Alternative history: It’s not just about Nazis by Alison Morton

Adaptations of The Man in the High Castle (original story by Philip K Dick, 1962) and SS-GB (Len Deighton, 1978) have been the most prominent ‘what if’s in front of the viewing public’s eyes recently. These stories have fascinated us as they depict the most horrific thing that could have happened to Western Europe and America in modern history. Robert Harris’s Fatherland (1992) gave Nazi alternative history fiction a good nudge and then along came C J Sansom’s Dominion in 2012. Perhaps the first two are a projection of fears about the Cold War, the second two a re-examination after the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

But as the Tudors are not the only historical period, so the Nazis are not the only alternative history subject. Our cousins in the US enjoy speculating about the outcomes of the War of Independence or the American Civil War, while any respectable French bookshop inevitably has a section on the ‘what if’ of Napoléon winning at Waterloo.

Alexander the Great, Naples Museum (author photo)

Alternative history is nothing new

Roman historian Livy speculated on the idea that the Romans would have eventually beaten Alexander the Great if he’d lived longer and turned west to attack them (Book IX, sections 17-19 Ab urbe condita libri (The History of Rome, Titus Livius). In 1490, Joanot Martorell  wrote Tirant lo Blanch about a knight who manages to fight off the invading Ottoman armies of Mehmet II and saves Constantinople from Islamic conquest. This was written when the Fall of Constantinople in 1453 was still a traumatic memory for Christian Europe.

What is alternative history fiction?

Althist is a speculative genre with two parents: history and science fiction. Like any genre there are conventions:
– the event that turned history from the path we know – the point of divergence (POD) – must be in the past.
– the new timeline follows a different path forever – there is no going back.
– stories should show the ramifications of the divergence and how the new reality functions.

The world of the alternative timeline can partially resemble our own or be very different. Sometimes documented historical characters appear with or without changed roles and views; sometimes the story centres on entirely fictional characters or a mixture of both. Stories such as Ken Follett’s The Key to Rebecca or Alexandre Dumas’s The Knight of Sainte-Hermine, although ‘what if’ in nature don’t result in a change of the course of history as we know it.  Noami Novik’s excellent Temeraire series where dragons fight in a Napoleonic era is, of course, historical fantasy. Time travel machines, heroines falling through temporal portals, time travellers dropping in to sort out history then popping back out, or goddesses putting everything back as it was are not included. Once the historical timeline diverges, that’s it.

In alternative history, the jumping-off point is the point of divergence from the standard timeline, so wise writers research that period to death; religion, customs, dress, food, agriculture, legal background, defence forces, cultural attitudes, everyday life of all classes and groups. Landscapes and climate should resemble the ones in the region where the imagined country lies. And no serious alternative history writer can neglect their imagined country’s social, economic and political development. Every living person is a product of their local conditions; their experience of living in a place, and struggle to make sense of it, is expressed through culture and behaviour.

Writers need to imbue their characters with a sense of living in the present, in the now. This is their current existence, for them it’s not some story in a book(!). Character-based stories are popular; readers are intrigued by what happens to individual people living in different environments as well as taking part in major historical events. Sometimes it’s more interesting to follow the person’s story than the big event itself.

Whether a historical story is fictitious or a near biographical novel, readers will engage with it and follow as long as the writer keeps their trust. If the story world doesn’t feel plausible and consistent, the reader’s trust will break. However fantastic that imagined world, it also needs to have reached the setting for the current story in a credible way, i.e. have good backstory and history of its own. But no amount of plausibility, research or attention to ‘the rules’, or sense of fun, will disguise poor writing, shallow characterisation and losing the plot.

But how plausible is alternative history?
Alternative history varies in ‘hardness’ with readers and fans grading it by how plausible the 'alternation' is when measured against historical reality. At the ‘hard’ end are well-researched pieces that take into account historical sources and trends and try to relate events that flow from the point of divergence by using historical logic. Having a grasp of how history works despite, or perhaps because of, the butterfly effect is essential. At the ‘soft’ end are works of pure fantasy and ‘Rule of Cool’, generally a result of alien space bats (more classically, the dei ex machina).

I’m very grateful to TV Tropes for dissecting and qualifying the main types so clearly on the sliding scale of alternate history plausibility, and I’ll use their categories to explain in more detail.

Type I – Hard Alternate History: These are works that stick to strict, sometimes scientific, standards in their plausibility. Research is often detailed and intensive. Most historical counter-factuals fall into this category.
Type II – Hard/Soft Alternate History: Often well researched with historical logic and methodology, but allows room for adventurous outcomes or Rule of Drama/Cool/Comedy
Type III – Soft Alternate History: Here, setting up a world that fits the writer’s creative objectives is more important than the plausibility of the setting’s alternate history. Research is often minimal to moderate and plausibility will take a back seat to Rule of Drama/Cool/Comedy.
Type IV – Utterly Implausible Alternate History: These are works that are so ‘soft’ that they melt and so implausible as to be effectively impossible. Often, the author puts their own ideology to the fore at the expense of research, historic details or sensible logistics. Readers with even a passing familiarity with history can’t take it seriously. The original term 'alien space bats' was coined to refer to this level of implausibility.
Type X – Fantastical Alternate History: In contrast with Type IV, these works are deliberately designed as pure fantasy, typically following the Rule of Cool. Mad ideas prevail such as Nazis on the moon in the 2012 film Iron Sky.

Perception is, of course, subjective and depends upon the individual reader’s personal interpretations or on whether they are looking for serious historically logical development, a lighthearted, if not positively wacky, adventure story or something in-between. I stand at the historical end of the scale because I’m a historian as well as a thriller writer.

As with all historical fiction, characters must act, think and feel like real people. The most credible ones live naturally within their world, i.e. consistently reflecting their unique environment and the prevailing social attitudes. Of course, it makes a stronger story if the permissions and constraints of their world conflict with their personal wishes and aims. But that’s what happens in all good fiction!

Some alternative history themes and stories

England has remained Catholic – Pavane, Keith Roberts or The Alteration, Kingsley Amis
Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn have a son and Elizabeth I and Philip II of Spain have a daughter – The Boleyn Trilogy/Tudor Legacy Series, Laura Anderson
Alaska rather than Israel becomes the Jewish homeland – The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Michael Chabon
Roosevelt loses the 1940 election and right-wing Charles Lindbergh becomes US president – The Plot Against America, Philip Roth
Napoleon Bonaparte escapes from St. Helena and winds up in the United States in 1821 – Napoleon in America, Shannon Selin
Is John F. Kennedy killed by a bomb in 1963? Or does he chose not to run in 1964 after an escalated Cuban Missile Crisis led to the nuclear obliteration of Miami and Kiev? – My Real Children, Jo Walton
A secret fifth daughter of the Romanov family continues the Russian royal lineage –The Secret Daughter of the Tsar and The Tsarina’s Legacy, Jennifer Laam
An England in which James II was never deposed in the Glorious Revolution, but supporters of the House of Hanover continually agitate against the monarchy – Children’s favourite The Wolves of Willoughby Chase by Joan Aiken
A dystopian anti-female religious theocracy – The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
Prolific writers of althist especially from the US viewpoint include Harry Turtledove, Eric Flint and S.M. Stirling.
The Roman Empire has survived into the present day – Romanitas, Sophia McDougall

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Alison Morton's latest alternate history thriller, RETALIO, came out in April 2017.
www.alison-morton.com  @alison_morton

Moving along the Timeline by Penny Dolan.

I have just come back from Florence. Although I had an image in my head of that great dome, my pre-trip study barely allowed time to note our hotel was near the Ponte Vecchio. I decided Florence could create its own surprise, and went clutching my Rough Guide’s densely packed pages and a variety of maps, some deocrative, some useful. Wonderful it was - and perhaps because the visit was so dominated by architecture, my History Girl thoughts are about one of the ways we arrange history.

 

As I left the Uffizi Gallery, slightly stunned by all the acres of art, I felt that at last I had understood something about the development of Italian art history. I could see it as I hadn’t when visiting London's clustered galleries. I decided it was because of the shape of the Uffizi building itself.

Architecturally, the gallery is set out like, as a friend said, “a tuning fork”. It consists of two long, thin corridors (with small rooms off) that link at a midway point facing the River Arno. 

The linear procession of the rooms and paintings had somehow helped me to see the pattern of those Italian centuries, whether the changes came from Constantinople, the Low Countries, Austria or elsewhere, or in the dreadful guise of  personalities like Savanarola, Napoleon, Hitler or Mussolini. All that day I was walking through a timeline and I came out a little wiser.

I have liked timelines ever since seeing one in my own children’s encyclopaedia. They are such a useful way of gathering and displaying historical information even though they need to be approached with caution. They can be annoyingly simplistic, lacking the kind of precise detail one wants and are almost by definition heavily biased. I always peer into my copy of a strongly American timeline book with a suspicious English eye. Just who invented what, where and when, sir?

Timelines are ever popular educational devices. Most primary school classrooms display history timelines, usually just below the ceiling where they can’t be touched or followed with the finger. (Surely that's one of the pleasures of the timeline?) 

Then, only last weekend, at the Federation of Children’s Books Annual Conference, I met a man totally devoted to a timeline. Christopher Lloyd was talking about his pictorial timeline book “What on Earth?”with extreme enthusiasm. 

A gigantic version of Christopher Lloyd’s timeline was displayed on the South Bank by County Hall about a year ago and a new one will be posted in the same position in a few weeks called, unsurprisingly, The History of Sport.  

Making one's own timeline can be a useful task. Writers, especially historical novelists, often put together some form of timeline to ponder about how a story works and/or to check a fictional plot against the pattern of real world events.  In fact, that is what I iam about to do.

Meanwhile, before I leave Florence, I must add that by mid-afternoon at the Uffizi I was starting to wonder just what ailments each Madonnas or Bambino was suffering from, or imagining dialogues along the lines of “Try that again, sonny boy, and you’ll be sorry!” or “Do I have to?” or “Seen one magus, you’ve sent them all.”

The Uffizi  painting that charmed me most was a small, dark painting by Fra Angelico called The Thebiad. It showed a landscape filled with tiny images of the Thirteen Hermits who lived around Thebes. If you squint enough, you can see them all doing wondrous or saintly things, This painting has no logical time-line at all and the events are happening almost higgledy-piggledy at the same time as if Thebes was a vibrant, holy theme park. Here's a small section.

I recall another painting too: the face of a saintly nun, probably by Andrea Della Robbia, inside the new Museo Nationale Alinari Fotografia, which is opposite the Church of St Maria Novelli. We called in there late one afternoon to see an exhibition of photographs by Duffy, one of the Sixties street-kids-with-cameras gang that included David Bailey and Don McLean. 

The wall painting was set above an arch, over the intersection between two areas of the gallery display space. As I recall, the nun's calm saintly gaze looked down on black and white portraits of a young Michael Caine, a boldly naked model and Reggie Kray play-boxing with his grandfather in a cramped East End living room. They seemed strange company for such a person, but then this peaceful nun was used to very odd company. 

For centuries, the place had been the Dominican hospital of St Paolo, caring for the sick and destitute and following the 1780 Suppression, became a home for poor girls and unmarried women. When World War II arrived, the Fascists emptied out the orphans and turned it into a prison where state suspects were detained.  Despite that lovely peaceful face, I felt a shiver reading that fact.  

Meanwhile, back to the big sheets of paper and pencils and my own struggling tome. Just where should I begin my timeline?

Penny’s most recent children’s novel is A BOY CALLED M.O.U.S.E, published by Bloomsbury.

I have just finished reading “Long Lankin” by Lindsey Barraclough, copy and recommendation from HG Catherine Johnson, and “Gillespie and I” by Jane Harris, recommended to me by Adele Geras. Two novels that offer more shivers.

Timelines and Peter Ackroyd

When I still lived in London, there was a term when I was Writer in Residence in five Primary schools in a North London borough. I was trying to get children to find their way back into the past. One year was easy; ten years took them back to babyhood. Even a hundred years had some resonance for them because the schools were Victorian buildings which had recently celebrated centenaries, with children and teachers dressing up.

But five hundred years?

Tudors, Vikings, Romans - even dinosaurs were offered. They simply had no sense of how different periods of history fitted together, even English history. OK, they were only ten. But I actually wanted to take them back thousands of years to the people of pre-history. I was specifically trying to get them to imagine a time before houses, cars, electricity, books, in order to think what stories such people might have invented to explain the phenomena of the Sun, Moon and Stars, as they sat round their fires at night.

We got there in the end and their ideas were wonderful. What they were doing was inventing their own myths, which was what I had hoped for. But I kept remembering those contemporary Vikings and Tudors. For me, a timeline of history is the framework into which I slot each new piece of research and detail of knowledge. If you don't know that Tudors came after Plantagenets, it's hard to fit in each new fact or date or fascinating story.

This is a "ruler of rulers" of which I used to have one which  I seem to have mislaid. It was a very useful quick fact-checker for someone who finds it hard to remember dates. But it also exemplifies what those who spurn timelines hate most: it implies that History, particularly English History, is all a matter of the dates of the reigns of monarchs. Which, of course, it isn't.

But the reaction to that perceived view of the subject has brought about the kind of topic-based teaching that makes it difficult for students to link things up.  And in fact, the man or woman on the throne does have an enormous effect on ordinary people. If you are being subjected to a Poll Tax or having to give up the profits from selling the wool from your sheep to finance an expensive war with France, it really does make a difference to your daily life.

And as a novelist I find timelines make an enormous difference to mine. I make one for every novel, just to avoid things like having children in school on Sundays or parents going to work on Bank Holidays. If it's a historical novel it's even more important; there will be two simultaneous timelines - the one of what is known to have happened as events in time  and the one I have invented for my fictional characters. The two will entwine and inter-connect and I make much use of the Net to find out what the phases of the moon were in any given month of a specific year in the Middle Ages, for example, and when there were eclipses.

So I've been thinking about how to bring timelines back into fashion and then along comes Peter Ackroyd. He is releasing this month a book called Foundation, which is the first in a six volume series of the History of England (published by Macmillan).

Foundation begins where I wanted my Primary school children to travel back to: tens of thousands of years ago. It finishes with the death of Henry Vll, the first Tudor monarch. That's a lot to cram into 450 or so pages but it does leave roughly one century for each of the remaining volumes.

There are no actual timelines in the book, nor any family trees - indeed there are not even any notes, though there is a chapter by chapter bibliography. Ackroyd is approaching History not as a Historian but as a writer, perhaps the first since Macaulay wrote his History of England in the late nineteenth century . "The first historians after all were poets," Ackroyd reminds us.

First and foremost, his book is wonderfully readable. There are enough dates and monarchs to satisfy traditionalists but chapters about the Hundred Years' War or The Wars of the Roses or intercalated with ones on feudal customs or how other countries viewed the English.

Birth and death rituals, the role of the Parish church and all sorts of domestic details are here. What people wore and ate and drank, their animals, their cooking pots, their weapons. It's like finding small archaeological digs in between all the gorgeous detail of what kings spent their money on: £4,784 on clothes and furs in the case of Edward lV - in 1461!

"He draped himself in cloth of gold and crimson velvet, in tawny silk and green satin. He owned hundreds of pairs of shoes and slippers, hats and bonnets; he wore amethysts and sapphires and rubies in abundance."

(The pedant in me wants a footnote and sources but the reader and writer just says "ooh!")

And then there is the odd statement that resonates long after the book is shut, such as that the invention of the clock marked the demise of the feudal and seasonal world, as did the longbow and the decline of the serf.

Reading about the Peasants' Revolt in 1381, we hear a contemporary chronicler say that the teenage Richard ll, after reneging on the deal he had made with the rebels, who had been rioting and looting in the street, told them, "You seek equality with the lords but you are unworthy to live. Give this message to your fellows: rustics you are and rustics you will always be. You will remain in bondage, not as before but incomparably harsher. For as long as we live we will strive to suppress you, and your misery will be an example to posterity."

That has an awful topicality about it.

I can't wait for the remaining five volumes and Ackroyd is such a workhorse that we might well get one a year. I hope so; it will really help with the timelines.

Update: We have two signed copies of Foundation to give away (UK only, I'm afraid) to the commenters with the best answers to this question:

"What is your favourite period of history between 15,000 BC and 1509 AD (the time covered in Foundation) and why?"

Deadline September 16th