What should you do, then? The same thing you would do for any other kind of story: write the best piece you can. Even if you’re writing something that seems to you far removed from your essential convictions, they will shine through anyhow. They can’t help it. This is the famous realization that then-Galaxy editor H.L. Gold passed on to—once more—Theodore Sturgeon. He knew what he was talking about, too.
Let’s look at some of the pieces that go into writing that best piece you can. A breakpoint for an alternate-history story needs to be both significant and interesting. The battle of Teutoberg Wald in 9 AD, which ensured that Germany would not become part of the Roman Empire, is one of the most significant in history. Europe looks profoundly different today because of what happened there then. If it had turned out otherwise … well, who cares? Too long ago, dammit. It took me more than twenty years to come up with a story to follow on changing things there. The breakpoint also needs to be something that believably could have gone the other way. This is why writing a story where, for instance, the Native Americans fend off the Europeans is so hard: the conquistadors and their English and Dutch brethren simply had too big a head start on the people they found on this side of the Atlantic.
To figure out what you might change and to have an idea how you might change it and what would spring from that, you should be interested in real history and know something about it. You don’t have to be professionally trained in history to write a-h, any more than you have to be an astronomer to write an sf piece involving one of Neptune’s moons. If you are professionally trained, as I happen to be, that’s an asset. But it’s not a prerequisite. Still and all, you’re unlikely to write a good story about Neptune’s moons if you first have to hit Wikipedia to find out how many moons the planet has and how big they are. And you’re unlikely to write an interesting a-h piece on early modern Europe if you have to look up the order of the Hundred Years’ War, the Thirty Years’ War, and the Seven Years’ War. Doesn’t mean you can’t try something else. But that particular period might not be ideal for you.
When you look at what happens when you make your breakpoint go the other way, the way it didn’t really go, you have to remember that you are changing things. You are changing them in all kinds of ways, and those changes will radiate out from your initial alteration. Everything will change, not just the stuff you’re looking directly at. The farther from the breakpoint you go, the more different stuff will be. If Germany successfully gets incorporated into the Roman Empire, no way in hell Constantine the Great gets born in an obscure provincial town more than two and a half centuries later. And double no way in hell he fulfills a role in the changed world similar to the one he had in the real world.
This is one of those places where you can cheat. If you’ve got a world where the American Revolution never happened, Richard Nixon won’t get born (one possible advantage to learning different words to the tune of “America the Beautiful”). But if you need a used-car salesman called Tricky Dick in the late twentieth century of that world, go ahead and stick him in. Just be aware that you are cheating, and then sin proudly. Don’t drop him in there for no better reason than that you haven’t thought through the consequences of your change.
Because if you are sloppy that way, people will spot it. There’s always someone out there—usually, there are lots of someones out there—more knowledgeable about your topic than you are. In many ways, alternate history is still an intellectuals’ parlor trick. Like any good fiction, it should evoke an emotional response. But it should also evoke one in the thinking part of the brain. And if your carelessness makes somebody crumple under the weight of disbelief that can no longer be suspended, you’ve lost that reader forever. You’ll hear about it, too, in great detail. The Internet has made this easier and quicker, but it happened before, too.
A while ago, I said that you didn’t have to be right when you were creating an alternate history: that by the nature of things you couldn’t be right. It’s still true. It has a back-asswards corollary, though. You’d better not be wrong about stuff you aren’t changing deliberately. If you have British fighters accompanying British bombers on air raids over Germany in the early years of World War II, you will get letters—those alarmingly detailed letters—telling you those fighters couldn’t have done that because they lacked the range. Again, someone will have failed to suspend disbelief and probably won’t want to read on. Same thing goes for the shape of a ’57 Chevy’s tail fins and the price of shoes in 1902—or 1602.
If you aren’t changing it on purpose and you can’t be sure you’re right about it, leave it out. A-h is a research-intensive subgenre; you need to resign yourself to that. If you can’t, you’d once more be better off taking a swing at something else. This leads me to another point. The more of your research you do but don’t show, the better off you are. “I’ve done my homework and you’re gonna suffer for it” is one of alternate history’s besetting sins. Expository lumps, friends, are right out. Research ought to be like an iceberg: ninety percent of it should stay under the surface of your story. If and when it crops out, it should do so in a few telling details, ones that make your reader feel Well, of course he knows all that other stuff! Tolkien, writing a fictitious history rather than an altered one, was particularly good at this.
One important difference between alternate history and other forms of sf and fantasy is that, with a-h, you aren’t projecting onto a blank screen. If you’re writing about the future or about a wholly created world, readers know only as much as you choose to tell them. The same goes for the people who inhabit your city on Tau Ceti II or in the imaginary Empire of Bebopdeluxe.
But what if you’re writing about Chicago in 1881 in a world where the Confederacy won the Civil War? What if you’re putting Abraham Lincoln in Chicago in that world in 1881? Everybody has ideas about Chicago. Everybody has ideas about what things were like for real in 1881. And everybody has ideas about Lincoln, too. In this altered world, what are some of the things you need to think about?
Chicago will probably be diminished economically to some degree, because a Confederate victory puts a national frontier halfway down the Mississippi. But it will still be an important east-west hub, definitely a big city. Overall life in the new world’s 1881 likely won’t be much different from how it was in ours. Again, because of losing the war and being divided, the rump of the USA may well be poorer than it was in reality. If that’s relevant to the story you’re telling, you can find ways to indicate it.
But Abraham Lincoln, Lincoln in 1881, there’s your challenge as a writer. In the real world, of course, he was dead, and a revered martyr north of the Mason-Dixon Line. Here, he’ll be past seventy. Is Mary Todd Lincoln still alive? If she is, what’s she like? That will affect her husband. If she isn’t, how and when did you have her die? (Isn’t playing God fun?) That will also affect Lincoln.
He’s not a martyr in the alternate world, obviously. Chances are he’s not revered, either. After all, he’s the President who led the USA into war against the CSA—and then lost it. Would he have won reelection in 1864, assuming the war was over by then? Chances are he wouldn’t; you’ll have to do more explaining if you say he did. What did defeat do to the Republicans? In real history, they dominated politics in the last third of the nineteenth century. Would they now? How do things look in Washington in the changed world (assuming you’ve left Washington in the USA)? What’s Lincoln doing in Chicago, and how many people care?
And how does the brave new world he never really lived to see look to Lincoln? What does he think and feel about it? That’s liable to be the crux of your story. He’s watched laissez-faire capitalism take hold in the USA (and, don’t forget, in the CSA) after the war. What does he think about it? He wrote some sharp things about the relationships between capital and slave labor. What would the relationships between capital and wage-slave labor look like to him? Has he ever heard of Karl Marx? What does he think about him, if he has?
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I’ve offered answers to some of these questions in my novel, How Few Remain. The ones I proposed there certainly aren’t the only ones possible. To me, alternate history is always more a game of questions than of answers, anyhow. The questions you come up with show what concerns you in the real world, even more than your answers will.
Real historians still play this game, too. Now they call it “counterfactuals.” In my admittedly biased opinion, counterfactuals are much less interesting than alternate-history stories and novels. Why? Simple. Counterfactuals are illustrations of broad historical forces. Stories and novels are illustrations of character. People fascinate me; I have to confess that broad historical forces don’t. You need both for any reasonably serious approach to the world’s workings, but more people care more about people—a clumsy sentence, but true, and important to a writer.
Changing wars is an easy way to generate alternate histories. It’s far from the only way. Altered history can spring from changed diseases. What would the world look like today if the Black Death had killed off ninety percent of Europe’s population in the fourteenth century rather than “only” a third? What would it look like if HIV had spread out of Africa three hundred years before it really did?
You can play with geography, whether Earth’s or the Solar System’s. If the lump of rock in the next orbit out from the Sun had been big enough to hold a reasonable atmosphere, our Viking probe might have got a humongous surprise when it touched down there. Or—who knows?—their probe might have discovered us instead. If the Mediterranean Sea had never refilled after evaporating when the gap between Gibraltar and Africa closed up five million years ago, what might that part of the world look like now? If glaciations and migration patterns had worked out differently, the Americas might have been settled by Homo erectus, not Homo sapiens. How would Europeans have treated subhumans when they found them here? (This notion, and my book called A Different Flesh, spring from a speculation by the late Stephen Jay Gould. Inspired by exactly the same speculation, Roger MacBride Allen wrote the fine Orphan of Creation at about the same time. Each of us was fascinated to see how the other used very similar research materials—and we’ve been friends ever since, not least because of the coincidence.)
If gold hadn’t been discovered on Cherokee lands in the late 1820s, the Trail of Tears might never have happened, treaties between the USA and Native American tribes might have been more respected, and things might not have turned out quite so bad for our original immigrants. Might—you can’t be sure.
And if that fender-bender hadn’t made you an hour late for your job interview, you wouldn’t have drowned your sorrows at the place next door to that office … and now, twenty years later, you wouldn’t be married to your spouse. This is alternate history on what you might call the microhistorical level. Everyone has such stories. In a lifetime, you accumulate piles of them. It’s so easy to imagine your life being different if you’d made another choice back then. And if it could happen to you, couldn’t it happen to your country? Your world? Maybe Livy was pondering his long-ago fender-bender when he set pen to papyrus to talk about Alexander and the Romans.
I’ve mentioned researching a-h stories a few times. How do you go about that? If you want to capture the look and feel—and, most important, the language and attitudes—of a bygone time, use primary sources as much as you can. Primary sources are written by the people you’re researching. A collection of Lincoln’s speeches and writings is a primary source. A modern biography of him isn’t—it’s a secondary source. The advantage to using primary sources is that, with them, you are the only person standing between your source and your reader. Secondary sources add another layer of distancing, which isn’t what you want. (Just in case you’re wondering, it also isn’t hard to find reprinted or plain used 1880s travel guides that will tell you more than you ever wanted to know about contemporary Chicago—what it was like before you went and changed it, at any rate.)
On this same principle, do as many things related to your novel yourself as you can, too. Nothing tells you more about what riding in an airship feels like than talking your way aboard the Goodyear blimp. You may not own an AK-47 yourself, but I wouldn’t be surprised if you know someone who does. If you need to write about field-stripping one, watching where your friend has trouble will tell you where your characters may, too. If you set a novel in Hawaii, you should go there if you can possibly afford to; seeing the place first hand will tell you more about weather and smells and such than you can get from a zillion books. (The same is no doubt true of Buffalo, but the temptations are fewer there.) And remember, for a working writer such travel is deductible. Save those receipts!
If you’re working on something contentious, you will often find out that one side says one thing, the other side says something else, and if you didn’t know better you’d be positive they were talking about two different incidents. How do you decide who’s telling the truth and who’s lying? How do you decide if anyone’s telling the truth? You do it the same way you do when two of your children are squabbling over the last cookie: you weigh the available evidence, you make up your mind, and you take your best shot. Sometimes, when your kids are going at it hammer and tongs, you feel like smacking both of them, though I hope you don’t. Sometimes you feel like smacking your sources, too. Most of the time, you can’t, which is bound to be a good thing.
To sum up, you need to make up your mind about what your change is and what it means to things that follow upon it, and you probably need to do a not-too-obtrusive job of establishing it in the front end of your story. (You can do this too well. I had a story bounced by an editor who couldn’t tell where the real history left off and the a-h began. I had, honest, made this Perfectly Clear—to me, anyhow. Not to him/her. The story eventually sold elsewhere, so I don’t think the beam was entirely in my own eye.)
And, most important, you need to have your changes matter to the people in your piece, whether those people are real ones in new circumstances or figments of your imagination. If you don’t do that, you may have yourself a cool counterfactual, but you won’t have a story. People, what they do, what happens to them, and why, are what make stories. One reason alternate histories are hard to do well is that your need to do the background stuff can make you look away from the people in the foreground. Especially at the shorter lengths, you just don’t have room to do that, so try not to.
The rewards are the flip side of the difficulties. A good alternate history can make your readers look at the ordinary, mundane world in a whole new way. The urgent desire to blow somebody’s mind is a very Sixties thing, you say? Okay, I plead guilty to that. But in closing, I will note that a good friend of mine once said writing a-h was the most fun you could have with your clothes on. I don’t know for sure that she was right, but I don’t know for sure that she was wrong, either. Your next assignment, should you choose to accept it, is to find out for yourself.
DRANG VON OSTEN
This story was written just as the Soviet Union was coming to pieces in the late summer of 1991. Yes, it’s one where I was working from the headlines. It’s a story that starts out looking like one thing and ends up—I hope—looking like something else. Science fiction isn’t and isn’t supposed to be prophecy, but I have to say that, more than twenty years after I did this piece, it looks at least as probable as it did when it was new. Maybe more so, or maybe, again, I’m judging from current headlines. Eventually, we’ll all find out.
Buckets of rain poured down from the autumn sky. They turned the endless Russian plain into an endless swamp. The thick, gluey mud tried to suck the boots off Gefreiter Jürgen Sack’s feet at every weary westward step he took.
The clouds and the deluge shut down visibility, too. The lance-corporal never knew the ground-attack plane was near until it screamed past just over his head, almost close enough for him to reach out and touch the big red star painted on the side of the fuselage. He threw himself face
-down into the muck. A few of his comrades had the presence of mind to fire at the aircraft, but to no effect.
Half a kilometer west of Sack, the plane vomited cannon fire and rockets into the Germans retreating across the Trubezh. He swiped a filthy sleeve across his equally filthy face. “God help us,” he groaned. “We’ll never make it back to Kiev alive.”
Beside him in the mud lay a staff sergeant who’d been at the front since the push east began in ’41. Wachtmeister Gustav Pfeil said, “If you think the Reds are going to get you, they probably will. Me, I figure I’m still alive and they haven’t got me yet.” He pushed himself to his feet. “Come on. The sooner we cross the Trubezh, the safer we’re liable to be.”
Sack stumbled after him. You had to stay with your comrades, no matter what. Get cut off and dreadful things were likely to happen. Like too many other German soldiers, he’d seen what the Reds sometimes did to men they caught. Some of the roadside corpses had their noses cut off, others their ears. Others had their pants pulled down and were missing other things.
The lance-corporal lifted his face against the rain, letting it wash some of the dirt away from his eyes. Here and there, through the downpour, he saw other hunched figures tramping west.
A squeal in the sky, different from any aircraft noise. “Rockets!” he screamed, his voice going high and shrill as a girl’s. He dove for the mud again, in an instant redestroying a couple of minutes’ approach to cleanliness.
He was near the rear edge of the salvo of forty truck-mounted artillery rockets; no doubt they were all intended to slam down on the Germans struggling to cross the rain-swollen Trubezh. The noise and the blast were quite dreadful enough where he lay. He felt as if he’d been lifted and then slammed back to earth by a giant’s hand. Fragments of rocket casing screeched past his head. They could have gutted him like a carp.
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