Alternative history

There are those who put out "alternative history" as nonfiction, but
the really interesting alternative history is from those who imagine
how things would have turned out differently if, say, the South has
won the Civil War or if Rome had continued its domination in the West
for a thousand years as the Byzantium did in the East. There are
numismatic angles to this, I suppose, but mostly it's straight
history, imaginative history...

I just bought two books about this from Amazon.com:

What If?: The World's Foremost Military Historians Imagine What Might
Have Been. One contribution examines what if Alexander the Great had
died at the age of 21 instead of 32. The conclusion is, according to
the blurb, "Greece would have been swallowed up by Persia and Rome,
and the modern Western world would have a much different sensibility
-- and probably little idea of democratic government."

Island in the Sea of Time by S. M. Stirling. "It's spring on Nantucket
and everything is perfectly normal, until a sudden storm blankets the
entire island. When the weather clears, the island's inhabitants find
that they are no longer in the late 20th century, but have been
transported instead to the Bronze Age. Now they must learn to survive
with suspicious, warlike peoples they can barely understand and deal
with impending disaster, in the shape of a would-be conqueror from
their own time."

Mind candy. The latter book isn't really alternative history, but it
has created a lot of attention in the Usenet newsgroup about
alternative history, soc.history.what-if. They've put together a very
good FAQ that includes among other things a list of other books:

http://www.faqs.org/faqs/history/what-if/index.html

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Reid wrote:

"There are those who put out 'alternative history' as nonfiction, but the
really interesting alternative history is from those who imagine how things
would have turned out differently if, say, the South has [had?] won the Civil
War...."


Ages ago, when I was still in high school, I cut out an article from Look
Magazine (or was it Life?). "If the South had Won the Civil War" by Bruce
Catton. I kept it for years, but never read it.


Anka ---- NOT a Civil War buff

On Mon, 10 Nov 2003 13:23:19 -0500, Reid Goldsborough
wrote:

There are those who put out "alternative history" as nonfiction, but
the really interesting alternative history is from those who imagine
how things would have turned out differently if, say, the South has
won the Civil War or if Rome had continued its domination in the West
for a thousand years as the Byzantium did in the East. There are
numismatic angles to this, I suppose, but mostly it's straight
history, imaginative history...

I just bought two books about this from Amazon.com:

What If?: The World's Foremost Military Historians Imagine What Might
Have Been. One contribution examines what if Alexander the Great had
died at the age of 21 instead of 32. The conclusion is, according to
the blurb, "Greece would have been swallowed up by Persia and Rome,
and the modern Western world would have a much different sensibility
-- and probably little idea of democratic government."

It's fun to speculate. Maybe the Persians would have controlled Italy as
well
and been the major power in the world until losing a decisive naval
engagement
to the Carthaginians.

Have you read Kim Stanley Robinson's "The Years of Rice and Salt"? I
found it to be an enthralling work of alternate history fiction. The
premise of the book is that the Black Death, instead of killing a
third of Europe's population in the late Middle Ages, wiped out over
99% of Europeans. History moves on, without European civilization
(except as remembered in classical texts copied by the Arabs). Most
of the alternate history seemed plausible to me, although Robinson's
digressions on the nature of history, and on how different religious
and cultural traditions can coexist, may bore some readers.
Nonetheless, Robinson shows a deep understanding of many different
civilizations, in both their real-world and alternate-history
versions, and I wished we had more time to explore the worlds he
portrays. I would recommend the book to any RCCer who is fascinated
by history.

-Robert A. DeRose, Jr.

P.S. My favorite short story of alternate history is L. Sprague de
Camp's "Aristotle and the Gun." A late-20th century man decides to
change history, and travels back in time to meet Aristotle and try to
jump-start the scientific revolution. The results are not quite what
he expected...

(Robert A. DeRose, Jr.) wrote:
Have you read Kim Stanley Robinson's "The Years of Rice and Salt"?

I have not read that one, but I know of it generally.

P.S. My favorite short story of alternate history is L. Sprague de
Camp's "Aristotle and the Gun."

I liked that because of the accurate portrayal of ancient
sensibilities. Arthur C. Clarke is supposed to have said that any
sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
That is not true, however. Neither is it true that the people who
created what we regard has high minded cultures, were themselves
sophisticated as we measure it.

Many years ago, I read a novel called A CHOICE OF DESTINIES by Melissa
Scott (I think). She has since moved on to much better writing. I
think this was her first. She basically made herself a sorceress who
warns Alexander the Great not to catch cold and die of pneumonia in
India and as a result, Alexander conquers the rest of the world,
creating an empire that lasts to our day. About the only good scene
in the book was the execution of the conspirators. Other than that, I
think she missed the essence of the ancient world.

Similarly, there are murder mysteries, etc., set in ancient Rome.
"Silver Pigs" was one and I could not finish it. It was like "Sam
Spade in Rome:" the wrong guy in the wrong time. The author had no
feel for ancient history. Another series centers on Cicero's murder
trials and think the author there had a better grasp of ancient
sensibilities.

Also, there is a distinct difference between "historical fiction" and
"alternate histories." There were no private detectives in Rome, but,
ok, you can make one guy really good at following a trail of clues for
a fee. That, to me, is weak, but entertaining. Sort of like the
"Horatio Hornblower" idea where you take someone whom you would not
want to have at your dinner table and certainly not marry your
daughter and then redraw the historical man into a fictional character
who is handsome and charming and brave and always polite to a fault,
by Jove and by golly.

Myself, I learned to like Westerns when I was commuting from Columbus
to Dallas in 2000 and 2001. For Zane Gray, the people he created were
not much different than the people he knew. (See my reply to Ankaaz
on this subject for a footnote to that thought.)

(Ankaaz) wrote:
Ages ago, when I was still in high school, I cut out an article from Look
Magazine (or was it Life?). "If the South had Won the Civil War" by Bruce
Catton. I kept it for years, but never read it.

I recall at least one and probably more books with that title and
topic. I browsed the type off the pages at Burrows Downtown and
Burrows Westgate, but never bought them.

A couple of months ago, I read HISTORIANS' FALLACIES by David Hackett
Fischer. He exposes errors such as the "Static Fallacy" and
"Presumptive Continuity" and about 20 more. You will see these in
books about the history of coinage and the history of money.
Numismatists are generally poor historians. They do record facts
revealed by coins and they do show that coins support known facts. A
good example of that is the dating of Roman denarii by the COS
inscriptions. However, popularizations of ancient numismatics project
on the past modern sensibilities. The most common fallacy is that the
symbols on ancient Greek coins served as a guarantee of the purity of
the metal or the honesty of the weight. Even when writing about
medieval or U.S. colonial numismatics, the opportunity for erroneous
thinking is too available.

The fallacies in those kinds of assumptions and presumptions are in
the same class as the fallacies of (so-called) "alternate history."
You have to work really hard to imagine yourself in a world you can
never know. What if Lincoln had not been shot? The fact is that he
was and you were raised in a world in which that happened. Simply
following the thread as if it were a matter of mathematical syllogism
is not possible. For instance, would there have been Reconstruction?
We like to think not. Yet, Lincoln has been sanctified in our
thinking by 150 years of writing and schooling and iconizing.

"Alternate history" (so-called) is sort of a crossword puzzle or a
rubic's cube: fun to do, perhaps, but not useful and eventually, not
even interesting. "Alternate history" is really just another way to
deliver Roseanne, Friends, and Seinfeld.

"Michael E. Marotta" wrote in message
om...
"Alternate history" (so-called) is sort of a crossword puzzle or a
rubic's cube: fun to do, perhaps, but not useful and eventually, not
even interesting. "Alternate history" is really just another way to
deliver Roseanne, Friends, and Seinfeld.

I think alternate history can make for interesting reading, provided that
the author is up to the task both as a writer and as a historian. No doubt
it has made for plenty of bad reading, too! But as a concept (not as a
literary form), it has a legitimate place in the study of history. To fully
appreciate the impact of a given event, it can be very useful to consider
what might (within reason) have happened, had things turned out differently.

Eric

"Michael E. Marotta" wrote in message
m...
(Robert A. DeRose, Jr.) wrote:
Have you read Kim Stanley Robinson's "The Years of Rice and Salt"?

I have not read that one, but I know of it generally.

P.S. My favorite short story of alternate history is L. Sprague de
Camp's "Aristotle and the Gun."

I liked that because of the accurate portrayal of ancient
sensibilities. Arthur C. Clarke is supposed to have said that any
sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

I think the right answer is: "Things would be different."

Alan
'what did I win?'

On 10 Nov 2003 21:47:47 -0800, (Robert A. DeRose,
Jr.) wrote:

Have you read Kim Stanley Robinson's "The Years of Rice and Salt"? I
found it to be an enthralling work of alternate history fiction. The
premise of the book is that the Black Death, instead of killing a
third of Europe's population in the late Middle Ages, wiped out over

Sounds like a very interesting book. I haven't read it. In fact, these
two books I just ordered will be the first alternative history books
I'll have read (though only one is pure alternative history, the other
a time travel fantasy). The subject of alternative history strikes me
as being just as practical as the study of coins -- not very. But that
doesn't make it uninteresting. I see it as an exercise of the mind,
like chess, crossword puzzles, detective yarns.

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On 11 Nov 2003 04:21:40 -0800, (Michael E.
Marotta) wrote:

"Alternate history" is really just another way to
deliver Roseanne, Friends, and Seinfeld.

More contrarianism for the sake of contrarianism, surface cleverness.
These TV shows are comedies, and the only common ground they have with
alternative history is that to do it as well as these three shows were
done, you need lots of imagination. With all TV, all movies, all
literature, you need to grant the creators a certain amount of license
to stray from reality, which has been called a "willing suspension of
disbelief." The viewer or reader enters into a pact with the creator.
"I will follow you if you don't stray too far from reality, provided
you make me laugh or lift my spirits or shed insight into the human
condition or take me away from my daily concerns."

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