Alternative History

Not to be confused with historical fiction, alternate history is a fun subgenre of science fiction that starts with a “what if?” What if Oswald never shot Kennedy? What if Hitler had not declared war on the Soviet Union? What if cheese was never invented until the 21^st century? Sometimes alternate history comes about in a science fiction story because of time travel or dimensional travel or some such. In The Sound of Thunder by Ray Bradbury, a time traveler falls off a levitated path and crushes a butterfly. The death of the butterfly caused changes to the timeline thousands of years down the line. This story is not strictly speaking an alternate history since the main characters live in the future, but a similar mechanism has been used as the impetus for stories in the alternative history genre. (By the way The Sound of Thunder has erroneously been attributed as the source of the phrase “the butterfly effect”. Actually it comes from weather modeling and chaos theory. Meteorologist Edward Lorenz coined the metaphor in a paper in 1969.)

But there have been many stories envisioning a different history or a different present without the need for telling why it happened; it just did, and now you watch how it unfolds. One of the most famous examples of this genre is the Philip K. Dick novel The Man in the High Castle in which we view the world of 1964 if the axis powers had won World War II. America has been divided up into regions that are controlled by Germany or Japan, with a neutral zone in between. It is interesting to contemplate the changes in such a world. In Dick’s world of 1964 rocket travel is commonplace, but they are just beginning to experiment with what will become television. Dick doesn’t go into this, but one wonders if humans would have landed on the moon sooner or later than they did in our world. You could argue sooner because of the German prowess in rocket building. Or you could argue later because the impulse to “beat the Russians” was not there. Would computer technology have happened more quickly or more slowly in such a world? When you declare war on entire ethnic groups, you lose diversity and the ability of looking at a problem from different points of view. In our world, Hitler drove many Jewish scientists out of Germany. This was one of the factors that helped lead to the downfall of the Axis powers.

What if’s can lead to interesting thought experiments, or they can just be fun. I have written a (yet to be released) novel called Renfield’s Dream which is half alternate history and half fantasy. The alternate history portion takes place in a version of the 1980’s that is somewhat different than the one I remember (for one thing, Richard Nixon is in his fourth term as president). When you are starting such a story the possibilities are endless, but as you go, you have to hone them down to just a few major changes. The more divorced from reality a story is, the less interesting it is.

(My novel Star Liner, is now available in paperback or as an e-book through Amazon, or the other usual online sources)

Star Liner