Afterword

The afterword sums up the conclusions made by the chapters in the collection. All the chapters demonstrate that – although there is a wide variety of alternate history narratives produced – these texts all reflect on and reveal the nature of our current reality. A common theme throughout the collection is ‘Great Man’ model, where a sole figure is held responsible for big historical events. Another thread for discussion is the structure of form of alternate history, as the book explored science fiction and epic narratives alongside the development of alternate history. Issues of time within the structure of narrative were explored, as the collection considered breaks and continuities within alternate history. Many of these discussions emphasized the way that the cultural critique of minority voices are embedded in the narrative structure itself. Issues of power and dogma are often integral to these evaluations. Ultimately the collection concludes that there are a lot of questions that alternate history provokes, and while this collection cannot perhaps provide definite answers, it presents new ways to think about the genre in the hopes of stimulating further conversations.

Agency and Contingency in Televisual Alternate History Texts

Televisual alternate history texts concern themselves with not with history per se but rather the individual, agency, and self-contingency. In televisual texts including An Englishman’s Castle (miniseries, 1978), Sliders (1995–2000), Charlie Jade (2005), Fringe (2008–13), and Continuum (2012–15), individual characters are presented as being able to affect events by contingency—that is, an event that may occur but that is not certain to occur—and agency, or the capacity to act or exert power. History is used in only the most general sense to permit displacement; alternate worlds are a mode of this displacement. Contingency is used as a narrative and temporal construction to frame agency. Televisual alternate histories control the narrative so as to permit characters’ agency to permit causal, contingent events, resulting in a sort of feedback loop of contingency and agency.

Between the Alternate and the Apocryphal

This chapter explores connections between two treatments of history in science fictional literature—the apocryphal history and the alternate history—as they deal with material place. Theorists (Jameson, Hughes-Warrington) have explored the role of materialist history in our need to create counterfactuals by examining the cityscapes and structures in literary representations of the past. This essay connects the disparate strands of materialism, place, and religious revisionism via Juan Miguel Aguilera’s La locura de Dios. It reads the novel as both an apocryphal adventure to a “lost world” civilization and an alternate narrative of Spanish national history. La locura comments surprisingly self-consciously on the crystalline fragility of the logic holding material history together, threatened as it is by a revisionist, escapist orthodoxy.

Quest for Love

The catastrophe science fiction of John Wyndham was once dismissed as being cosy. “Random Quest”, one of several works that David Ketterer labelled “time schism love stories”, is an alternate history. But is this story (and its British film adaption, Quest For Love (1971)) also cosy? Just as his catastrophic narratives invoke the blind forces of evolution that resist anthropocentric visions of the world, so here the blind forces of physics and chance resist the inevitability of true love. A potential intertext, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s novel Die Wahlverwandtschaften (Elective Affinities, 1809), features a heroine Ottiline who shares her name with the heroine of “Random Quest” and offers a pseudoscientific model for predestined love that bears fruit in the film’s assumption of a cosy ending.

‘Her Dreams Receding’

Ian Sales’ Apollo Quartet (2012-16) series of novellas develops a series of alternate histories of the Space Age. Determinedly ‘hard’ in its approach to sf and the technical (as well as historical) background, Sales uses slightly different alternate scenarios in each novella for exploring not only the NASA’s Apollo Moon program, but the fabric of the post-war United States. This chapter analyses Sales’ alternate-history mode in terms of an explicit intervention in science fictions of space exploration with regard to ideological and patriarchal constructions of gender, and in particular as a means by which to re-imagine both the potentialities and implications of space exploration and of post-World War II masculinity and femininity.

‘It Is One Story’

Alternative histories create a ludic space where a game of allusion, extrapolation and speculation is played. Kim Stanley Robinson’s (2002) The Years of Rice and Salt depicts a world that might have developed had European civilisation been eradicated by the Black Death. This chapter examines how Robinson uses science fiction, utopia and the alternate history to examine and challenge assumptions about progress, memory, identity, culture and storytelling. It investigates how The Years of Rice and Salt portray the actors who make up the story of history, how this history is characterised and what repercussions these explorations have for reading the stories that make up contemporary “real-world” history.

Napoleon as Dynamite

This chapters reads Louis-Napoléon Geoffroy Napoléon Apocryphe (often described as the first ‘alternate history’ novel), contextualizing it in terms of nineteenth-century theories of history and comparing it on those terms to Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Where Tolstoy forcefully repudiates the “great man” theory of history; Geoffroy in particular and—I argue—alt-history as a mode in general necessarily style history as fundamentally fragile. In War and Peace even so important a figure as Napoleon is powerful in the face of the inertia of collective historical force, where in Geoffroy’s novel it is history that is weak as the ‘great man’ conquers Russia, defeats America, occupies the whole globe and reshapes a Napoleonic utopia. The chapter explores the extent to which alternate history is Geoffroyan in this sense: agenre that can only think of history as a succession of ‘great’ (that is, significant) individuals, of moments around which everything might hinge. The comparison will lead into discussion of several key althistorical texts, including Murray Leinster’s ‘Sideways in Time’ (1934), Ward Moore's Bring the Jubilee (1953), and Felix Gilman's Half-Made World (2010).

Introduction

The introduction provides a summary of the genre’s literary history from its earliest roots to the contemporary novel, presenting important examples of alternate history literature from nineteenth century French novels to early-twentieth century essays and more recent examples of science fiction short stories, novels, television and films. It provides definitions and distinctions for key terminology such as ‘nexus point’, ‘counterfactualism’, ‘secret history’ and ‘alternate future’, as well as an overview of important existing research, and explores the relationship between alternate history texts and their source historical narratives. After setting out the aims and aspirations of this collection of essays, the introduction concludes with a precis of the essays in the rest of the collection, underlining connections between them.

Weird History / Weird Knowledge

The 2003 horror short story collection, Shadows over Baker Street partakes of the Weird tradition of revising the history of human civilisation whilst also producing a secret history of the fictional detective, Sherlock Holmes. The stories pit Conan Doyle’s master of rational enquiry against Lovecraft’s terrifying monsters. The contest is unsettling. Typically, detective fiction shores up faith in rational enquiry, whilst the Weird disrupts enlightenment narratives, suggesting that everything we know about the world is wrong. Shadows over Baker Street encourages the reader to surrender disbelief entirely in the face of the ‘ineluctability of the Weird.’ This surrender manifests a postmillennial structure of feeling towards epistemological uncertainty. Shadows over Baker Street is an example of how the Weird challenges rational, inductive reasoning and epistemological certainty, ushering in an era of belief - in the unbelievable.

Time and Affect After 9/11

Lavie Tidhar’s Osama (2011) cannot be categorised unproblematically as an alternate history novel, it does however use alternate history as a discourse to explore the status of history and alternate history in the aftermath of 9/11 and the other terrorist attacks referenced throughout the novel. Osama shows that historiography itself has changed in the aftermath of 9/11 and now demands that the emotional impact of historical events be taken into account by historians, a demand that I argue is recognised by the rise of affect theory in academia. Through the trauma of the main protagonist alternate history and history itself become narrative practices undermined by Tidhar’s refusal to anchor the action of his plots to specific dates and names. The time of trauma is non-linear and affective, and this chapter asks how political action or narrative sense can be made possible in such a milieu.