Comments on: What Ifs and Might-Have-Beens: Draft Syllabus

By: Keplerus

Keplerus — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 21:23:55 +0000

I am a bit late to this post, but can I just say what a fantastic idea for a course this is? (I can? Ta!)

By: Gil

Gil — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 17:23:56 +0000

Lemme second (or perhaps third, in case I missed one) the “Gernsback Continuum” recommendation … and add another sci-fi short story: Chet Williamson’s “Double Trouble,” which describes a present in which Elvis Presley never became a musician — and the world that results is very different indeed.

By: ELB

ELB — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 14:52:08 +0000

ooh, I want to take this class. We had a good discussion about the WWII question on my blog a bit back at:

http://halfchangedworld.com/2007/07/two-paths-diverged-tbr-farthing/

I need to read Catch That Zepplin, because I argued that there was no story to be found in positive alternatives. Happy to be disproven.

By: G. Weaire

G. Weaire — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 22:16:00 +0000

Herodotus 7.139

By: Martin

Martin — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 21:28:46 +0000

How could we all have forgotten the obvious: David Lewis, On the Plurality of Worlds. 🙂 I mean you just blogged about going beyond disciplinary boundaries!

By: Lara

Lara — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 20:43:46 +0000

Sounds like a fascinating class! A few more fiction references –

L. Sprague de Camp, “Lest Darkness Fall” – Available as a short story and as a novel, and the inspiration for a lot of subsequent alternate histories (including a few written as direct responses to it).

Maureen F. McHugh, “The Lincoln Train” – A Civil War alternate history that isn’t just “What if the Confederates won?”

George Alec Effinger, “Schrodinger’s Kitten” – Not exactly an alternate history, but an interesting look at the idea of different outcomes in multiple worlds. Other works which explore some of the same territory are “The Garden of Forking Paths,” by Jorge Luis Borges, and “All the Myriad Ways,” by Larry Niven.

The various “Alternate” anthologies edited by Mike Resnick (if nothing else, the cover image of Alternate Warriors, which shows Gandhi holding a bazooka, might be a fun picture to show in class).

By: Timothy Burke

Timothy Burke — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 15:55:11 +0000

The Lieber story is one I was planning to assign, for precisely that reason. One of the things I like about alternate history is that it suggests that the value of the enterprise is in an emotional appreciation for contingency rather than in a formal, empirical study of causality. It’s possible that alternate history achieves better through fiction what historians writing formal counterfactuals are trying to achieve through scholarship. At the same time, the most interesting alternate histories (for my tastes) are those which are in some sense “scholarly”, e.g., knowledgeable about history. The alternate histories which have the least regard for the substance of history are those which strike me as satisfying less as a commentary on the past and more as a fantastic or speculative engagement with human possibility in a more general way, not much distinct from other kinds of speculative or fantasy writing.

By: Martin

Martin — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 03:38:11 +0000

When I read it a long time ago I was very moved by Fritz Lieber’s “Catch That Zeppelin” which apparently is in the Mammoth Book of Alternate Histories. Unlike many or most alternate history stories, it works primarily at an emotional level. It basically imagines a Twentieth Century in which, after 1918, everything went right instead of wrong. (In the construction of this there is a mixture of reasonably serious analytical reconstruction and fantasy–for example Thomas Edison marries Marie Curie and together they invent technology that forestalls later energy and pollution problems.) The force of the story is that it makes you mourn for the loss and waste of the Twentieth Century as it happened in fact. You can decide if it fits your course, but, if memory serves, it’s an amazingly effective historico-emotional exercise.

By: Matt Lungerhausen

Matt Lungerhausen — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 23:42:47 +0000

Sounds great! I loved the Years of Rice and Salt, but I hadn’t thought about the historiography of counterfactual history.

Re: Nazis – Philip K Dick, _The Man in the High Castle_. I think its an interesting book because he seemed to have thought out all the implications of the alternate world. Nazis along with Neo-Confederate quislings but a Japanese Empire that also embodied some of the attractive elements of the Taisho period. The Japanese war in Brazil could be a kind of critique of the French Indochina and Vietnam wars.

By: Stephen Frug

Stephen Frug — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 22:35:57 +0000

Looks like a fun class.

I definitely second the Rosenfeld. Fabulous book.

Obviously you know about Roger Ransom’s The Confederate States of America from Gallagher’s essay, but if you haven’t actually gone and read it, it’s good — I don’t agree with him necessarily, but it’s an interesting model of well-done alternate history by a historian.

And since you’re teaching Kim Stanely Robinson, I presume you know about his (sort of) sequel to “The Lucky Strike” (in the Mammonth collection), called “A Sensitive Dependence on Initial Conditions”; it’s an interesting meditation on historical causality. It’s online; you can read it here:
http://www.webscription.net/chapters/1597801844/1597801844___6.htm

I hope you’ll let us know how it’s going as it goes.