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Book Nook: If It Had Happened Otherwise

I suppose in a collection of stories published a hundred years ago, what are now seen as cliches are not unexpected: confederate victory and then conquest of Mexico are a fairly obvious alternative to our timeline, but in 1930 hadn't been written by hundreds and hundreds of people.

SenatorChickpea said:
Once you get past the ludicrously posh authors
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that part is very very funny
 
The huge diversity of style is interesting, putting many anthologies in any genre to shame - guessing this is because as the first such AH collection, there weren't yet any "rules". I am a bit surprised there's nothing about Brutish imperial history, like "look how bad India would be if we couldn't help them, by Major-General Tarquin Money-Sterling KCBE"
 
A note which may be relevant to the selection of authors here - Harold N was best known at the time of publication as a Foreign Office diplomat, eg in then British client Iran, who retired early to become an MP and diarist; he later became more famous as a Conservative statesman and husband of the author/ gardener Vita Sackville West. He was also chosen as the official biographer of King George V. Sir John Wheeler Bennett was another 'high Tory' and 'safe pair of hands' Establishment figure who was chosen as the official biographer of George VI, so both HN and JWB had links at Court and could be relied on to leave anything controversial out of their books.

Hilaire Belloc was French by descent and cultural affiliation (and an enthusiastic 'romantic traditionalist' Catholic like Chesterton) but was brought up in and lived in the UK, mostly in a windmill in West Sussex, and was a close literary ally of Chesterton and critic of modern industrial Britain as 'Godless and driven by commercial greed' (with a dislike of bankers and the City that was often accused of straying into anti-Semitism). At the time of publication Churchill was heavily involved in the right wing Conservative / press campaign against granting any constitutional autonomy or independence to India . All of these figures can be lined up as of 1930 as cheerleaders for the Empire and anti-USSR, and most had international experience, if only via travel and writing.
 
Great article idea.

Interestingly Churchill at one point also planned to write some articles similar to Baen's later "Alternate Generals" anthology, where he imagines scenarios like "Ramsay MacDonald in the French Revolution". Roy Jenkins, his biographer, was rather glad he never wrote them, but I disagree.

Charles EP M. said:
I am a bit surprised there's nothing about Brutish imperial history, like "look how bad India would be if we couldn't help them, by Major-General Tarquin Money-Sterling KCBE"
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It might be because of the 1930s stereotype I've seen a few times of the "India bore" retired colonel to whom the broader UK population was indifferent at best.
 
The Red said:
Great review, fascinating to consider the endurance of the Great Man in AH goes back to it actually being produced by Great Men.
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Now to write the most surreal AH of all: what if Great Men of history didn’t write alternate history with a focus on Great Men and so, because Great Men didn’t do it, the Great Man form of AH doesn’t take off?
 
SenatorChickpea said:
I do recommend this book for anyone who's interested in the history of this genre.

Once you get past the ludicrously posh authors, it really is very interesting to see just how similar the work is to much of the stuff being done here on ah.com.
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In those days posh people were the only ones likely to get published. To some degree it remains the case, but fortunately, to a slightly lesser extent.
 
Alexander Rooksmoor said:
In those days posh people were the only ones likely to get published. To some degree it remains the case, but fortunately, to a slightly lesser extent.
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The nature of the in-group has changed somewhat, but not that much. Look at the Venn diagram between 'been on telly' and 'gets to (sometimes ghost)write highly-promoted novels in Waterstone's, usually crime novels'.
 
How close the stories are the stuff in 90s paperbacks and forum posts is one of those nice little things reminding you that humanity has always been the same
Liam Connell:
Men who would play, as Carr sneered, intellectual parlour games.
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Is he really wrong ? I'm not trying to say AH is dumb or pointless but yeah it is most certainly an intellectual game of fantasy. We like to subscribe a meaning and importance to AH that doesn't really exist a lot more than we should. It's a writer's hobby that happens to use real events as a backdrop. I don't think it would accomplish much if academics had to go "well yes but what if The Americas weren't discovered until 1504 instead ?" and a lot of us (I'd say the majority really) are just people who have a above average interest and knowledge in history not college educated historians or even individuals that truly study history outside of their hobby.
 
Loriori said:
How close the stories are the stuff in 90s paperbacks and forum posts is one of those nice little things reminding you that humanity has always been the same

Is he really wrong ? I'm not trying to say AH is dumb or pointless but yeah it is most certainly an intellectual game of fantasy. We like to subscribe a meaning and importance to AH that doesn't really exist a lot more than we should. It's a writer's hobby that happens to use real events as a backdrop. I don't think it would accomplish much if academics had to go "well yes but what if The Americas weren't discovered until 1504 instead ?" and a lot of us (I'd say the majority really) are just people who have a above average interest and knowledge in history not college educated historians or even individuals that truly study history outside of their hobby.
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It's true that a lot of AH is just another exercise in literary fun, in the same way most science fiction doesn't have anything too concrete to say about real-world science and engineering. But, in the same way that watching Star Trek inspired a generation of engineers towards flip phones and tablet computers, AH can have the potential to affect the real world. It's been highlighted that a generation of people interested in politics and history (some of them) got there through the AH mod of "Hearts of Iron", "Kaiserreich", which is based on a German victory in WW1. (@Meadow has a lot to answer for).

In a more niche sense, I think the academic role of AH is to hold up a critical mirror to the often rather determinist assumptions of historians. @Charles EP M. rather brilliantly does this in his "Chamberlain Resigns: And Other Things That Never Happened". This is a knowing parody of those "What If?" essay collections written by allegedly serious historians, who often sketch an interesting what-if and then conclude with a rushed paragraph and a bizarrely Marxian-Calvinist message of "However nothing would actually change because broader trends shut up goodbye". Charles' book brings a similar parodic stuffy historian attitude but written from the perspective of academic historians speaking from another timeline. To them, if Chamberlain had resigned in favour of Churchill after Norway, why, this ultimately wouldn't change the ineluctable trends of the Bloody Fifties, of course. (Thus highlighting to the reader that it absolutely would have, seeing as we don't even know what the Bloody Fifties is yet in the narrative - it's a grim series of colonial wars over decolonisation).

Now one could take the historian's side and point at the Mau Mau etc and say is OTL really that different. But the point is that the name Bloody Fifties is different, historiography is different, the human perception of the historical narrative is different, and that makes all the difference in the world to the things that matter. If our historiographic analysis of our own timeline doesn't take that into account, then it's flawed and narrow thinking. This is the critical point which AH can contribute to a serious academic debate, in the same way that counterfactual analysis can be crucial in natural philosophy: why is something in the natural world the way it is? can also be asked as: well, what would happen if it wasn't?
 
Loriori said:
How close the stories are the stuff in 90s paperbacks and forum posts is one of those nice little things reminding you that humanity has always been the same

Is he really wrong ? I'm not trying to say AH is dumb or pointless but yeah it is most certainly an intellectual game of fantasy. We like to subscribe a meaning and importance to AH that doesn't really exist a lot more than we should. It's a writer's hobby that happens to use real events as a backdrop. I don't think it would accomplish much if academics had to go "well yes but what if The Americas weren't discovered until 1504 instead ?" and a lot of us (I'd say the majority really) are just people who have a above average interest and knowledge in history not college educated historians or even individuals that truly study history outside of their hobby.
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Jeremy Black brings up that, while after the fact counterfactuals like, "What if Hitler invaded Great Britain?" or "What if Spain entered the Second World War on the side of the Axis?" are far-fetched to us now because they didn't happen, for policy makers 1939-1945 these were very inportant questions that were discussed and had direct impacts on decisions made at the highest levels.
 
heraclius said:
Hilaire Belloc was French by descent and cultural affiliation (and an enthusiastic 'romantic traditionalist' Catholic like Chesterton) but was brought up in and lived in the UK, mostly in a windmill in West Sussex.
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Warthog said:
LOL
how very naturalised English
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The Jonathan Creek of Anglo-French humour.

It's a shame the book, which is safely out of copyright, can't be republished.

Also, one of the authors may have been a blue-blooded aristo born at Blenheim Palace, but he was just Rt Hon Winston S Churchill MP, PC at the time.
 
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