March 25, 2013

• The Mammoth Book of Alternate Histories

  The Mammoth Book of Alternate Histories is a very mixed bag, as I suppose is to be expected from an anthology of short stories by different authors. It’s extremely long, and not very quick to read, which is why I took so long to get through it. Most of the stories aren’t that interesting, but a few are excellent and they make it worth getting the book just to read them.

   

  “The Raft of the Titanic” I found spectacularly boring; it doesn’t go anywhere and takes many pages to get there.

   

  “Sidewinders” I found interesting, but a bit too weird; it’s more standard science fiction than most of the others, but doesn’t have quite as ‘alternate history’ a feel. Also, there’s no explanation given for the central premise of jumping between timelines; some people like that, but I always find it annoying.

   

  “The Wandering Christian” requires you to take Christian mythology far more seriously than I did even when I considered myself Catholic.

   

  “Hush My Mouth” is definitely original, but honestly a bit too dark; it starts with a scenario that seems like it would be a good thing, and then it leads to a really quite horrible conclusion.

   

  “A Letter from the Pope” is the most historically thorough, and while it deals with a part of history that isn’t of particular interest to me, it does an excellent job of applying the butterfly effect appropriately; by changing just a few key variables a little bit, it results in a radically different outcome in a very plausible way.

   

  “Such a Deal” tries to do the same thing, but doesn’t do nearly as good a job of it; it’s hard to take seriously the idea of Ferdinand and Isabella surrendering to a merchant in Grenada simply because they had failed in their conquest of the Aztecs.

   

  “Ink from the New Moon” is quite intriguing, and reasonably plausible (we do know that the Chinese had quite a naval empire in their day), but it isn’t done all that well, and the conceit of calling it the ‘United Sandalwood Autocracies’ just to keep the acronym grated at me.

   

  “Dispatches from the Revolution” imagines what would have happened if the 1960s in the US had erupted into full revolution, and frankly seems like a paranoid fantasy borne of exaggerated misrememberings.

  “Catch that Zeppelin”, however, is excellent, an instant classic; it’s also one of the few alternate histories bold enough to imagine a life better than the one we are living today.

   

  “A Very British History” seems to have a bit too much, well, British nationalism; it imagines that if the British (instead of the Americans) had captured the Nazi rocket scientists, the result would have been a golden age of space exploration.

   

  “The Imitation Game” is also a gem in the rough; it actually is the only story in the set that might actually have happened, for it is arranged such that we would not actually know if it had. Perhaps Alan Turing did not commit suicide after all, but instead MI5 tried to kill him and he made a daring and devious escape!

   

  “Weinachsabend” imagines what might have happened if the Nazis won WW2, and is not as bleak as one might first think. It’s quite plausible, but I didn’t find it terribly interesting.

   

  “The Lucky Strike” is another one that does a nice job of making a small change at a critical moment. The Enola Gay and its crew are destroyed in an accident, and it is replaced by the Lucky Strike for the delivery of the atomic bomb at Hiroshima. The new bombardier hesitates at the last moment, sparing Hiroshima from destruction.

   

  “His Powder’d Wig, His Crown of Thornes” imagines what might have happened had the British won the Revolutionary War; it’s a weird take though, because it manages to at once propose that the Native Americans would have avoided the worst genocides yet somehow ended up worse off. (Personally I think genocide is pretty much the worst possible outcome.)

   

  “Roncesvalles” is a very interesting premise… that spends the entire time telling the story to set up the premise, instead of actually carrying out the narrative of the consequences. It ends with Charlemagne professing Islam; not begins, ends. We never see any of the consequences of that.

   

  “The English Mutiny” didn’t particularly interest me, but it is fairly well-executed. It turns the tables on the British Empire, imagining what might have happened if India had conquered Britain instead of the other way around.

   

  “O One” is brilliant; it achieves what “Ink from the New Moon” failed to do, making a plausible and compelling story out of Chinese world conquest. The domination of the abacus over the calculating engine, and the stagnation of technology that would result, is all too plausible, frankly.

   

  “Islands in the Sea” makes the same mistake as “Roncesvalles”, telling in detail the story of how the Bulgarian Empire becomes Muslim, but not telling us the really interesting story, what would happen to the world if they had.

   

  “Lenin in Odessa” is pretty good, and based on real incidents that easily could have gone the other way, but its ending is a bit unsatisfying; it seems to rely too much on the idea of historical inevitability.

   

  “The Einstein Gun” isn’t a great story, but it’s cute; it offers a bit of a warning about time travel, because the bad events they try to prevent end up leading to far worse events in the history we know.

   

  “Tales from the Venia Woods” is one of three stories that imagines a Rome that didn’t fall; it’s the most closely tied to Roman history, and it is well-executed but ultimately not that compelling. It focuses a little too much on telling the story of the transition to the Second Republic and not enough on telling us what the world of a future Rome is like.

   

  “Manassas, again” is the second Rome story, or tries to be; instead it’s really a pretty dumb story about a war that doesn’t make any sense and isn’t put into any context. Apparently we’ve invented artificially-intelligent mechs by now (which isn’t too implausible, given the loss of technology in the Dark Ages), but we’re still stupid enough to think that war is fun and makes you feel alive.

   

  “The Sleeping Serpent” is a neat little story; it imagines what might have happened if the Mongols had achieved their dreams of global empire. It’s really a brilliant choice of protagonist as well: Our hero is the Mongolian ambassador to the Iroquois.

   

  The final story, “Darwin Anathema”, is a cautionary tale about theocracy that, while heavy-handed, is an anvil that needed to be dropped. We stand even now on a precipice quite close to this horrific outcome, and we must remain vigilant lest we tumble over it.

   

  But my favorite is the penultimate story, “Waiting for the Olympians”. It’s the third and best story of Rome still standing, and it does a very good job of showing both the enormous benefits and the enormous harms (to the point where one is left agonizingly ambivalent). It tells a compelling story in its own right, fitted into a rich and realistic world that is nonetheless radically different from our own.

  This passage particularly struck me, because it is completely true of myself:
  “You see, my family has a claim to fame. Genealogists say we are descended from the line of Julius Caesar himself.

  I mention that claim myself, sometimes, though usually only when I’ve been drinking. It isn’t a serious matter. After all, Julius Caesar died more than two thousand years ago. There have been sixty or seventy generations since then, not to mention the fact that, although Ancestor Julius certainly left a lot of children behind him, none of them happened to be born to a woman he happened to be married to. I don’t even look very Roman. There must have been a Northman or two in the line, because I’m tall and fair-haired, which no respectable Roman ever was.”

   

  It’s a weird feeling reading such a paragraph, as you might imagine. Also, the character is a science fiction author, though that I can attribute to the fact that the author is a science fiction author (Frederick Pohl) perhaps taking “write what you know” a little too literally. (In fact, the character is in an alternate history writing an alternate history that turns out to be much like our own….)

  It also picks a crux event that almost anyone would have to agree upon (and a literal crux at that): Jeshua of Nazareth is pardoned, and his radical Judean sect collapses for lack of a martyr. Would that really save Rome? It might. Would our improved technology allow us to contact aliens? It might! 

  • 6:57 pm
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