philosophizing about alternativity, history, and straight lines

[marycatelli]

Which could also be Why I Like Fantasy Alternate Histories Better Than SF Ones, come to think of it, although the name would have its flaws.

'Cause it isn't really genre.  It's two techniques that are both alternate history.  The first is to introduce a point of divergence and extrapolate from there.  Time travel or the "many-worlds" hypothesis in quantum theory is the commonly invoked technobabble.  The other is have a magical (or otherwise different) world and parallel real-world history.

The fun of the latter game is to see how you can smuggle in all the magic or what-have-you without changing history and make it plausible.  Poul Anderson's A Midsummer's Tempest, for instance, had the English Civil War happen on time, even though William Shakespeare is the Great Historian in that world.  (And why would that make a difference?  Because in Julius Caesar, a clock chimed.  Chiming clocks were a medieval invention.  Anderson concluded that it was always more technologically advanced and the Industrial Revolution is in full swing at the time.)  Or Patricia C. Wrede's Mairelon the Magician, where we have the Royal Society of Wizards but the Napoleonic Wars happened on cue.  "Magic, Incorporated" is modern America with replacements for technology.  Leviathan is steampunk and all its technobabble is science-based, but it falls under this; WWI looks like to happen on cue.

The fun of the former game, however, is the extrapolation.  Except that many writers extrapolate the results of the change, and then have that go on for decades or centuries.  G. K. Chesterton once observed of predicting history that if you see a river meandering all over the landscape, you might have difficulty predicting where it would end up -- but you would be safe betting that it would not abruptly start moving in a perfectly straight line.  That is what I see again and again.  In Bring the Jubilee, the North is still mired in economic depression caused by, and decades after, its loss in the American Civil War. (Nevermind that winning Gettysburg could not have won them the war; Antietam, maybe, but they had lost Vicksburg just about the same time.)  In Poul Anderson's Delenda Est, the path is a little more complicated:  Carthage defeated Rome, Rome did not help defend the Jews during the time of the Maccabees, Judaism was wiped out, Christianity did not result, science did not result.  But -- the mindset in what would have been the time travelers' own time was exactly what it was in the time of the Punic Wars.  Randall Garret's Lord Darcy works -- well, much as I like them as mysteries, they diverge when Richard the Lion-hearted survived, and since then, it's been all Plantagets on the throne with no upheavals; the only historical event cited after that was when they elected one of the Holy Roman Empire.

So -- I like the chiefly fantasy type better because the world-building history is much more lively and interesting, where the chiefly SF type is flat and improbable.

Comments

[mythusmage.livejournal.com]

Do you have any favorite fantasy alternate histories? The Shadow of the Lion and In the Shadow of Ararat are two of mine.

[marycatelli]

Patricia C. Wrede's Regency ones. And Poul Anderson's Operation Chaos.

[blitheringpooks.livejournal.com]

In my case, I have considered that I just like fantasy better than sf and that's what has shaped my preference. (I'm also writing a parallel magical Regency world, but don't think it's truly AU since the worlds don't intersect in any tangible historical way.)

[marycatelli]

The other tropes do indeed help. . .

It will probably be called alternate history if it's clearly a magical Regency.

[superversive.livejournal.com]

I’ll add another offender: Harry Turtledove’s Agent of Byzantium. He has Muhammad convert to Christianity instead of founding his own religion, eventually dying in a Spanish monastery and becoming St. Mouamet. Consequence: Sasanid Persia never falls, the Byzantine Empire never loses most of its territory — well and good.

But then, Agent is set some six or seven hundred years after the divergence, and Byzantium and Persia still have exactly the same territory, to say nothing of culture, as they had in AD 600. The only significant geopolitical change in all those centuries is that the Merovingian Franks seem to have merged with the Anglo-Saxons. We hatess it, yess we does, precious.

Centuries!

[marycatelli]

shakes head

Very few writers grasp the changes in history, but AH writers, by putting it front and center, underscore how badly they don't grasp it.

[luckymarty.livejournal.com]

Mostly I agree. The usual SF method for getting around the problem is to set things at most a generation ahead, which works moderately well but isn't nearly so interesting. To me, anyway; I seem to be something of an outlier among AH fans, who are already kind of marginal.

I do think you're unfair to Poul Anderson, though. Delenda Est is still pre-modern, but it is significantly different from the pre-modern mentality of the Punic Wars era. They seem to have ethnic nationalism, for instance. Greek rationalism has been submerged. Contrast with all those unimpressive Roman-survival AHs and their frozen histories.

(I suppose the most extreme counter-example is Turtledove's "Down in the Bottomlands.")

[marycatelli]

The Greek rationalism was part and parcel of the fall of Rome.

still

[ilion7.livejournal.com]

"... Carthage defeated Rome, Rome did not help defend the Jews during the time of the Maccabees, Judaism was wiped out, Christianity did not result, science did not result. ..."

Still, one is delightfully scandalized to see the causal connection between Christianity and modern science acknowledged in a work of popular (sciency) fiction.

Re: still

[marycatelli]

Anderson was pretty reliable. Indeed, when he had Christians as secondary characters he actually managed to convince me that they believed.

Re: still

[ilion7.livejournal.com]

He never seemed to me to be anti-WesternCiv (or anti-Christianity), as so many authors seem compelled to present themselves.

Re: still

[marycatelli]

Very true!

Peshawar Lancers

[erudito.livejournal.com]

My favourite alternative history is S. M. Stirling's The Peshawar Lancers, but he has a sense of change in history (he has a lot of fun gently making it clear that the "Angrezzi" of the alternate C21st Raj really are not British as such, but what British would become if they had spent 130 years based in India).

I liked his earlier Draka books because, although the alternative WWI happens, it has a partially different outcome, leading to a rather different "Eurasian War" as the equivalent of WWII. (I now have more problems with the series because I have much more knowledge of the economics of bondage.)

But I find that SF alternate histories do regularly fail the plausibility test.

Re: Peshawar Lancers

[marycatelli]

Though they still have to be close enough to be recognizable as British who had sent 130 years based in India. . . though the time frame might be feasible.