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marycatelliOne thing you can do in an alternate history is speculate about what would have happened if a character had lived longer, or died sooner.
Sometimes you can guess. Britain would have scrambled for a Prime Minister if Churchill had died between the world wars, or been shot during the Boer War. And one alternate history had Lincoln not get shot at Ford Theater -- and his reputation was rather lower when he had to manage the Reconstruction as well as the war. Napoleon observed that his reputation would have been much higher had only a cannonball carried him off as he rode down the streets of Moscow.
But that precludes a lot. Suppose Prince Arthur had survived. It's one thing if he survived long enough that the future Henry VIII was married off to someone else by the time of his death; either, if she proved barren, for him to fudge up a different reason, or for a future in which the Church of England did not exist, and what would that have done to the Reformation. It's another if he actually lived to succeed or even just to father an heir. But the trick of that is the alternitacy of it turns on what would he have been like as king, or what his purely hypothetical son would have been. Would they have funded Henry Hudson? Would the English colonization of North America gone off? Or suppose Constantine had not executed his oldest son, Crispus, who had looked to be his successor? (An execution where historians often accept the ancient historians' account -- that his second wife had claimed Crispus had tried to rape her, he had executed him in a rage, and then he had learned the truth and executed her -- even though it's obviously the story of Phaedra, Hippolytus, and Theseus, slightly tweaked, because of the lack of alternative reasons.) But what would Crispus Augustus have been like? Constantius II was Arian, and Julian the Apostate tried to revive paganism, both with startling lack of long-term effect, so his religious influence might have been minimal, but what would his other effects have been?
Perhaps this is one reason why many of the best alternate histories are brief accounts by alternate historians speculating about what the world would be like if something that really did happen, happened. Because they are always funny and off the wall. Benedict Arnold as the second president would have made perfect sense if only he had died at Saratoga.
Sometimes you can guess. Britain would have scrambled for a Prime Minister if Churchill had died between the world wars, or been shot during the Boer War. And one alternate history had Lincoln not get shot at Ford Theater -- and his reputation was rather lower when he had to manage the Reconstruction as well as the war. Napoleon observed that his reputation would have been much higher had only a cannonball carried him off as he rode down the streets of Moscow.
But that precludes a lot. Suppose Prince Arthur had survived. It's one thing if he survived long enough that the future Henry VIII was married off to someone else by the time of his death; either, if she proved barren, for him to fudge up a different reason, or for a future in which the Church of England did not exist, and what would that have done to the Reformation. It's another if he actually lived to succeed or even just to father an heir. But the trick of that is the alternitacy of it turns on what would he have been like as king, or what his purely hypothetical son would have been. Would they have funded Henry Hudson? Would the English colonization of North America gone off? Or suppose Constantine had not executed his oldest son, Crispus, who had looked to be his successor? (An execution where historians often accept the ancient historians' account -- that his second wife had claimed Crispus had tried to rape her, he had executed him in a rage, and then he had learned the truth and executed her -- even though it's obviously the story of Phaedra, Hippolytus, and Theseus, slightly tweaked, because of the lack of alternative reasons.) But what would Crispus Augustus have been like? Constantius II was Arian, and Julian the Apostate tried to revive paganism, both with startling lack of long-term effect, so his religious influence might have been minimal, but what would his other effects have been?
Perhaps this is one reason why many of the best alternate histories are brief accounts by alternate historians speculating about what the world would be like if something that really did happen, happened. Because they are always funny and off the wall. Benedict Arnold as the second president would have made perfect sense if only he had died at Saratoga.
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Date: 2012-10-05 02:23 pm (UTC)I like the idea of Henry V living longer, and successfully creating Angleterre, one nation with a big fat waterway bisecting it!
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Randall Garret's Lord Darcy stories postulate a similar outcome from Richard Lion-Heart doing things differently. Of course, that's not what's really different about that world…
[That wikipedia article points out that with no John Lackland and thus no Magna Carta, and no bizarre Renaissance Popes and thus no Luther nor Reformation, many of the underpinnings of individual liberty which exist in our world, don't there - though fortunately it turned out well. *
The best idea I've seen yet for If He'd Lived (or They) involved Spartacus and the slave rebellion. In reality it was already disintegrating, losing force as the freed slaves got hungry and tired of camping out and went back home - what could have happened to the Israelites! Finally Spartacus & Co made a deal to be boatlifted off Italy to Carthage, but the sea captains knew which was the winning side and sold them out.
But what if a) they'd got off shore, and b) the ships were blown out to sea by a storm, and c) slid down the Atlantic currents to Nicaragua fifteen hundred years before Columbus did the same? Look what would come ashore - these were the artisans, the engineers, the doctors Rome depended on. Farmers, soldiers, blacksmiths… and with them would come the grains, wheat, barley, oats, peas; there'd probably be horses, some cows… This entire Western Civilization would come wading ashore!
Now, instead of a bizarre, admittedly amazing-that-they-even-managed-at-all civilization based on corn, deer and dogs, with no metallurgy, NOW imagine what Columbus and the Spaniards would have encountered - possessed of an ancestral hatred of Latin civilization! Ooopsies… While the Protestant English and Dutch would have positively chortled. “How DO you do!”
* It's interesting, by the way, to compare J R R Tolkien's view with Thomas Paine's. Tolkien viewed The Return of the King as a good thing, to be desired. There are two schools of thought on that.
Indeed, nobody seemed to be particularly suffering for the lack, that we saw; the Rangers protected the Western lands, which governed themselves without interference. What difference would a King make, besides imposing taxes and conscription? [Even “The Cleansing of the Shire” was a purely internal affair, handled by the hobbits themselves, thank you.]
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Date: 2012-10-05 02:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-10-05 04:12 pm (UTC)Well, after all, that wasn't the point of the stories. If he'd somehow contrived the creation of a society as bizarre as Swingin' London '67 would have been to an Englishman of 1907, the detective-story aspect would have been lost.
Look at I Asimov's seminal 1953 SF murder mystery The Caves of Steel: For all that it's set a thousand years from now in a subterranean megacity with AI robots and interstellar colonies reached by hyperdrive, and firearms now take the form of atomic blasters… it's still the story of a New York cop named Baley, his pleasantly-plump wife Jessie, their apartment, and the New York City Police Department. Nothing fundamental has changed - because the reader must be solidly grounded for the story's extrapolations to make sense in context.
The very same principle, for the same reason, applied firmly to the Lord Darcy stories: They HAD to be set in a recognizable environment. Indeed, what made them so interesting was that magic wasn't a board-flipper, it just allowed fun forensic ideas. I remember the story where someone had gone out for some air from six stories up, and all the glass from the shattered window was still laying about - so Lord Darcy's sorceror threw a magic circle around it, went wiggy-woogie-wargle, and all the glass rose into the air to reform in the frame as it was at its last contiguous instant - and there they could see the fracturing as the guy's face impacted the glass chin-first, not head-first. He'd been pushed, violently - it was murder. But by whom? Why? That, they had to find out on their own!
If glass were now obsolete, replaced by some force-field spell, nothing of this would be possible nor would any equivalent have that impact - so to speak.
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Date: 2012-10-05 05:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-10-05 03:05 pm (UTC)And how many epidemics would they have brought with them? Even with that culling, Europe would have had a few more centuries to breed more. Like bubonic plague.
The idea that they could have taught an unrelenting hatred of Latin civilization for centuries is bizarre. There is no way that could have passed unmodified such that the Spanish had something to fear and the British and Dutch.
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Date: 2012-10-05 04:09 pm (UTC)But… Once you start talking relative probability, the whole thing goes out the window - just like the late 20th century. What are the ODDS that the Party geriocracy in the Kremlin would have allowed the Soviet Union to first change, then collapse, without launching a “Hail-Mary” nuclear strike because they had nothing to lose? Indeed, what are the odds that the bomb dropped on Nagasaki would be the LAST A-bomb dropped or set off on an urban population for the next sixty years - and (so far) still counting?
We live in a very improbable world. The nation of iPartakatli (or whatever) swims in the same probability backwater.
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Date: 2012-10-05 05:04 pm (UTC)After all, by then the gerontocracy, old though they were, had grown up in the Soviet Union. Hemmed in on all sides and afraid to sneeze at the wrong time for fear it would be taken as evidence of disloyalty. It only cultivates some forms of ruthlessness.
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Date: 2012-10-05 03:11 pm (UTC)Anyway, if you look at how the welfare states are imploding, you can see that democracy doesn't exactly have bragging rates nailed down.
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Date: 2012-10-05 05:12 pm (UTC)Oh, no - they all did. The Rohirrim, the Men at Dale, the Dwarves of the Lonely Mountain, all did their own thing and didn't bother anyone else. Even the Elves of Mirkwood were only a problem to travellers through Mirkwood. They traded peaceably with the Men at Dale, and never raided their neighbors, nor did Rohan. There was even a road (called The Road), and though Tolkien had someone say that traffic was scarce on it these days, yet Frodo & Co encountered no bandits - their only danger was brand new, and came from far away to the East. *
[It would have been an interestingly different story, if they had encountered a Middle-Earth Robin Hood & Merry Men Inc. operating much as did CPT Faramir's LRRP boys, and their leader is decent and smart enough to recognize the Common Enemy and he, in place of Strider, conveys them to Rivendell - where Frodo (or Gandalf) has to speak for him because these outlaws are decidedly not welcome!.]
* Besides, if it's scarce these days, then relative to today it wasn't scarce in those days, within the memory of the speaker - and the King's been gone a LONG time…
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Date: 2012-10-05 05:34 pm (UTC)Arguing for Robin Hood is merely that this story does not play into your will-fulfillment dreams, which is hardly an aesthetic flaw. One notes that a Robin Hood who steals from the rich and gives to the poor did not appear into centuries after the legend started; those who dealt with actual outlaws didn't think of him even as a fantasy.
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Date: 2012-10-06 01:44 am (UTC)I'm not “arguing for,” my point throughout has been that The Return of the King served sentimental value rather than any practical need. Everybody was doing just fine without him.
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Date: 2012-10-07 12:10 am (UTC)In the appendices and in the other writings, it is indeed well developed that Aragorn's return was a good thing for Gondor. Down to people having children instead of comtemplating their ancesters.
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Date: 2012-10-06 01:52 pm (UTC)No, Tolkien's setting could be played several other ways. For one, his Elves show no psychological effect of being immortal, whereas all KINDS of consequences could be imagined. Consider his bare statement, that they knew not age nor illness, “unless it be that they grew weary after ten thousand centuries.” That's one million years. When we encounter her, Galadriel herself was as old as agriculture in our world. (He does show that effect, subtly; though she was quite the firebrand at the beginning of the Second Age, according to The Silmarillion, nowadays she leaves the world and its troubles to younger folk like Elrond, while she rusticates in Lothlorien. She was ready to go into the sunset.)
But what would that really be like? I pictured sculptured mountains (how long would it take for one man to carve Mt Rushmore by himself? Who cares? He's got that long, and for six more after that, and that's just one fingernail-paring of the eternity ahead of him…), I imagined wars where both sides fight to lose (“Bring to us now an ending…”) and most importantly, a war of extermination (and sport!) against those Swiftian Yahoos, those defective, destructive, grossly inferior, foul-smelling, sick, weak, promiscuously breeding mistakes called Men.
“Human beings are a disease, a cancer on this planet. You're a plague, and we… are the cure.”
Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving, coincidentally!)
I liked the idea I had by way of a Brian Aldiss story, where Frodo and Sam stare astounded at an entire Plain of Nazca, a vast salt flat covered entirely out to the uttermost perspective horizon by an intricate pattern of pebbles, unguessable millions of little stones all exactly sorted by size and color… and far out in the distance they see a lone figure moving slowly. One Elf… one immortal Elf.
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Date: 2012-10-07 12:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-10-07 04:00 am (UTC)See, but the way that you find trying to wipe out humanity more believable than the Elves Tolkien did create just points to a totally different world view. The idea that they'd go into war to destroy, just for an end, is likewise counter to the world view that he was writing from.
For all that it doesn't say a thing about Jesus or Saint Peter, it's a very Catholic world.
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Date: 2012-10-07 03:03 pm (UTC)There's a certain weakness to the notion that reading expands the mind, which is that the mind can always reject something outside its experience as implausbile.
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Date: 2012-10-07 08:49 pm (UTC)I'm seeing that as a dig at me. Maybe I'm wrong. If I'm not, then don't be snide: I'm just playing with ideas.
You did mention a point that puts paid to this particular idea, that the Elves had it on the highest authority that they themselves were not, after all, the crown of creation. This does tie in to Tolkien's Christianity, of course; the fate of Men was unknown to Middle-Earth because it was, after all, just make-believe, and really the souls of men go to the real Heaven. In theory.
So the game is rigged to be the way Tolkien wanted it. I'm sure there've been other fantasy works since then that played closer to my own idle speculation.
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Date: 2012-10-07 09:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-10-15 02:43 am (UTC)Morgoth'sMelkor's point of view, and one of the reasons he's so upset with the rest of the Valar is that they and their elves were so mean to him and his Men.no subject
Date: 2012-10-15 03:21 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-10-15 03:27 am (UTC)I think the main point of the books was to take The Silmarillion's roots in Paradise Lost to their obvious (modern) conclusion, given that everyone knows Satan is the hero there....
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Date: 2012-10-15 03:58 am (UTC)