The second is a quotation. It can be matched by similar quotations in any of half a hundred volumes on the Civil War. I pick this only because it is handy. From W. E. Woodward’s Years of Madness, p. 202:
“…Union troops that night and next morning took a position on Cemetery Hill and Round Top.…The Confederates could have occupied this position but they failed to do so. It was an error with momentous consequences.”
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Copyright © 1952, 1980 by the Estate of Ward Moore; first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction; reprinted by permission of the author’s Estate and the Estate’s agent, the Virginia Kidd Agency, Inc.
ALTERNATE HISTORY, by Andrew M. Gordon
Alternate history, the practice of positing “what if” history had transpired differently, is both a flourishing subgenre of science fiction and a subfield of history. It has been called by many names, such as “uchronia,” “allohistory,” and “counterfactual fiction.” Grammatically, “alternative history” is more accurate, but because this term is used in a specialized sense by historians, such as history as viewed from a feminist perspective, the preferred term is alternate history.
Like science fiction, alternate history is extrapolative: SF posits a change in our present or future; alternate history posits a change in the past and its consequences on history. Part of the pleasure in reading alternate history is figuring out at what point in history the change occurred and then measuring the created world against known history and noting the deviations. The critic Karen Hellekson says that “The alternate history is a text placed at the crux of temporality, narrativity, and history; these three points engage in a dialogue that…questions these topics by estranging them, by changing events or interpretations to make them unfamiliar” (Hellekson 65).
According to the novelist E. L. Doctorow, “history is a kind of fiction in which we live and hope to survive, and fiction is a kind of speculative history, perhaps a superhistory” (“False Documents” 25). Alternate history can be considered an especially powerful form of superhistory, a means of speculating on and reconceiving history itself.
Alternate history derives from the universal human tendency to speculate about the random and arbitrary nature of existence, and about how our lives might be dramatically altered if one small event in the past were to change. We do it to congratulate ourselves on our good fortune, or to express our fear of the huge role chance plays in human existence, or to wish that our lives had gone otherwise. Says Michael Chabon, author of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007), which won the Sidewise Award presented annually for the best novel of alternate history, “I think all of us are wired to lie awake in bed at night going back over the course of our life, looking at the things that led us to the place where we are now, being able to see sometimes only after only after a period of many years certain key junctures.…You can begin to imagine an alternate life for yourself. It’s a fundamental part of the way we look at our own history” (Chabon interview by Greenwood). Alternate history simply extends that tendency from rethinking one’s own history to reimagining the larger patterns of history.
Alternate history permeates contemporary popular culture, in both science fiction and fantasy and mainstream novels. There are dozens of websites catering to fans of the genre, with such features as alternate history role-playing games, instructions on how to create your own alternate timeline, and Rough Planet Guides to Alternate Earths. There are also many alternate history video and computer games and comic books. On television, there have been series such as Quantum Leap (1989–1993), about a time traveler who improves people’s lives, Sliders (1995–200), about a team who use machinery to travel to many parallel Earths subtly or dramatically different from our own, and Time Cop (1997–1998), a TV series based on a 1994 movie, about a policeman who travels through time to correct its course when criminal time travelers alter history for personal benefit. Recent movies such as Run Lola Run (1998), Sliding Doors (1998), and The Butterfly Effect (2004) present a given situation which is played repeatedly, yielding different and sometimes completely contradictory outcomes. Although it may saturate contemporary popular culture, alternate history, like other forms of SF, tends to get little respect from critics who disdain genre fiction.
Nevertheless, alternate history has a long and distinguished lineage, beginning with the Greek historian Herodotus, who wondered what would have happened if the Persians defeated the Greeks at Marathon, and the Roman historian Livy, who pondered what would have happened to the Roman Empire if Alexander had gone west instead of east.
The first known alternate history in English is a chapter in Isaac D’Israeli’s Curiosities of Literature (1824). The first novel-length alternate history was Louis-Napoleon Geoffrey-Chateau’s Napoléon et la conquête du monde (1836). Nathaniel Hawthorne’s story “P.’s Correspondence” (1845) concerns a man who is considered mad because he sees an alternate 1845. Charles Renouvier’s novel Uchronie (1857) introduced the French term for alternate history. But the best known alternate history of the nineteenth century is Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), where the alteration is caused through time travel, which in the twentieth century became a favorite literary device to create a changed past or present.
Alternate history burgeoned in the twentieth century, both in the speculations of historians and in the creations of the new genre of SF. And its rules began to be codified. Alternate histories basically come in three varieties: 1) the anomaly, 2) the time travel deviation, and 3) the parallel worlds scenario.
First, the alternative reality may be due to an anomaly which is simply given. At some critical juncture in the past—which Karen Hellekson calls “the nexus event” (27) and other critics call “the point of divergence”—history deviated from its known course to follow another path, as in Philip K. Dick’s classic The Man in the High Castle (1962), which takes place on the west coast of America, an area governed by the Japanese, decades after the Axis won WW II.
Second, a time traveler may inadvertently or deliberately interfere with the course of events, as in A Connecticut Yankee; or L. Sprague de Camp’s Lest Darkness Fall (1941), where a twentieth-century time traveler in sixth-century Rome prevents the Dark Ages by introducing the printing press and other modern innovations; or the film series Back to the Future (1984, 1989, 1990), which deals with branching time lines caused by an unwitting time traveler, who must keep traveling up and down the time lines to correct his mistakes.
Third, there is the possibility of parallel worlds, multiple realities, or a “multiverse,” and people may accidentally slip cross-time or else deliberately travel from one timeline to another by machine. These parallel worlds co-exist in separate dimensions, and they may be “virtually identical, right down to the people who inhabit them,” so that the hero can even encounter different versions of himself (Hellekson 51). H.G. Wells’s Men Like Gods (1923) may be the first novel about cross-time travel to an alternate universe. H. Beam Piper did a lot to popularize and explain the idea of parallel universes in his “Paratime” short stories in the 1950s and in the posthumously published novel Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen (1965). Vladimir Nabokov dabbled in the notion of parallel worlds in his novel Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (1969), in which he conjures up an “Anti-Terra” where the Russian and American land masses are connected. A variation on the parallel worlds theme is the time-loop story, in which a character involuntarily re-experiences a portion of his life over and over, with different outcomes, as in Ken Grimwood’s novel Replay (1986) or the film Groundhog Day (1993).
British historian John Squire’s If It Had Happened Otherwise (1931) collected speculations by distinguished historians, including Winston Churchill’s sophisticated fiction, “If Lee Had Not Won the Battle of Gettysburg,” in which a historian from an alternate world in which the South won the Civil War imagines what would have happened if the South had lost. This form of alternate history is known variously as “recursive altern
ate history,” the “double-blind what-if” or the “alternate-alternate history.” The most famous example is Ward Moore’s classic science fiction novel Bring the Jubilee (1955), in which a historian from a twentieth century in which the Confederacy triumphed time travels to witness the Battle of Gettysburg, but in the process of observing unintentionally changes the outcome. He becomes trapped in a world in which the North wins—that is, in our world, which he has unwittingly helped create. The popular novelist MacKinlay Cantor’s If the South Had Won the Civil War (1961) played on the same notion but brought it mainstream acceptance.
Starting in the 1960s, the publication of alternate histories increased exponentially because, with the coming of postmodernism, history was up for grabs. Theorists such as Roland Barthes and Hayden White began to note the similarity between the strategies of history and fiction. In Metahistory (1973), the historian Hayden White argued that historians structured their narratives just like novelists. Writers in the 1960s began to recognize that there was no single “truth” about a historical period, that who was telling the story and how mattered, and that fiction had much to contribute to our understanding of history.
American writers in the 1960s and 70s responded by creating not so much alternate histories as a new kind of historical novel which mixed fact and fiction, or sometimes history and pure fantasy: John Barth’s The Sot Weed Factor (1964), Thomas Berger’s Little Big Man (1964), Bernard Malamud’s The Fixer (1966), William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), and Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel (1971) and Robert Coover’s The Public Burning (1977), both of which reimagined the Rosenberg case.
Like these new historical novels, alternative histories rewrite history, but they go even further: they rewrite reality. Says Karen Hellekson, “Alternate histories question the nature of history and of causality; they question accepted notions of time and space; they rupture linear movement; and they make readers rethink their world and how it has become what it is. They are a critique of the metaphors we use to discuss history. And they foreground the ‘constructedness’ of history and the role narrative plays in this construction” (Hellekson 4–5).
Gavriel Rosenfeld suspects that the mainstreaming of alternate history in recent decades reflects the postmodern discrediting of deterministic ideologies and skepticism about all metanarratives. In alternate history, everything is contingent and history is open-ended (6). Moreover, according to chaos theory, even a tiny change in a complex system can lead to a cascading series of huge effects (the “butterfly effect”). Now that the twentieth-century threat of totalizing systems such as fascism or communism seems over, we have the freedom to look back and see how easily it could have turned out differently. Meanwhile, new threats, such as resurgent nationalism, religious fundamentalism, terrorism, or environmental catastrophe make the future less certain than ever. “In our current transitional era. . .we recognize that nothing is inevitable at all” (7).
Among the best of the flood of alternate history novels since the 1990s are William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s The Difference Engine (1991), in which the Victorian age features gigantic computers run on steam; Harry Turtledove’s The Guns of the South (1992), in which time travelers try to change the outcome of the Civil War by importing modern weaponry; and Robert Harris’s Fatherland (1992), set in Nazi Berlin in 1964.
Recent award-winning novels by Philip Roth and Michael Chabon re-imagine twentieth-century Jewish history, showing both the imaginative power of fiction and the contingent nature of history. In The Plot Against America (2004), Roth, imitating a memoir, tweaks the American involvement in World War II to imagine an America sliding toward fascism and a potential American holocaust for the Jews. In The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007), Chabon, imitating the hard-boiled detective novel, invents a post-Holocaust Jewish state, not in Israel but in Alaska. Both novels won the Sidewise Award.
SF seems to be histories of possible futures and alternate history to be histories of possible pasts, but both are really about the present. Writes Gavriel Rosenfeld, “When the producers of alternate histories speculate on how the past might have been different, they invariably express their own highly subjective present-day hopes and fears” (Rosenfeld 10).
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Works Cited
Chabon, Michael. “Michael Chabon Interview,” Helen Greenwood. Sydney, Australia Morning Herald, May 3, 2007.
http://www.smh.com.au/news/books/michael-chabon-interview/2007/05/03/1177788267982.html
Doctorow, E. L. “False Documents.” E.L. Doctorow: Essays and Conversations. Ed. Richard Trenner. Princeton, N.J. : Ontario Review Press, 1983.
Hellekson, Karen. The Alternate History: Refiguring Historical Time. Kent, Ohio : Kent State University Press, 2001.
Rosenfeld, Gavriel David. The World Hitler Never Made: Alternate History and the Memory of Nazism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
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Andrew M. Gordon is Professor Emeritus of English, University of Florida and author of An American Dreamer: A Psychoanalytic Study of the Fiction of Norman Mailer; Empire of Dreams: The Science Fiction and Fantasy Films of Steven Spielberg; Screen Saviors: Hollywood Fictions of Whiteness (co-authored with Hernan Vera); and Psychoanalyses/Feminisms (co-edited with Peter Rudnytsky). He also has many essays and reviews on Jewish-American writers, on other contemporary American writers, and on contemporary American science fiction and science fiction films.
EDGAR PANGBORN
(1909–1976)
Edgar Pangborn’s place in the field is probably more for the writers who he influenced than by his continuing readership. Never a prolific science fiction writer, his work largely fell out of print after his death and has only recently become widely available again with new editions published by Old Earth Books.
A child of two literary parents (his father was an attorney and dictionary editor while his mother had written supernatural fiction) Pangborn studied music at Harvard (starting at age fifteen) and the New England Conservatory of Music, but did not graduate from either. Shifting his focus to writing, he sold his first novel at age twenty-one and spent the next twenty years writing for pulp mystery and detective magazines under various pen names. He worked at various other trades during the same period, including several years spent farming in Maine and World War II service as an Army medic in the Pacific.
He turned to science fiction in the early 1950s when he was in his forties (writing under his own name for the first time), and showed a touch for depicting emotionally evocative characters. Pangborn’s 1954 novel A Mirror for Observers won the International Fantasy Award, but his best-known work is the post-apocalyptic novel Davy (1964), of which “The Golden Horn” became a part.
Pangborn left everything to his older sister, and she in turn passed his estate on to writer Peter S. Beagle (who Pangborn had been close with) when she died in 2003. One of the themes that plays through “The Golden Horn” is the power of music and the pain of its loss. In 2003, all of the music Pangborn had written in his early years and then abandoned (except for references in stories like this one) was discovered in the attic of the house where he died.
THE GOLDEN HORN
First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, February 1962
Moha, where I was born, is mainly a nation of farms, grouped around their stockade village throughout the hill and lake and forest country. I grew up in Skoar, one of Moha’s three cities, which lies in a cup of the hills near the Katskil border. Even there things moved with the seasons and the Corn Market trade; wilderness whispers at the city’s borders, except where the two roads, the Northwest and the East, carry their double stream of men, mule-wagons, soldiers, tinkers, wanderers.
Farming’s heartbreak work in Moha, same as everywhere. The stock give birth to as many mues as anywhere else, the labor’s long sweat and toil and disappointment wearing a man down to old age in th
e thirties, few farmers ever able to afford a slave. But the people scrape along, as I’ve seen human beings do in places worse than Moha. I’m older, I’ve traveled, I’ve learned to write and read in spite of that mystery’s being reserved to the priests. Looking back, I sometimes wonder if Moha wasn’t the happiest land I ever knew.
The other cities—I’ve never visited them—are Moha City and Kanhar, both in the northwest on Moha Water. Their harbors can take big vessels up to thirty tons, the ships that trade with Levannon and the Katskil ports on the Hudson Sea. Moha City is the capital and Kanhar is the largest, twenty thousand population not counting slaves. Fifty miles south of Kanhar is Skoar, and there I was born squalling and redheaded in one of those houses that are licensed but still supposed not to exist. In such places they don’t have time for kids, but since I was a well-formed chunk of humanity and not a mue, the policers took me from my mother, whoever she was, when I was weaned, and dumped me in the Skoar orphanage, where I stayed until I was nine, old enough to earn a living.
I’m thinking now of a day in middle March when I was past fourteen, and slipped away before dawn from the Bull and Iron where I worked as yardboy, bondservant of course, two dollars a week and board. I was merely goofing off. We’d gone through a tough winter with smallpox and flu, near-about everything except the lumpy plague, and a real snow in January almost an inch deep—I’ve never seen such a heavy fall of it before or since. There was even a frost in February; people called it unusual. In the stable loft where I slept I just thought it was damn cold. I remember looking out the loft window one January morning and seeing icicles on the sign over the inn door—a noble sign, painted for Old Jon Robson by some journeyman artist who likely got bed and a meal out of it along with the poverty talk that Old Jon saved for such occasions. A fine red bull with tremendous horns, tremendous everything, and for the iron there was a long spear sticking out of his neck and he not minding it a bit.
Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction Page 258