty-gritty details about history, I could even dissect these "pivot points," further. What good is Henry VIII, after all, when I don't know which butt cheek he put most of his weight on while sitting on the throne?
I am reminded of the closing of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince, in which our narrator, one final time, laments the perceptive differences between children and adults:
"Here, then, is a great mystery. For you who also love the little prince, and for me, nothing in the universe can be the same if somewhere, we do not know where, a sheep that we never saw has--yes or no?--eaten a rose...
"Look up at the sky. Ask yourselves: is it yes or no? Has the sheep eaten the flower? And you will see how everything changes...
"And no grown-up will ever understand that this is a matter of so much importance!"
Indeed. And, if you are wise, you'd do well to ponder the rose's fate the next time you pick a seat on the bus. Pay special attention to which butt cheek you balance on; after all, who knows what the consequences could be.
Posted by James at August 3, 2005 06:11 PM