What if the Nazis cracked the atom bomb? What if the Aztec empire never fell? Alternate history is a genre obsessed with things that never happened, and equally obsessed with things that did.
Why write about real people and real history if you aren’t interested in what really happened? Then again, why write alternate history if you’re that interested in reality and accuracy? Isn’t the whole point of our genre making things up? Except, definitionally, alternate history has everything to do with real history, even where it deviates.
So how do you choose when and where to strike out into the wilds of invention? How do you choose which pieces of the historical record to keep, and why?
Back in 2017, I published a World War I time-travel novelette with Sam J. Miller, about Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, that led to a lot of give and take around “how much fact, how much invention.” Could we invent a psychiatrist to treat Owen? Could that psychiatrist himself have invented a science fictional treatment? Sam was all for it; I had to be convinced. Sassoon’s side of the story—mine—adhered rigidly to historical fact. Or, as rigidly as you can adhere to historical fact when there’s time travel involved.
While Sam and I were working on “Making Us Monsters,” one of our Clarion classmates sent us his notes from World Fantasy 2013, where he heard Tim Powers on a panel saying “If, according to your best information your character broke his arm on Thursday, you cannot come in and say he broke it on Monday because you need that to make your plot work. To do otherwise would be to prose as Frost said free verse was to poetry: playing without a net.”
This truly insane piece of advice resonated with me, a truly insane person. At the time, I couldn’t have told you why. Stubbornness, maybe. And if it was good enough for Tim Powers, surely it was good enough for me!
Lately I’ve been trying to parse out why I feel so strongly about this, partly because I have a new World War I alt history out: No Such Thing as Duty from Neon Hemlock, about playwright, novelist and spy W. Somerset Maugham. It’s rigorously researched, couched firmly in the very real setting of Romania, 1918. One problem: Maugham never actually went to Romania. Oh, also: vampires.
Maugham did almost go to Romania, but decided not to when it became clear the mission would probably kill him—he was seriously ill with tuberculosis at the time. I learned this in the Selena Hastings biography The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham—the first place I learned Maugham was anything more sinister than a novelist and playwright. Hastings painted his espionage work vividly—the frigid midnight ferry rides across Lake Geneva, the tension in Petrograd as the Russian Revolution gathered steam. I learned he had later fictionalized his experiences in Russia in Ashenden: or, the British Agent, laying one of the founding blocks of the spy thriller genre. And then as Hastings’s biography wrapped up the section on Maugham’s work for the British military intelligence, she very briefly mentioned that during Maugham’s debrief, after he returned from Russia, that there was talk of sending him to Romania to keep the Don Cossacks involved in the war. There’s maybe a paragraph about it, all told. But it stuck in my brain like a splinter: Tuberculosis. Pulmonary hemorrhage. Blood. Romania. Vampires. What if he had gone after all, and his illness had gotten worse?
There’s our first turn off the beaten path. Our first what if. Without it: there is no story.
So that’s the answer to the first half of the question: why change what really happened? Because without it, what are you doing? You’re either writing nonfiction, or you’re writing straight historical, no genre. I’d argue the latter is still speculative, but all the speculation is about character internality—a speculation you’re going to have to make in alt history too, along with all the others.
In alt history, you build your story by making choices about where to deviate from the historical record. Those choices can be about a fork in the road (what if the Tlaxcaltecas didn’t side with Cortez?) or they can add a genre element (what if the Napoleonic wars had dragons?), or if you’re feeling really spicy, you can do both. Which, as someone who often feels extremely spicy, of course I did.
But the second half of the question… this is the half that I think draws particular genre writers to alternate history instead of secondary world fantasy. This is the half of the question that unites us with the historical fiction crowd. This is the Tim Powers half of the question. The part that I gnawed on for a long time in order to write this essay. Why is it so important to keep some elements of history intact and to obsess about getting the detail right? Why email professors, why read expensive academic text books, why puzzle over the rank structures of the Austro-Hungarian armed forces, if you’re operating in an invented reality anyway?
Because the question isn’t just what if this happened? The questions is: What if this happened within the context of the rest of history? Your research is your guard rails. It provides context for everything you change. Without the “history,” there is no “alternate.” The knowledge of history, the deep research, gives you the power to say “it could have happened this way; this is how.”
Why is it important that your completely made up, cracked out alt history premise retain plausibility within the broader historical context?
Genre fiction is always asking us to consider the what if, but alternate history asks us to consider a what if significantly closer to home. Because there but for the indecision of the Tlaxcaltecan elders, the brains of the Manhattan project, the existence of dragons… there but for a single twitch upon the thread go we.
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No Such Thing as Duty
No Such Thing as Duty
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