Neither the sculptural satisfaction nor the privileged authorial position are entirely denied in the writing of real history. Inevitably, narrating the real past is also a matter of interpretation, and tacit modelling, and when the history in question is perceived as having a conclusion which touches on the present position of the narrator, then the historian, too, has a seat in the midst of history; it flows towards her or him. Michelet, for example, included his own birth in his annals of the French Revolution, where it was indeed a significant event, because the Revolution led to the possibility of Michelet becoming what he was. The rise of ‘the people’ from subjection to power was also, as Michelet saw it, his own rise from poverty to learning. The Revolution created the conditions for a republican intelligence like himself to grasp the times, and tell them. Imaginary history exaggerates, and literalises, this role. The tacit becomes the explicit. A maker of imagined history has all the powers of a real historian to impose a narrative on events, tamping this and that into place in an intelligible design, with the additional power of adding or inventing the pieces to be tamped.
The heady ability to create worlds brings in its train the equally heady chance of criticising them, as you can only criticise made things. When the fabric of history becomes a chosen arrangement, it can be savoured like a picture (or like the book it actually is), assessed for consistency, admired in some parts but regretted in others. An imaginary history is open to criticism from base to crown. In John Crowley’s Great Work of Time (1989), an exquisite and paradoxical fable about the defects of granted wishes, the ‘President pro tem’ of a society dedicated to the preservation of the British Empire by altering history wanders the streets of a place his society has, in a strange half-accidental way, created. This ‘capital city of an aged empire’ answers his desires uncannily, though he never anticipated a class structure contrived from different species: saurian butlers, maned Magi as subtle and gentlemanly as Sherlock Holmes, tubby hominids to do the heavy lifting, and sexless angels annunciating in the public parks. But do the pieces fit, the President wonders. He studies this world as if it were a set of nested fictions of differing, and perhaps incompatible, moods and styles:
The lives of the races constituted different universes of meaning, different constructions of reality; it was as though four or five different novels, novels of different kinds by different and differently limited writers, were to become interpenetrated and conflated: inside a gigantic Russian thing a stark and violent policier; and inside that something Dickensian, full of plot, humours, and eccentricity. Such an interlacing of mutually exclusive universes might be comical, like a sketch in Punch; it might be tragic too. And it might be neither: it might simply be what is, the given against which all airy imaginings must finally be measured: reality.26
The sting in the tail, as the President finds, is that inconsistency has no force as an objection against what actually is, if with sudden doubt and bewilderment you should find yourself in the posture of a connoisseur before that real order of things which cannot be accepted or rejected, appreciated or deprecated. What Crowley makes happen to the President pro tem within the kaleidoscopic precincts of Great Work of Time can also happen in our solid and consensual world to the reader of imaginary histories. They can have a temporarily estranging effect on your perception. As you close some story in which matters are otherwise, you can catch yourself regarding the real course of history, by a kind of persistence of vision, in the guise of an equally gratuitous arrangement. If imaginary histories have any radical quality at all, it’s this momentary gift of the feeling that real history might well be done better. It takes mountainous effrontery, though, to mark reality low for inventiveness and coherence. For that reason Madame de Staël reserved it as a role for the Devil, God’s would-be competitor at world-creating, who in Goethe’s Faust she said ‘criticises the universe like a bad book’.
But the pleasures of upset, inversion and irony are quite as attractive in the writing of imaginary histories as the chance at omnipotence. If they are a game, they are one with peculiarly loose rules. Probability is a consideration, but the decisive factor is what you can get away with, while retaining a sufficient atmosphere of probability. Strictly speaking, in The Difference Engine Gibson and Sterling cheat. They have invented a world of sluggish mainframe computers, analogous to the IBM-dominated globe of say 1960, yet wanted to infuse it with the cyberish attitudes of the present, and people it at least in part with the denizens of the hacker subculture of the 1980s and 1990s. They want youths in frockcoats who feel the same covetous delight about what they can do with a pillar of gears that youths in baseballs caps feel about the havoc they can wreak with a modem. Hence the constant tug they exert on the Babbage technology towards devices ever further out of developmental sequence. Their cinema-screen-sized ‘kinotrope’, with its tens of thousands of mechanically rotated pixels, lets them have Victorian computer graphics despite the absence of the cathode-ray tube. Hence too the conceptual shove in the novel which makes ‘catastrophist’ interpretations of evolution shade over into chaos theory. Accelerated modernity and accelerated postmodernity are all mixed up; but then buttressed by matter-of-fact storytelling, and defended by jokes and subterfuges that deliberately blur period. Gibson and Sterling work tricksily at the reader’s belief. They are both keen to have you credit their alterations (though the kinotrope may be nearly as functionally implausible as Fred Flintstone’s rock-hewn TV set, it exudes the same ingenuity as real Victorian optical toys) – and eager to trap you, if they can, into spurning unlikely but genuine Victoriana. Surely calling the radical governors of this England ‘the Rads’ is an obvious exercise in forged slang? It hints at radiation. It sounds off-key, an unwise attempt to make Victorian politics sound zippy and streetwise. Nope: louche politicos drawl the word in Disraeli’s Sybil (1845), one of Gibson and Sterling’s chief sources, a book whose plot, characters and even author all appear here in mangled form.
Like most of those in the world-revising business, Gibson and Sterling are fascinated by the encapsulated meanings of words and habits and objects. Really perfunctory stories in the genre will indicate a different world by looking at banknotes, coins, flags, stamps and military uniforms, the most concentrated tokens of a course of history. (Even the most economical fiction featuring an American stamp with Hitler on it can’t match mathematical logic for high-handed brevity. ‘Possible worlds are mentioned by means of the lower-case letters h,i,j,k’, runs one of David Lewis’s footnotes; ‘sets of worlds by means of capital letters; and sets of sets of worlds by means of script capitals.’) Such self-contained signs, above all, are portable. They work as counters that can be moved elsewhere, still meaning what they mean, so the expectations they represent collide. Imaginary histories offer the pleasure of seeing familiar objects in unfamiliar settings: a revolver in Julius Caesar’s hands, a word-processor on Disraeli’s desk. And the contrary tickle of satisfaction when unfamiliar circumstances lap a familiar scene: J.F. Kennedy trundling across Dealey Plaza in a cart pulled by donkeys. Likewise, imaginary history can confirm, or reverse, our sense of a historical character, either extending a person as we already imagine they were into new but suitable contexts, or using the revisionary power of the genre to force an incongruity. The latter ploy comes accompanied by the cynical suggestion that character and role are themselves accidents, and could have been otherwise. A story published around the time of the Rolling Stones drugs trial in London played with a counter-world where Victorian manners, social deference and cold-bath culture still ruled. It therefore contained a fresh-faced detective constable from Scotland Yard by the name of Michael Jagger. ‘This’, as Merlin remarks bitterly in T.H. White’s Once and Future King, when his familiar spirit supplies him a sailor hat to wear, ‘is an anachronism . . . That is what it is, a beastly anachronism.’
Most imaginary histories use anachronism in one way or another, though perhaps it is too broad a term for the variety of switches and swaps that are possible
with the capsuled material of history. When a tract of time can be made to appear, like a hat out of thin air, in the form of some typical thing, anachronism itself can be a form of wit; of the kind of conceit-building wit which involves finding an unlikely affinity or point of comparison. Anachronism dispenses with the time between what it brings together in the same way that calling love a pair of compasses dispenses with every obvious dissimilarity. Your surprise is the object of the exercise. A medieval magus in kiss-me-quick headgear, the Emperor Caligula riffing away on a cherry-red electric guitar, John Keats loading every rift of a graphics program with ore: all these exemplify the quality defined (disapprovingly) in the eighteenth century as ‘the unexpected copulation of ideas’. Interestingly, it was around the same time as the rejection of conceited wit that ‘anachronism’ first entered the vocabulary of literary critics. A growing awareness of historical difference led to stringent displeasure at current poetry, and translations of ancient works, which broke the decorum of period – by inaccurate dress on Roman orators, impossibly modern sentiments in the mouths of Celtic heroes. Writers of imaginary history have returned the compliment and largely ignored the eighteenth century. Hardly anybody has thought it worth altering the seventy-odd years before the French and American revolutions. Somehow, before the revolutions brought in their unpredictable fire, the eighteenth century seems too primly stable; somehow its events seem to be of the wrong kind. Nobody has ever bothered to make the War of Jenkins’ Ear come out the other way. Imaginary historians prefer times that teeter between possibilities: wig-less days when it seems anything might happen. They have a vested interest in flux.
All the same they surprisingly often have the people who inhabit their different history sense that something is awry. ‘It has come to me’, says a scruffy aristocratic communard in The Difference Engine, a boy doubly opposed to Babbage’s world of capitalist merit, ‘that some dire violence has been done to the true and natural course of historical development.’ On the words ‘true’ and ‘natural’ red flags signalling dangerous irony snap to the top of textual flagpoles. It’s a remark laminated with intent, and it goes to the heart of Gibson and Sterling’s alterations, for the talk, just before, has been of poetry. Their 1855 is indeed founded on an imbalance between reason and imagination; they’ve deliberately enthroned science at poetry’s expense, starting with Byron’s new career as politician and working on down through instance after instance in which those qualities that cannot be quantified or analysed have been scrubbed out of daily life. The result is polarisation. Their London streets are so dark because they’ve become the repository of all unacknowledged desires. The repressed must return, and it does, it erupts in the form of a Blakean insurrection scattering prophetic gibberish through the poisonous fog. A world ‘unnaturally’ divided tries convulsively to reunite. Other imaginary histories register their own artificiality in passages of unease, or in premonitory dreams sent by the author to warn a character that the world is less solid than they think. Quite frequently, the Caesar of a surviving Rome gets visions of a tumbled Colosseum: Lincoln, retired and disgraced in 1870, senses that he has outlived his proper span. The weirdest ripple of doubt probably passes across the Axis-occupied America of Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, when the yarrow stalks of the I Ching are made to deliver the plain message that the world is not true, an oracle very puzzling to the people of Dick’s most tautly realised novel, who must continue to live all the same where the punctilious agents of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere rule San Francisco, delighting in Mickey Mouse watches and other remnants of Americana. It’s as if the deviance of imaginary histories from the truth were a pervasive wrongness you could feel, infiltrating everything; as if what is not true was also out-of-true, subtly misshapen throughout its fabric.
No contradiction is necessarily involved when a genre devoted to change also throws up these momentary confessions of inadequacy. The characters may grow uneasy but the authors are not. Such nods back towards the unaltered world cheerfully acknowledge, in fact, a truth about the making of false realities. They are one manifestation of real history’s paradoxical conservation by the process of chopping and changing it. Some authors like to conjure plots from a cod ‘Law of the Conservation of History’ which makes events right themselves no matter how hard you try to force a detour. That way they have their cake and eat it too; they get to tamper without disturbing a comfy Panglossian belief that everything is as it is for good reason. But a more fundamental kind of conservation is written deep into the structure of imaginary histories, and unites their ploys with the transactions that go on during the ordinary exercise of the historical imagination. Altered histories work with, work on, the sense of the past that readers bring to them. They operate upon what we think we know about Victorians or Romans or Christopher Columbus; their raw material is real history, not as real historians study it or understand it, but as a ready pack of characteristic images – the reader’s mind’s stock of associations between Victorians and crinolines, Romans and bloodstained togas, Columbus and cockleshell voyages off the map. They rely on the expectations they disrupt. History, joked 1066 and All That, ‘is what you can remember’. What you, the reader, can remember furnishes all that the imaginary historians have in the store cupboard once they have vanished the actual record. Of course they can invent; they can tell you things you didn’t know; but they can never go beyond that point of invention where contact is lost with your original sense of history, or they also lose the point of making an alteration. If everything changes, then the changes are no longer measurable against the real past, and can no longer be enjoyed. An imaginary history which forked off into a completely unrecognisable sequence of events would have no resonance at all.
And what first loaded meaning into the capsule props beloved of imaginary historians, except our customary understanding of history? Imaginary history needs the real past to instil such hybrids as the US Hitler stamp with reflexive, immediate significance. The same applies to human population of altered worlds: the memory of real history acts as essential preservative for the stated identities of the cast. The less ‘Victorian’ the things people are shown to be doing, for example, the more exaggeratedly Victorian in manners and outlook they have to be. Detached from their setting, they have to possess their Victorian identity as a concentrated essence of period, and the only source from which it can be pumped is our pool of shared expectations. So in undistinguished books you get an unusually high proportion of inevitable characterisations, characterisations done by numbers (though the numbers are scrambled). Predetermined bundles of mutton-chop-whisker and check trousering masquerade as human. Even excellent authors in the genre cannot ever quite invent from scratch. Person-building must always happen on a grid of references. The scope for surprise and sympathy that does remain stems from the diversity of references available, which can become a sort of palette. The inhabitants of invented worlds can be tinted to flesh colour with shades extracted from here, here and (unexpectedly) here. Gibson and Sterling were able to find out-of-the-way and almost novel stereotypes for The Difference Engine. They give us, in the underworld adventures of Mallory the savant, not the gestures and speaking voice of Victorian prudery (the popular choice of period trademark) but an active and half-shamed sexual hypocrisy like an out-take from My Secret Life. In the cloak-and-dagger part of the plot, they give us, rather than Sherlock Holmesery and predictable gas-lit mayhem, an amalgam whose constituent parts could be listed like movie credits. Feel for detective procedure: Wilkie Collins. Criminal mastermind supplied by: Jules Verne. Action sequences: Spring-Heeled Jack, of Limehouse. Apocalyptic lighting effects: the painter John Martin. Et cetera.
Still the most obvious aspect of their 1855 is its premature, its blatantly precocious, similarity to our own time. Their updating is not always smooth, and when Gibson and Sterling tweak overhard to align ‘clackers’ with ‘hackers’, or to make London pavements into mean streets the Neuromancer audience will li
ke, it can seem that the past is just being invested with arbitrary cool. Hey, these aren’t dull Victorians. These are hip Victorians! Turbo Victorians! Victorians With Attitude! But modernising the Victorians can also mean discovering a modernity in them that was really there. Gibson and Sterling are frivolous and serious here: travesty is mingled with an operation on our sense of the Victorian past that – like the slang ‘Rads’ – only looks like travesty. They have an agenda. Gibson, for one, has long been interested in pushing back the starting dates for the communications phenomena that fascinate him: he has argued before that access to the unsituated dimension of ‘cyberspace’ really began with the telephone, and now it looks as if the Morse key of a telegraph apparatus is being saluted as an even earlier gateway. He exaggerates, of course, but the effect of this kind of exaggeration is to render an element of the past visible. The same is true of The Difference Engine in sum; a wholesale device, after all, for solidifying theories, completing abandoned Engines, and turning wispy speculations into a visible manifold of events. More: it pursues a kind of secret, unlikely fidelity to elusive strains of genuine nineteenth-century technological feeling, by exploiting our ability to recognise them as familiar once they have been transposed into current terms. The cartoonish enthusiasms for machinery in The Difference Engine, and the gothic apprehensions, are both blatant versions – therefore visible versions – of real feeling. The book is filled with disguised continuities. This is Gibson and Sterling’s subtlest use of imaginary history’s constant return upon the real. Imaginary history’s prime material, the consensual vision of what used to be, is generally a sluggish thing, fond of its segmented sense of period, slow to register a new thought; but it can be hoodwinked into expansion. Gibson and Sterling’s imaginary history returns the past to us, garishly refurbished, loudly wonderful; but those prove to be the terms on which, as when we look at the ranked cogs in South Kensington, we can glimpse the past’s possibility alive.
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