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INTRODUCTION

Harry Turtledove

WHAT IF . . .

Most science-fiction ideas don’t come naturally. Most take a degree of intellectual sophistication

that came only with the Industrial Revolution. It’s hard to write about the effects of technology

before there’s much in the way of technology to write about. But alternate history isn’t like that. It’s

as natural as those two mournful little words up there. What if . . .

What if I’d married Lucy instead of Martha, George instead of Fred? What would my life be like?

Would I be richer? Happier? What would our kids have been like, if we’d had kids? What if there

hadn’t been that traffic accident that clogged three lanes of the freeway, so I wasn’t late to the

interview? How would things have looked if I’d got that job? Or—let’s not think small—what if I

won the lottery? How would I live if I had sixty million dollars in the bank?

In our own lives, we endlessly imagine these scenarios. We can’t help it. There’s always the feeling

that we’re inside God’s pinball machine, bouncing through life and off bumpers at random, and that

we could have ended up elsewhere as easily as where we did.

It’s certainly true for me. If I hadn’t read a particular book— Lest Darkness Fall , by L. Sprague de

Camp—when I was about fourteen years old, I wouldn’t have ended up with the degree I have (a

doctorate in, God help me, Byzantine history), wouldn’t have written much of what I’ve written (I

surely wouldn’t be working on this introduction now), wouldn’t have met the lady I’m married to,

wouldn’t have the kids I have. Other than that, it didn’t change my life a bit. If someone else had

taken that novel out of the secondhand bookstore where I found it . . .

And from there, from the sense that individuals’ lives might be plastic, mutable, comes the sense

that the wider world might work the same way. “A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!”

Richard III cried. What if he’d got that horse, instead of going down to defeat and death because he

didn’t? What would England be like today? No different at all? A little different? A lot different?

How can we know?

Well, we can’t know , not in any absolute sense. Whatever else history may be, it’s not an

experimental science. How can we make plausible guesses, interesting guesses, entertaining

guesses? This is the way in which the alternate-history story was born.

The subgenre is a lot older than you might think, too. As I’ve noted, alternate history doesn’t

require a relatively high-tech background. All it requires is the ability to extrapolate from the

individual to the wider world, the intuitive leap that lets you see that, just as small things can change

individual lives, they can also change wider affairs.

The first person of whom I’m aware who made this leap was the Roman historian Livy, who wrote

about the time of Christ. In Book IX, sections 17–19, of his monumental (so monumental that it was

frequently abridged and extracted, and does not survive complete) History of Rome from Its

Foundation , Livy wonders what would have happened if Alexander the Great had turned his

attention to the west and attacked the Roman Republic in the late fourth centuryB .C. With fine

Roman patriotism, he tries to show that his countrymen could and would have beaten the

Macedonian king. My own opinion is that Livy was an optimist, but that’s neither here nor there.

He clearly invented the game of alternate history—not a small achievement for a man who has been

criticized for the past two thousand years as one who made his history with scissors and paste,

taking it all from the works of those who went before him and piecing those works together into a

continuous narrative as best he could.

Livy proved to be ahead of his time, as inventors sometimes are. In his case, he was further ahead of

his time than most: about eighteen hundred years ahead. Not till the aftermath of Napoleon’s

downfall did alternate history rear its head again, with several French novelists wondering what

might have been had the defeated emperor proved triumphant.

It is not till the twentieth century that most—not all, but most—alternate history came to be

reckoned part of that new and sometimes strange kid on the literary block, science fiction. To this

day, some people wonder why this identification was made. I have a couple of reasons to propose.

For one thing, people who wrote other forms of science fiction also came to write alternate-history

stories. And, for another, alternate history plays by some of the same rules as (other) varieties of

science fiction. In many science-fiction stories, the author changes one thing in the present or nearer

future, and speculates about what would happen in the more distant future as a result of the change.

Alternate history goes down the same road, but from a different starting point. It usually changes

one thing in the more distant past and speculates about what would have happened in the nearer past

or the present. The relationship seems obvious.

The American Civil War has offered aficionados of the subgenre a playground full of toys ever

since a still fell at Appomattox. In fact, many Civil War officers’ memoirs read as if they were

alternate history, with the authors trying to seize credit for everything that went right anywhere near

them and blaming incompetent subordinates and superiors for everything that went wrong. But, as

their purpose was to make themselves look good rather than really to examine what might have

been, they cannot in fact be included among early alternate historians.

The crowded, chaotic twentieth century saw the true rise of alternate history. Murray Leinster’s

seminal story, “Sidewise in Time” (after which the Sidewise Award for alternate history is named),

introduced this type of story to the science-fiction pulp magazines. But alternate history was also

the province of intellectuals on a lark. In 1931, for example, Winston Churchill’s essay “If Lee Had

Not Won the Battle of Gettysburg” examined the possible consequences of a Northern victory in the

Civil War in a world where the South won it—a neat double twist. And, in the second volume of

his A Study of History , Arnold Toynbee, in “The Forfeited Birthright of the Abortive Far Western

Christian Civilization,” postulated a world in which Celtic Christianity had survived along with the

Roman variety, and in which the Muslims defeated the Franks at the Battle of Tours in 732.

This latter speculation was later fictionalized by L. Sprague de Camp in his classic novella, “The

Wheels of If,” which imagined a modern lawyer from our world transported to the twentieth century

of that one. That novella, along with de Camp’s even more important novel, Lest Darkness Fall, in

which an archaeologist is dropped back into the Rome of the sixth centuryA .D., and seeks to keep

the Dark Ages from descending on Europe by propping up the Ostrogothic Kingdom of Italy

against the resurgent Byzantine Empire and by improving technology, finished the job begun by

Leinster’s story and brought alternate-historical speculation into the orbit of science fiction.

In the years following World War II, a few writers followed de Camp’s lead and produced

thoughtful alternate histories of their own. H. Beam Piper’s Paratime stories and Poul Anderson’s

tales of the Time Patrol (and, in a different vein, his stories collected in Operation Chaos , in which

magic reappeared in the world as a technology around the beginning of the twentieth century) stand

out among these.

For the centennial of the War Between the States, Pulitzer Prize winner MacKinlay Kantor wrote If

the South Had Won the Civil War , an optimistic scenario in which the severed parts of our nation

reunite in the 1960s. Also coming into prominence during the decades following the end of the

Second World War were stories in which the Axis won, which have challenged stories of

Confederate victories in the Civil War for popularity. Three of the best of the earlier ones were

Sarban’s The Sound of His Horn , C. M. Kornbluth’s great novella, “Two Dooms,” and Philip K.

Dick’s Hugo-winning novel, The Man in the High Castle .

In the 1960s, two Englishmen, John Brunner and Keith Roberts, produced stimulating alternate

histories on a subject particularly relevant to British hearts: a successful invasion by the Spanish

Armada. Brunner’s Times Without Number examined why travel between different time lines

doesn’t happen more often, while Roberts’ beautiful Pavane looked at, among other things, the

consequences of slowing down technological growth (strictly speaking, Pavane isn’t an alternate

history, but a first cousin: a recursive future). At about the same time, Keith Laumer, in Worlds of

the Imperium and its two sequels, did a first-rate job of combining alternate history with fast-

moving adventure.

But alternate history really became a more prominent subgenre in the last two decades of the

twentieth century. There are a couple of reasons for this. One is that, with our much greater

knowledge of the true nature of the solar system, we have found that it looks much less inviting

than it did a couple of generations ago. There are no canals on Mars, and no Martians, either; nor

are there oceans on Venus full of reptilian monsters. Before the space probes went out, these were

scientifically plausible speculations. No more; brute facts have killed such possibilities.

Furthermore, more people trained in history have begun writing science fiction, and have naturally

gravitated to areas with which they find themselves familiar: S. M. Stirling, with a law degree and

an undergraduate degree in history; Susan Shwartz and Judith Tarr, both with doctorates in western

medieval studies; and myself, with a doctorate in Byzantine history (a subject I was inspired to

study, as I’ve said, by Lest Darkness Fall ).

Stirling’s Draka universe, commencing with Marching Through Georgia , is as thoroughly

unpleasant a place as any ever envisioned by an alternate historian, but, especially in Under the Yoke

, alarmingly convincing as well. His more recent trilogy, beginning with Island in the Sea of Time ,

drops the entire island of Nantucket back to about 1250B .C. and examines the consequences with

fine writing, splendid research, and careful logic.

Shwartz and Tarr have both combined fantasy and alternate history in intriguingly different ways.

Shwartz’s series that begins with Byzantium’s Crown looks at a magical medieval world that might

have sprung from Cleopatra’s victory over Octavian, while Tarr’s beautifully written the Hound and

the Falcon trilogy and other succeeding books examine what the world might have been like if

immortal elves were real rather than mythical.

My own book-length work includes Agent of Byzantium , set in a world where Muhammad did not

found Islam; A Different Flesh, in which Homo erectus rather than American Indians populated the

New World; A World of Difference, which makes the planet in Mars’s orbit different enough to

support life; the Worldwar series, which imagines an alien invasion in 1942; The Guns of the South,

in which time-traveling South Africans give Robert E. Lee AK-47s; and How Few Remain and the

Great War books, which embroil an independent Confederacy and the United States of America in

World War I.

In a slightly different vein, Kim Newman has imagined the Victorian age and the early years of this

century controlled by vampires in Anno Dracula and The Bloody Red Baron . The really frightening

thing about the latter book is that the World War I he imagines is no bloodier than the one we really

had. Newman’s entertaining Back in the USSA looks at a Red revolution in the United States rather

than Russia, with Al Capone in the role of Stalin.

And alternate history has not become the sole province of escaped history buffs. Aerospace

engineer Stephen Baxter’s Voyage looks at a journey to Mars in 1986 that might have happened had

John Kennedy not been assassinated. This is hard science fiction at its best, as is Gregory Benford’s

award-winning Timescape , which touches on ecological disaster along with its main theme of

communicating across time lines.

Nor has alternate history remained the sole province of science-fiction writers. Spymaster Len

Deighton produced SS-GB , a chilling account of a Nazi-occupied Britain. And journalist Robert

Harris’s Fatherland became an international best-seller—certainly a breakthrough for alternate

history. Fatherland, another tale of Germany triumphant, is carefully researched; its principal flaw

seems to be a conviction that the discovery of the Holocaust twenty years after the fact would be a

world-shaking event rather than a nine days’ wonder, if even that.

Several anthologies have also highlighted alternate history in recent years. Gregory Benford edited,

with Martin H. Greenberg, Hitler Victorious and the four volumes titled What Might Have Been ,

which examined different ways in which the past might have changed. And the prolific Mike

Resnick edited and wrote for a series of Alternate anthologies, including such titles as Alternate

Kennedys and Alternate Tyrants . Alternate-history stories have found homes in magazines as

diverse as Omni and Analog .

And there is a renewed interest in alternate history outside the confines of science fiction and

fantasy. Articles on the topic have appeared in such mainstream publications as USA Today

and American Heritage , and academic alternate histories, the parlor game of the 1930s, are

respectable once again. Serious historians have played the game in two collections of essays edited

by Kenneth Macksey, Invasion: The Alternate History of the German Invasion of England, July

1940 and The Hitler Options: Alternate Decisions of World War II . Peter Tsouras’s recent Disaster

at D-Day: The Germans Defeat the Allies, June 1944 and Gettysburg: An Alternate History recall, in

their detail and fictional critical apparatus, Robert Sobel’s classic For Want of a Nail , which

imagines a failed American Revolution and the subsequent 180 years of history from the

perspective of a college history text.

The stories in this collection, in their quality and their variety, show where the field went during the

last century. I have no doubt that, with so many talented writers wondering what might have been,

we will continue to see many more fascinating, thought-provoking stories in the century just being

born. The purpose of any good fiction, after all, is not to examine the created world alone, but to

hold up that created world as a mirror to the reality we all experience. Alternate history gives us a

fun-house mirror that lets us look at reality in ways we cannot get from any other type of story.

That, to me, is its principal attraction—along with the joys of storytelling. Have fun!

Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson’s monumental Mars trilogy ( Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars )—a future

history of the Red Planet from its colonization through its struggle for independence from Earth—

has been hailed a modern classic and acknowledged a landmark of twentieth-century science

fiction. Robinson’s first published story appeared in 1976, and since that time he has earned the

Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, and John W. Campbell Memorial Awards for his short fiction and

novels. His first novel, The Wild Shore, published in 1984, produced two thematic sequels, The Gold

Coast and Pacific Edge , which form the Orange County trilogy, about the future development of the

California coast in the aftermath of nuclear holocaust. Robinson’s other novels include The

Memory of Whiteness, A Short, Sharp Shock , and Antarctica , the story of a future Antarctica

society threatened by ecological saboteurs. His short fiction has been collected in Escape from

Kathmandu, Remaking History, and Down and Out in the Year 2000. His doctoral dissertation has

been published as the critically acclaimed The Novels of Philip K. Dick.

THE LUCKY STRIKE

Kim Stanley Robinson

WAR BREEDS STRANGE PASTIMES.In July of 1945 on Tinian Island in the North Pacific,

Captain Frank January had taken to piling pebble cairns on the crown of Mount Lasso—one pebble

for each B-29 takeoff, one cairn for each mission. The largest cairn had four hundred stones in it. It

was a mindless pastime, but so was poker. The men of the 509th had played a million hands of

poker, sitting in the shade of a palm around an upturned crate sweating in their skivvies, swearing

and betting all their pay and cigarettes, playing hand after hand after hand, until the cards got so soft

and dog-eared you could have used them for toilet paper. Captain January had gotten sick of it, and

after he lit out for the hilltop a few times some of his crewmates started trailing him. When their

pilot Jim Fitch joined them it became an official pastime, like throwing flares into the compound or

going hunting for stray Japs. What Captain January thought of the development he didn’t say. The

others grouped near Captain Fitch, who passed around his battered flask. “Hey, January,” Fitch

called. “Come have a shot.”

January wandered over and took the flask. Fitch laughed at his pebble. “Practicing your bombing up

here, eh, Professor?”

“Yah,” January said sullenly. Anyone who read more than the funnies was Professor to Fitch.

Thirstily January knocked back some rum. He could drink it any way he pleased up here, out from

under the eye of the group psychiatrist. He passed the flask on to Lieutenant Matthews, their

navigator.

“That’s why he’s the best,” Matthews joked. “Always practicing.”

Fitch laughed. “He’s best because I make him be best, right, Professor?”

January frowned. Fitch was a bulky youth, thick-featured, pig-eyed—a thug, in January’s opinion.

The rest of the crew were all in their mid-twenties like Fitch, and they liked the captain’s bossy

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