Progress and history

[mrissa]

Progress, or just a fluke? Well, you decide: Ista did not attempt to gnaw the monkey underwear that was lying well within her reach on the bathroom floor. Did not even bite it once. Just sniffed the laundry about to go into the hamper from a comparative distance and then let it be.

Ohhh, the things we consider notable with small mammals in the house.

Someone wanted me to talk about Flying Squirrel Divas of the Jovian Moons. Someone is scottjames and has found the Flying Squirrel Divas of the Jovian Moons a source of endless amusement for years now. timprov suggested that Flying Squirrel Diva of the Jovian Moons might be the next award to give to people who have already been Hero of the Revolution several times. I am dubious: we haven't even gotten our caramel-filled, foil-wrapped chocolate Hero of the Revolution medals. I should think that it would be even harder to find chocolate flying squirrels in spacesuits.

This is the internet, so I could be wrong.

Someone asked me if I wrote alternate history, what country or countries would I pick, and what would the story be. Umm. Some would say that I already do write alternate history, since Thermionic Night is set in Finland in 1950, and to the best of my knowledge there was not magic in Finland in 1950. However, I try not to contradict recorded history (just recorded science), so some people would categorize these books as secret history, not alternate history.

Anyway, my big problem with alternate history is that if the story isn't really, really close to the change -- and even most of the time when it is -- I don't think the author changes enough. (To compound this problem, stories further from the change may well be more interesting. Much, much, much harder. But more interesting.) A major historical change two hundred years ago means that most of the people who are currently alive might well not have been. Very minor policy changes in the US in history would result in vastly different immigration and settling patterns. If different people settled here -- or if population pressures in the Old Country for all sorts of values of "the Old Country" were not relieved -- the world goes very different directions very quickly. And I'm supposed to believe that the author's favorite historical figures exist anyway? That's a much more major suspension of disbelief for me than it seems to be for most people, and the story has to be a corresponding lot of fun to make it worth my energy. Any appearance of John Dee or Benjamin Franklin requires a lot of effort for me not to just close the book and walk away quietly.

The alternate history ideas I get rely heavily on the kind of history I read. This means that they tend to be the sorts of ideas that would make it difficult for most people to spot the turning point, and as such I think it would be harder for them to care about the result. "What if something you didn't know happened had never happened? Wouldn't that be weird and interesting?" Umm, gosh. How fascinating. I know that the right story can be fascinating that way -- I'm certainly hoping that people manage to find themselves interested in mid-20th century Finland in ways they had not expected to be -- but it takes a lot more work from the author to establish why anyone should care about this obscure historical change, and often it seems less worth my time than other, equally shiny ideas.

Comments

[brithistorian.livejournal.com]

The problem I have with alternate history is musch the same as yours: The set of instances where a small change can create a history that is recognizable and interesting to the average person is miniscule, and consequently the good ones get worked to death. This is why you get so many "What if the South won the Civil War?" and "What if Germany won WW2?" books.

There are also many other "what-ifs" that are interesting from a historical point of view, but don't really make for interesting fiction. ("What if the Spanish Armada had won?" and "What if Henry VIII's older brother Arthur had not died without an heir?" spring immediately to mind.) Let me amend the first sentence of this paragraph - these sorts of "what-ifs" don't make for interesting fiction unless it's written as quasi-historical fiction taking place soon after the event in question, which is not how most alternal history is written.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I think the problem with the "what if the Spanish Armada had won?" type of story is not that the story isn't interesting but that it's harder to sum up in pithy one-liners and thus harder to pitch.

[brithistorian.livejournal.com]

That's probably it. You could make a good story of out it, but it would be in a world so different from ours it might as well be another world.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Exactly. Only with a lot more research and people like me willing to jump down your throat. Just calling it a fantasyland looks a lot more appealing from this vantage.

[ellarien]

Keith Roberts used that one in Pavane -- and then started the story somewhere around the twentieth century, and didn't put in any recognizable historical figures that I remember. That one isn't quite pure alternate history, though.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Is it good?

[ellarien]

I liked it -- it's beautifully atmospheric, if a little dated. It didn't quite make the cut for schlepping back across the Atlantic after reading it in the UK this summer, but very few things do.

[apis-mellifera.livejournal.com]

Have you read Jon Courtneay Grimwood? His take on what the world would be like if the Germans had won WWI and the Ottoman Empire hadn't fallen is really quite interesting.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

He's on my list, but I haven't gotten there yet.

[apis-mellifera.livejournal.com]

I'd be interested in reading what you think about them, when you do get to them. I enjoyed them, but they're definitely not everyone's cup of tea.

[columbina.livejournal.com]

I think the appearance of Ben Franklin, say, as a historically significant character - but NOT in the way you were taught that he was historically significant - can certainly be a sign of lazy authorship, but it doesn't always have to be. I have a certain fondness for the sort of plot which seems to believe that history is, shall we say, self-balancing; key personnel are going to turn out to be key personnel even if they don't get there in the way one would expect.

So I am okay with stories where, say, George Washington eventually ends up being the first president ANYHOW but ends up getting to it in a strange way. Or the ones where Washington turns out to be traitorous to the cause and Benedict Arnold ends up as president - a more dramatic change, perhaps, but the key names are still recognizable.

Mind you, I approach most alternate history stories as a lark and throw my brain out the window first. Sure, it's certainly possible to write a seriously thought-out alternate history, where all the name change as well as the facts, but it seems to be useful as a background. There have been plenty of stories where alternate history was used as the backdrop for a story (i.e. your changes to 1950s Finland may very well have affected the names of the heads of government there, its politics, etc - but your story is not primarily about that, it's about some people who we are interested in who happen to live in that framework). Those are not the kind I am talking about; I'm talking about the novelties which focus on the changes/differences in history itself. ("Oh, look! Ben Franklin is going to turn out to be President instead! Whee!")

I've thought about writing a set of stories about people who can go back in time as researchers, and who spend a lot of time worrying about change, about to what extent history is self-righting. Sure, they can interfere in the life of Joe Pigherd and the history books won't all self-destruct, but how high up does that go? They had better leave Ben Franklin alone, but can they have a chat with Franklin's greengrocer safely? Where is the threshold? Is it one crushed butterfly (obBradbury) or is it higher? And do big events end up happening "the way they should have" anyway, showing some sort of historical inertia? Would the American colonists have gotten disgruntled and rebelled anyway, only later? Would they have succeeded if it had happened later?

Unfortunately this story idea, upon contemplation, promptly collapses under its own overhead ... which, I suspect, may be the real reason that not many writers dare to postulate BIG changes in What We Think Happened. The research needed to predict Where We Would Have Ended Up Instead with any degree of believability is horrifying to contemplate.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I like research. And I would find a President Arnold/traitorous Washington story too lame to even contemplate. Unless someone whose sense of humor I trusted told me it was funny. Maybe even then.

[supergee.livejournal.com]

I think there are really two approaches to alternate history: the sensitive dependence approach, where one dead butterfly or whatever changes everything, and the anthropic principle approach, where basic patterns reassert themselves. We have no access to empirical data, so which one prefers is a matter of taste.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I guess, but it seems to me that the mechanisms for a chaotic approach are pretty straightforward, whereas an anthropic approach looks to me like it requires forces that may exist but certainly have no particular evidence. If one is arguing that "basic patterns reassert themselves" to the point of Ben Franklin popping into existence even though the Normans never conquered England, that's starting to sound an awfully lot like destiny to me. And while I can't disprove the existence of destiny, I find it pretty distasteful personally.

[alecaustin.livejournal.com]

In addition to the whole destiny thing, the surname "Franklin" is derived from the Middle English frankelein (a non-noble landholder), which word was derived from the from the Anglo-Norman fraunclein. So it's unlikely that *anyone* would be named Franklin if the Normans hadn't conquered England.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

It is such a pity you are not here to hug.

[scottjames.livejournal.com]

Someone is scottjames and has found the Flying Squirrel Divas of the Jovian Moons a source of endless amusement for years now.

I really do. But you caught me on a weird day, so it was particularly funny then.

[scottjames.livejournal.com]

err... I really have, I suppose, is the correct formulation.

So, I will ask another topic of posting (for you to do with as you will): who are a few of your favorite historical figures, and why*?

*Where all of those words are defined as you would like them to be for the purposes of this question.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I have added this to the list.

[alecaustin.livejournal.com]

The alternate history ideas I get rely heavily on the kind of history I read. "What if something you didn't know happened had never happened? Wouldn't that be weird and interesting?" Umm, gosh. How fascinating.

That was more or less the space my story "The Garden of His Regret" fell into, except with extra bonus points on the no-one-will-ever-buy-this scale. I mean, alternate ending to the Three Kingdoms period? Check. Written in the style of Sima Qian, the Grand Historian of the Han Dynasty? Check. And then there was the whole Taoist sorcerer/strategist bit that constituted the actual story...

*sigh* It's too bad that conventional alternate history bores me to tears.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I'm a good deal more interested in what you describe than in conventional alternate history. Ah well.

[redbird]

I couldn't resist changing my "name" field again. If you or scottjames mind, let me know and I'll go back to An Emergent Property of Carbon.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Hee. I don't mind, and I sincerely doubt that Scott will.