What if?…and alternate history…
For some strange reason, alternate history is considered a subgenre of sci-fi or fantasy, most likely the former. Maybe the reason is whoever decides these things just didn’t know where to put it? It isn’t as puzzling as that catch-all genre literary fiction, but it’s close.
An alternate history story is the quintessential example of an author using a what-if to write a story. What if George Washington had been assassinated? What if Lincoln hadn’t? What if Hitler had been taken out early on in his nefarious career? What if Eisenhower had been in his illustrious career? What if Alexander the Great had conquered all the known world and his empire had continued into the modern era? What if gunpowder had never been invented? (Feel free to use any of those ideas, by the way.)
I’ve collected what-ifs all my life, but none of them led me to write an alternate history story. In fact, I don’t read much in that genre unless it really is hard sci-fi, like Hogan’s The Proteus Operation (it’s about a plot to take out Hitler and involves time travel). When I discussed reality in fiction a few posts ago, I didn’t consider alternate history—it isn’t reality, of course; it’s fiction. It might as well be called alternate reality.
I don’t know what turns me off about this genre. I don’t like steampunk either, a genre that has a lot in common with alternate history and has been described as “what the past world look like if the future had happened sooner” (sorry, I don’t know who coined this delightful and logically twisted definition—maybe a reader can tell me in a comment). They all fit in with the idea of parallel universes, or the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, where at each moment in time (actually points on the Universe’s world-line or quantum history), all possible states of the Universe exist and “ours” splits off into just one state, ad infinitum. (The idea of quantum histories might be the salvation for quantizing general relativity, an unsolved problem in theoretical physics. It also leads to the idea of metaverses. FTL travel in my sci-fi is linked to hopping between these metaversal states, a process so complicated it’s done with advanced AIs. By the way, my own oeuvre contains the “future history” timeline associated with many of my books—see the list of free PDFs on my “Free Stuff & Contests’ web page.)
It turns out that in our own special Universe’s world-line, there really was a plot to assassinate Hitler, but only after that monstrous villain had already done immense damage. There was also a plot to assassinate Washington. Neither one succeeded in our Universe’s progression along its timeline, but what if they had? In those universes where they did succeed, what happened afterward? That’s a story for alternate history (or “future history”?).
Whether authors write alternate history or not, collecting what-ifs is a great way to come up with plot ideas. I’d venture that every Stephen King book except his On Writing came from a what-if, for example. My very first published book came from a what-if where I asked myself long ago after learning about transplants and rejection problems, what if one-percenters create clones of themselves to have spare body parts always available. I asked myself that long before Dolly the sheep, but, when the time came to write the novel, cloning was occurring. And there you have the sci-fi thriller Full Medical (2006, 2011), probably more current today than when I wrote it. (There’s much more to the plot, of course.)
My third book, The Midas Bomb (2009, 2015), provides another example, but it came from multiple what-ifs. After 9/11, there were reports that some one-percenters had inside info and sold stocks short, making a killing on the stock market. A commission found no evidence for that, but, like in any good conspiracy theory, what-ifs in themselves, the question still remains. I asked, what if some really unscrupulous individual planned a terrorist attack to do just that?
For The Midas Bomb, I used another what-if ready about a dirty bomb being set off in NYC (yes, I know how to make one). I used yet another one about exploiting illegal immigrants for a terrorist attack where they would be reported if they didn’t comply.
All of this was a bit prescient: the first in the sense that we discovered the 2008-2009 economic implosion was caused by a Wall Street out of control (it still is, in many ways), the second because there’s at least one case where a dirty bomb was thwarted by NYPD (and there are probably many we don’t know about), and the third because illegal immigrants have been exploited in NYC for years, beginning in the old garment district. In this sense, at least for mysteries and thrillers, we can say that what-ifs often are warnings that the authors are indirectly making to society in their fiction.
I still have a lot of what-ifs available, so I’ll probably pass on before I ever have writer’s block. Here’s a fun one that I used recently: I asked long ago (maybe even before high school?), what if Dame Agatha had put her two sleuths Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot together to solve a crime? Not being a lawyer and not privy to all the legal nuances regarding estate law and such, especially in Britain, I couldn’t answer that question directly. Esther Brookstone and Bastian van Coevorden came to my rescue as 21st century versions of Christie’s famous sleuths in Rembrandt’s Angel (again, the plot is more complicated than that, but readers might wonder at the beginning of the story whether they’re in a Christie-style mystery!). I suppose I could have written an alternate history where Esther gets fed up waiting for Bastiann to propose to her and murders him. Different plot! But not as fun as keeping the fiction in the real world, right? (There’s a sequel, Son of Thunder, that will be published this year.)
I suppose there’s an alternate history, another timeline, where a disgruntled reader, agent, acquisitions editor, or publicist offs Steve Moore and none of his (my?) stories are (were?) written. What if I could travel back in time and warn him? And what if there’s a timeline where one of my books becomes a bestseller? What if I could actually learn about that? I might be very happy for that Steve Moore. Or what if I’d want to kill him out of jealousy? Would I succeed?
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Comments are always welcome.
Last man alive? What about last woman alive? Penny Castro, LA County Sheriff’s Deputy and forensic diver, finds she isn’t alone, though—there are a few others who survive the contagion and want to kill her. And the remnants of a US government could be the greatest danger for her and the family she’s adopted. The post-apocalyptic thriller The Last Humans will soon be published by Black Opal Books and available at the publisher’s website, online retailers, and bookstores (if they don’t have it, ask for it!). Coming March 30! Pre-orders now accepted on Amazon and Smashwords.
Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas?
