Sci Friday: The History That Never Was

~post by Tommy

History is set in stone. It’s already happened and there is nothing we can do to change it. But the foundation of science fiction is to ask the question: what if? Alternate history, a weird and wacky sub genre, dares to ask the question: What if history wasn’t set in stone. By daring to ask this, alternate history opens up whole new worlds of imaginative storytelling that are so very similar to our own.

The first kind of alternate history takes familiar modern day ideas, people, and technologies and puts them in a past location, thus changing history as we know it. This is very well done in Eric Flint’s 1630s series that begins with 1632. In 1632, Flint takes the modern day town of Grantville, West Virginia and drops it in Europe in the middle of the Thirty Years War. This naturally throws the major powers of the day, the Catholic Church and Spain, into a giant uproar. When the citizens of Grantville figure out where they are, they decide that 1630s Europe needs a revolution. Banding together with a few nearby towns, the Grantvillers, called “up timers”, form their very own New United States and throw wrenches into the plans of every historical figure they meet. This leads to some interesting things happening like the rescue of Galileo by young American hotheads and an alliance with the Swedish.

Another type of alternate history inserts the supernatural or science fictional into our timeline at a given point that changes absolutely everything. This is done quite a bit by Harry Turtledove and is best remembered in his Worldwar series in which aliens invade during WWII. Worldwar dares to ask the question: What if there was a threat big enough to force the Allies to work with the Axis powers. What if Yalta wasn’t just a meeting between Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt but also included Hitler and Hirohito? When the Race invades Earth, humanity must figure out whether they are willing to set aside their enmity and differences to protect their planet from an alien invasion. Turtledove followed this series with the Colonization trilogy that looks in on this timeline a generation in the future to see what changes the invasion and the ensuing war have made.

A third type of alternate history is not the addition of anything but the removal of certain key people or events. This upsets the course of history and the ensuing events form a splinter timeline that is different from our own. One of the best instances of this is also a Harry Turtledove novel, How Few Remain. In this book, Turtledove takes out a moment in 1862 where a Union soldier found Robert E. Lee’s lost battle plans that were eventually used to rout Lee at Antietam and put the North firmly in charge of the war. With those battle plans never found by the North, Lee goes on to win Antietam and  push into Pennsylvania and force the Union to surrender and recognize the Confederate States by 1863. After the war the Confederates purchase territory held by Mexico, which opens up another war with the United States in the 1870s. The Confederates receive help in the form of England and France, the former of which tries to invade Montana from Canada and are thrown back by a young volunteer cavalry commander named Theodore Roosevelt, and eventual force the United Stated to surrender once again. This drives the U.S. to seek their own European alliance in the form of Germany and leaves us waiting until the next book, which picks up in World War I, to see what happens.

So while in our reality history may be set in stone, in the world of science fiction history becomes a mutable object and it shows us that the smallest change could have an enormous impact on everything we thought we knew. Just imagine if Abraham Lincoln was never shot or Albert Einstein had lived in the 1550s? Who knows where our world would be now.

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Sci Friday is a weekly post focusing on all things Sci Fi. Booksellers Tommy and Marie are you intrepid leaders on this journey through awesome new books; the best and worst of what’s come before; Sci Fi film adaptations and more. Check back next Friday for more!