Harry Turtledove. Departures (1993)

     Harry Turtledove. Departures (1993) A collection of “alternate history” stories, which I began in August, and mostly read in September, and finished on October 1, so I’m counting it as a September book. The eras range from ancient history to the far future. As with all such speculative sociology, the theories underlying the stories tend to be simplistic, but that doesn’t often detract from them as stories. After all, contemporary fiction suffers from the same deficiency. Plausibility does not depend on factual truth.
     Turtledove’s vision tends to be dark: history is driven by greed, hate, prejudice and sheer ignorance. Occasional glimmers of honour, truth and justice flicker fitfully here and there, but they are strictly personal virtues, not systemic attributes of a society. A couple of his stories are pure fantasy; the rest hew pretty closely to reality as we know it. One of his repeated notions is that Muhammad became a Christian monk, so that the Muslim world never came into being. The contrary vision, that Islam became the dominant culture of Europe, also informs several of his stories. An alternate worlds story takes us to a North America whose Revolutionary War was incomplete, and hence no unified polity ever emerged: a mish-mash of independent former colonies and states still tied to England, as well as aboriginal fiefdoms, has led to a state of perpetual warfare, and a very delayed Industrial Revolution.
     Like many pre-perestroika writers, Turtledove carefully use ethnic names to denote an “international” space culture. However, he does not assume that the Soviets will endure in their present form; his alternate future Russia breaks up into a re-established Czarist empire and a federation of reformed Soviet states.
     Not that it matters. Closer reflection shows that Turtledove uses the alternate history settings in otherwise very traditional ways. There are adventure romances, fantastic fables, hard-science mysteries, tall tales, and so on. Two stories comment on the role of the Jews in our world (Turtledove is a Jew) and both stories work very well, both as stories and as lessons. An amusing collection; I omitted one story that was getting tedious, but enjoyed the rest. ** to ***. (2002)

Dozois and Schmidt, eds. Roads Not Taken (1998)

     Gardner Dozois and Stanley Schmidt, eds. Roads Not Taken (1998) Tales of Alternate History, ranging from the mildly humorous to the ploddingly serious to the politically despairing. I omitted reading “The Forest of Time” (Flynn), a tale based on the many worlds interpretation of QT. The best stories use what’s known of the past, put a little twist on it, and extrapolate in terms of what we know or guess about social developments, such as “Outpost of Empire” by Silverberg (the Romans control Europe in the 1500-1600s); “We Could do Worse”by Benford (Joe McCarthy becomes president); “Aristotle and the Gun” by Sprague de Camp (in which a disgruntled scientist tries to nudge Aristotle into a more scientific direction, but fails; Aristotle decides to devote himself to ethics, political theory, and aesthetics instead.)
     The means of the twist range from sheer chance to time-travel. Chance is the most satisfying; we all know how much of our lives results from unforeseen and unforeseeable events. A taste for this kind of fiction is in itself specialised, and within it, there are subgenres of differing appeal. Inventing an alternate history in detail is a pleasant occupation, much like inventing a game universe, but one must have the same interests as the author to enjoy the result. Like a game universe, the setting has a feeling of arbitrariness about it. After all, change a few contingencies, and still another scenario is just as plausible. The characters who inhabit such alternative worlds differ from us only in accidentals, such as language, knowledge of the world, costume, political assumptions, and so on. But it’s these accidental details one must focus on, in order to give the alternate history a feel of plausibility, and in doing so, one tends to lose the essence of character. The writer of alternate history must find the right balance between accident and essence, and few succeed. Benford’s “We could do Worse” comes closest, perhaps because it’s the least different from our own world. * to **** (2002)