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ALTERNATE HISTORY:
THE HOW-TO OF WHAT
MIGHT HAVE BEEN

When Michael Knost put together his
Writers Workshop of Science Fiction & Fantasy
(Seventh Star Press, 2013), he asked me for a piece on how to write alternate history, since I've done a fair amount of it. The question faintly alarmed me, since I usually don't think about how I do what I do, any more than a centipede thinks about how it keeps all those legs going. I just do it. I worried that, if I started taking apart what I did, I might start having trouble doing it, the way a contemplative centipede might end up with its feet all tangled together. But the prospect of a check got me going again, as I suspected it would. And I'm still writing stories, too, which is nice.

I
t's mildly surprising that, these days, alternate history is mostly a subgenre of science fiction. Up through the first third of the twentieth century, it was the province—more accurately, the playground—of historians and politicians on a lark. As far as I know, it was invented by a historian on a lark, and not one notorious for larkishness, either. Writing around the time of Christ, the Roman scissors-and-paste specialist Livy wondered what might have happened had Alexander the Great not died in 323 BC, but turned west and loosed his Macedonians against the Roman Republic. Livy's opinion was that his long-dead ancestors would have handled Alexander's hoplite band just fine. My opinion is that Livy was a wild-eyed optimist, but that's neither here nor there. He wrote about not what had been but what might have been, and the die, as another Roman said, was cast.

More recent examples also have authors better known for things other than cranking out alternate history. In 1931, Winston Churchill published “If Lee Had Not Won the Battle of Gettysburg” in editor J.C. Squire's
If It Had Happened Otherwise: Lapses into Imaginative History
. Churchill wasn't in the British government at the time, but he had been, and, as some of you will recall, he would be again. Three years later, Arnold J. Toynbee, a historian of considerably greater acumen than Livy, wrote “The Forfeited Birthright of the Abortive Western Christian Civilization” as part of the second volume of
A Study of History
. This examines what a world where Celtic Christianity triumphed over the Roman variety and the Muslims succeeded in invading the Frankish Kingdom could have looked like. Both of these essays are party tricks, games intellectuals play.

So how did a-h become part of sf, then? Well, for one thing, sf writers have written a devil of a lot of alternate history. Those in our field who've turned their hand to a-h include Murray Leinster, L. Sprague de Camp (whose “The Wheels of If” dramatizes the results of Toynbee's speculation), Poul Anderson, H. Beam Piper, Philip K. Dick, John Brunner, yours truly, S.M. Stirling, Kim Newman, William­ Sanders. … I could go on, but you get the idea.

And it's not surprising that this should be so, either. Alternate history uses the same extrapolative technique as other science fiction. It just plants the extrapolation at a different place on the timeline. Most sf changes something in the present or the nearer future and works out its consequences in the more distant future. A-h, by contrast, changes something in the more distant past and examines the effects of that change on the nearer past or the present. The tools are identical. Their placement, though, makes for different kinds of stories.

Outsiders still do pick up these tools every now and again. Over the past couple of generations, interesting alternate histories have come from writers as diverse as MacKinlay Kantor, Len Deighton, Richard Harris, and Philip Roth. In comments about
The Plot Against America
, Roth made it plain that he thought he was inventing something new and different with this whole what-might-have-been thing. He wasn't, but he produced an important book anyhow.

So you've decided you're going to write an alternate history this time around. How do you go about writing a good one, one that will entertain and interest your readers (without which, all else fails) and, with luck, make them think a bit, too? The first thing I need to warn you of is, it's not about Being Right. By the nature of things, you can't know if you're right. You are conducting a
Gedankenexperiment
, nothing more (and nothing less). You can reasonably hope to be plausible. Often—though not always—in this kind of story you will want to be plausible. We'll talk about how to manage that in a little bit. First, though, another word of warning.

Who and what you are will influence what you find interesting. This is not a hot headline; it is, in fact, inevitable. All fiction—not just a-h, not just sf, but all fiction—is not about the world you're creating. It's about the world you're living in. It's no accident that Livy speculated about an Alexandrian-Roman encounter. It's no accident that several nineteenth-century French novelists wondered what the world would have looked like had Napoleon won. It's no accident that Americans write so much a-h about their Civil War: it shaped who and what our country became. It's no accident that everybody seems to write a lot of alternate history about World War II; it's drowned out World War I in public perception of what made the rest of the twentieth century (and now the twenty-first) the way it is. Look at a different war and you look at a different world. A-h gives you a funhouse mirror in which to examine the real world and distort it in ways you can't do with any other kind of fiction.

Okay. Well and good. You can't help being who and what you are. History—real history—made you that way. Neverthenonetheless, using your a-h story to bang a big drum for your political views has about as much chance of succeeding as using any other kind of story for the same purpose. People who already agree with you will go “Well, sure!” or, if they're old farts, “Right on!” People who don't will say less kindly things. Converting them ain't gonna happen. And selling your birthright for a pot of message (thank you, Ted Sturgeon) is almost always a bad idea. On second thought, delete “almost.”

What should you do, then? The same thing you would do for any other kind of story: write the best piece you can. Even if you're writing something that seems to you far removed from your essential convictions, they will shine through anyhow. They can't help it. This is the famous realization that then-
Galaxy
editor H.L. Gold passed on to—once more—Theodore Sturgeon. He knew what he was talking about, too.

Let's look at some of the pieces that go into writing that best piece you can. A breakpoint for an alternate-history story needs to be both significant and interesting. The battle of Teutoberg Wald in 9 AD, which ensured that Germany would not become part of the Roman Empire, is one of the most significant in history. Europe looks profoundly different today because of what happened there then. If it had turned out otherwise … well, who cares? Too long ago, dammit. It took me more than twenty years to come up with a story to follow on changing things there. The breakpoint also needs to be something that believably could have gone the other way. This is why writing a story where, for instance, the Native Americans fend off the Europeans is so hard: the conquistadors and their English and Dutch brethren simply had too big a head start on the people they found on this side of the Atlantic.

To figure out what you might change and to have an idea how you might change it and what would spring from that, you should be interested in real history and know something about it. You don't have to be professionally trained in history to write a-h, any more than you have to be an astronomer to write an sf piece involving one of Neptune's moons. If you are professionally trained, as I happen to be, that's an asset. But it's not a prerequisite. Still and all, you're unlikely to write a good story about Neptune's moons if you first have to hit Wikipedia to find out how many moons the planet has and how big they are. And you're unlikely to write an interesting a-h piece on early modern Europe if you have to look up the order of the Hundred Years' War, the Thirty Years' War, and the Seven Years' War. Doesn't mean you can't try something else. But that particular period might not be ideal for you.

When you look at what happens when you make your breakpoint go the other way, the way it didn't really go, you have to remember that you are
changing
things. You are changing them in all kinds of ways, and those changes will radiate out from your initial alteration.
Everything
will change, not just the stuff you're looking directly at. The farther from the breakpoint you go, the more different stuff will be. If Germany successfully gets incorporated into the Roman Empire, no way in hell Constantine the Great gets born in an obscure provincial town more than two and a half centuries later. And double no way in hell he fulfills a role in the changed world similar to the one he had in the real world.

This is one of those places where you can cheat. If you've got a world where the American Revolution never happened, Richard Nixon won't get born (one possible advantage to learning different words to the tune of “America the Beautiful”). But if you need a used-car salesman called Tricky Dick in the late twentieth century of that world, go ahead and stick him in. Just be aware that you
are
cheating, and then sin proudly. Don't drop him in there for no better reason than that you haven't thought through the consequences of your change.

Because if you are sloppy that way, people will spot it. There's always someone out there—usually, there are lots of someones out there—more knowledgeable about your topic than you are. In many ways, alternate history is still an intellectuals' parlor trick. Like any good fiction, it should evoke an emotional response. But it should also evoke one in the thinking part of the brain. And if your carelessness makes somebody crumple under the weight of disbelief that can no longer be suspended, you've lost that reader forever. You'll hear about it, too, in great detail. The Internet has made this easier and quicker, but it happened before, too.

A while ago, I said that you didn't have to be right when you were creating an alternate history: that by the nature of things you
couldn't
be right. It's still true. It has a back-asswards corollary, though. You'd better not be wrong about stuff you aren't changing deliberately. If you have British fighters accompanying British bombers on air raids over Germany in the early years of World War II, you
will
get letters—those alarmingly detailed letters—telling you those fighters couldn't have done that because they lacked the range. Again, someone will have failed to suspend disbelief and probably won't want to read on. Same thing goes for the shape of a '57 Chevy's tail fins and the price of shoes in 1902—or 1602.

If you aren't changing it on purpose and you can't be sure you're right about it, leave it out. A-h is a research-intensive subgenre; you need to resign yourself to that. If you can't, you'd once more be better off taking a swing at something else. This leads me to another point. The more of your research you do but don't show, the better off you are. “I've done my homework and you're gonna suffer for it” is one of alternate history's besetting sins. Expository lumps, friends, are right out. Research ought to be like an iceberg: ninety percent of it should stay under the surface of your story. If and when it crops out, it should do so in a few telling details, ones that make your reader feel
Well,
of course
he knows all that other stuff!
Tolkien, writing a fictitious history rather than an altered one, was particularly good at this.

One important difference between alternate history and other forms of sf and fantasy is that, with a-h, you aren't projecting onto a blank screen. If you're writing about the future or about a wholly created world, readers know only as much as you choose to tell them. The same goes for the people who inhabit your city on Tau Ceti II or in the imaginary Empire of Bebopdeluxe.

But what if you're writing about Chicago in 1881 in a world where the Confederacy won the Civil War? What if you're putting Abraham Lincoln in Chicago in that world in 1881? Everybody has ideas about Chicago. Everybody has ideas about what things were like for real in 1881. And everybody has ideas about Lincoln, too. In this altered world, what are some of the things you need to think about?

Chicago will probably be diminished economically to some degree, because a Confederate victory puts a national frontier halfway down the Mississippi. But it will still be an important east-west hub, definitely a big city. Overall life in the new world's 1881 likely won't be much different from how it was in ours. Again, because of losing the war and being divided, the rump of the USA may well be poorer than it was in reality. If that's relevant to the story you're telling, you can find ways to indicate it.

But Abraham Lincoln, Lincoln in 1881,
there's
your challenge as a writer. In the real world, of course, he was dead, and a revered martyr north of the Mason-Dixon Line. Here, he'll be past seventy. Is Mary Todd Lincoln still alive? If she is, what's she like? That will affect her husband. If she isn't, how and when did you have her die? (Isn't playing God fun?) That will also affect Lincoln.

He's not a martyr in the alternate world, obviously. Chances are he's not revered, either. After all, he's the President who led the USA into war against the CSA—and then lost it. Would he have won reelection in 1864, assuming the war was over by then? Chances are he wouldn't; you'll have to do more explaining if you say he did. What did defeat do to the Republicans? In real history, they dominated politics in the last third of the nineteenth century. Would they now? How do things look in Washington in the changed world (assuming you've left Washington in the USA)? What's Lincoln doing in Chicago, and how many people care?