Tevun-Krus #18 - Alternative History

The History of Alternate History - An Article by @CarolinaC

The oldest surviving example of alternate history might have started life as schoolwork. The story goes something like this:

During the dying days of the Roman Republic, a teacher in Cisalpine Gaul asks his teenage students a question: explain what would have happened if, instead of invading India, Alexander the Great had turned his attention to a fledgling Rome?

The students present their answers as speeches. One student, Titus Livius, argues that, like Hannibal, Alexander would win battles, but ultimately, not the war. Proud of his work, Titus Livius keeps a copy of it. Twenty years later, still pleased with his reasoning, he tweaks his old assignment to become several chapters of the huge history book he's writing.

There's no actual proof that Chapters 17 – 19 of Book 9 of Livy's Ab Urbe Condita really was a youthful school assignment, but it's an attractive theory. The famous 'digression on Alexander' is written in a less mature style than the rest of the book, and Romans often gave students hypothetical situations to talk about in rhetoric class. Still, no matter how it came to be, Livy's three chapters form the earliest still-extant example of alternate history.

Despite the obvious value in terms of schoolwork, it took a long time for alternate history to become a well-defined genre. Alternate history written between Livy and the 19th century is rare, but there are a few examples. In the 1490s, Valencian Joanot Martorell had his knight errant hero, Tirant lo Blanc, prevent the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople. A few years later, Machiavelli, inspired by Livy, pondered what might have happened if the Romans had gunpowder. In the 1730s, French novelist and playwright Alain-René Lesage wrote a short novel where people from the Americas discovered Europe, rather than the other way around.

With the dawning of the 19th Century, the field of alternate history exploded. People as diverse as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Benjamin Disraeli tried their hands at the genre. Napoleon was a popular topic; in various tales he escaped from St. Helena, successfully invaded Britain, and took over the world. Other authors explored the effects of a longer life for Lorenzo de Medici, a Phoenician takeover of the Mediterranean world, or the results of Marcus Aurelius selecting a philosopher to succeed him, rather than his erratic son Commodus.

In the 20th Century, stories about Napoleon and ancient Rome continued, but the were joined by tales of the South winning the U.S. Civil War, the Germans winning World War II, and almost any other scenario imaginable. An increase in the variety of divergent histories explored was not the only new development for alternate history in the 20th Century. Early alternate history stories generally did not try to go too far forward in time from the point of divergence. Although there are exceptions, most 19th Century tales examined the immediate effects of the change, without moving forward to detail those permutations that could take several generations to appear. This would change in the 20th Century, with authors like Harry Turtledove (particularly his "Southern Victory" or "Timeline-191" series) and Michael Chabon (The Yiddish Policemen's Union) following through with tales set fifty or even a hundred years after the point of divergence.

Another 20th Century development was that alternate history stories were combined with the related time travel genre. The point of divergence typically became the moment when one or more time travellers interfered with events in their own past. Notable examples are Ray Bradbury's A Sound of Thunder, Eric Flint's 1632 series, and S. M. Stirling's Island in the Sea of Time. Alternate history stories also influenced time travel stories; there is an entire subgenre of stories dedicated to describing the lives of 'temporal police', people whose job it is to ensure that time travellers mind the rules, and to set the timeline right when those time travellers can't or won't listen. Sometimes the time police are an alien species, or something nearly indistinguishable from an angel, but more often, they're ordinary people, who just happen to come from a timeline where time travel and its implications are well understood.

Also popular in the late 20th Century and into the 21st Century is the combination of alternate history with fantasy. If you want to know how the Napoleonic Wars might have played out differently with magic (Susana Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, Wrede and Stevermeyer's Sorcery & Cecilia, or,The Enchanted Chocolate Pot), or with dragons (Naomi Novik's Temeraire series), this is the subgenre for you. There are even fantasy series where there are multiple versions of the same fictional world, each of which is treated like an alternate history version of each of the other worlds. This sort of alternate history meta-fiction isn't limited to fantasy worlds either; in Philip K. Dick's magic-free The Man in the High Castle, it is our reality that is the alternate history, laid out in the story-within-a-story enjoyed by many of the characters.

Alternate history has come a long way in the two thousand years since a teenage boy decided his homework was worth hanging onto. What started out as a handful mere fanciful digression has turned into an entire genre encompassing not only the books we've discussed in this article, but movies, tv shows, and even video games. Alternate history gives us an infinite number of possible worlds to explore, and with that, an infinite number of new stories to tell. It may have taken alternate history years to grow into a mature genre, but now that it's here, it won't be going away.