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Alternate History as a Political Tract

At its worst Dystopic Alternate History can become an exercise in contrasting imaginary crimes with real ones to make the latter seem better in comparison. The British Empire did a lot of bad things but they didn’t boil people alive and eat them like happens in my fictional French India, so in real life people should be grateful the UK won Plassey.

Very good.
 
Great article. As anyone who knows me in what I have written on the subject or commented on here, I do see alternate history as coming out of political writing. The fact that what we do still lies alongside politically motivated writing pushing agenda very strongly, as Oswald highlights, does cause problems for us.

Most of us write AH because we have an intellectual curiosity in how things might have been different. Sometimes we find, actually, they would not have been that different at all; that a divergence might be easily 'corrected' back to the path we have known. Certainly, when used as a tool in academic study, counter-factual sometimes shows us that an alteration would not have turned out to have much impact at all despite the initial impression.

I was criticised on these grounds for 'Scavenged Days' which saw Charles De Gaulle assassinated in 1961. Naturally there was a lot of upheaval, but by the late 1970s, despite more victims and some different names in positions of power, things were pretty much as they were in that period in our world. Readers complained that I had not done a 'proper' counter-factual with extreme changes, I do not know what, but perhaps a partitioned France or permanent US occupation. I have discarded scenarios when working them through I saw that the outcome would not have been massively different or certainly so that the average reader - our audience - could easily tell.

AH writers face a raft of assumptions and expectations from readers, let alone commentators who are often not even readers. There is this expectation that a change will lead to massive ripples. There is not an acceptance that an AH story might see a return to a status quo ante the way the majority of detective novels to. There is also an expectation, as Oswald has shown admirably here, that every AH author must be writing to a political - or at least social - agenda simply because some do. Few other genres are challenged in this way. Some have noted for example that P.D. James put in political statements into her crime novels, but most never refer to that. I have seen recently commentary about inter-racial romance novels and romance novels involving disabled characters, but to a far lesser extent than we face with our AH writing.

Some commentators seem to feel obliged to hunt out the political agenda we might be using. I have been accused of being 'unable' to prevent my liberal attitudes seeping into my books. In part this is because I live in a country with a national health system and gun control, so simply being British I seem to be peddling attitudes not welcomed by vocal sectors of the US public where I sell most. I was criticised for the erroneous view that a US victory in Vietnam would not have been a good thing for the world. Not only do I think the US 'victories' in Iraq and Afghanistan make the point for me, but in fact my story was about a successful Bay of Pigs invasion, so was set in Cuba rather than Vietnam anyway. However, such details did not matter to my critic; it was simply important to call me out.

We all have personal views on what is a feasible or not feasible scenario, but even in terms of these judgements there is now a strong sense among commentators of what is and is not permitted. One was very indignant that I had dared to write 'Stop Line', a story about a German invasion of Britain in 1940, very much drawing on the analysis in 1974 at Sandhurst of such a scenario, i.e. an invasion was possible but would have been defeated. The commentator raged that it had been proven on some online forum that such a scenario was impossible, thus I should be barred from writing my novel. There are good novels and there are poor novels, but what kind of sense of entitlement do people feel that they think we should be obliged to have them passed by some self-appointed committee on feasibility before writing them?

I think this level of antagonism towards writers 'daring' to write novels disapproved of by commentators is the prime challenge in this age. When Katherine Burdekin wrote Swastika Night (1937) in fact science fiction rather than AH at the time, she did run a risk that the Nazi regime would come for her. Fortunately she lived in Britain, though she did write under the name Murray Constantine to put some distance between her and possibly violent critics. The thing was, back then it needed the power of a state to reach out and assault an author. In this world, the internet has delivered that power into the hands of anyone with the inclination to make threats and indeed try to carry them out. In this context there is now an assumption that everything must be hostile; must be divisive and due to the reasons outlined above AH is assumed to be very much at the heart of this context, even when the author may simply be setting out to write an engaging and entertaining story. Naively when first writing AH - and you can see it in my synopses and forewords - I hope to trigger the kind of jolly debates on AH scenarios I had enjoyed down the years. I had failed to foresee how vigorous but respectful debate would almost utterly die in my lifetime.
 
I am now wondering if we need a term to sift out the AH which is intentionally written as a political tract and that which is not, no matter how people may still portray it. I wondered something along the lines of Agenda Alternate History - AgAH so people do not think it is about the Automobile Association or Alcoholics Anonymous. Please make suggestions.
 
One of the big problems of using alternate history as a political tract is that there aren't any counterfactuals that can actually be proven. All you have to do to respond to someone saying "Oh, if such and such happened, then this would be the result" is saying "But how do you know?", and they wouldn't be able to give a good response as they don't. Counterfactuals are fun as a hobby and for fiction but are useless in actual political arguments, or any argument. Personally I assume that if someone starts saying "Yeah, well, what if..." in an argument he's most probably lost.
 
One of the big problems of using alternate history as a political tract is that there aren't any counterfactuals that can actually be proven. All you have to do to respond to someone saying "Oh, if such and such happened, then this would be the result" is saying "But how do you know?", and they wouldn't be able to give a good response as they don't. Counterfactuals are fun as a hobby and for fiction but are useless in actual political arguments, or any argument. Personally I assume that if someone starts saying "Yeah, well, what if..." in an argument he's most probably lost.

There's not absolute proof but there absolutely are levels of plausibility in respect to counterfactual arguments. I'll always be interested in the opinion of someone who has seriously researched a subject and I'll always not be interested in the opinion of someone who is arguing at post-1900 level.

The fact that we can't be 100% sure of what would have happened stemming from a given divergence doesn't mean that all speculation is equal.
 
This one surprised me:

Perhaps most notably, the Palestinians are also betrayed, the Arab leaders refuse to give them their own state or even allow them to leave the refugee camps to return 'home'. Nobody benefits from this, everyone loses.

because while I can easily believe the Arab leaders go "fuck you actually" to the Palestinians, not allowing them to leave the refugee camps means they're still living in the Arab states in a you're-a-refugee-even-if-your-parents-were-born-here state instead of going "fuck off home now". That seems fundamentally wrong, the most Sandbrooky thing of the premise.
 
This one surprised me:



because while I can easily believe the Arab leaders go "fuck you actually" to the Palestinians, not allowing them to leave the refugee camps means they're still living in the Arab states in a you're-a-refugee-even-if-your-parents-were-born-here state instead of going "fuck off home now". That seems fundamentally wrong, the most Sandbrooky thing of the premise.

Well, that was the point of the political tract, a justification of Zionism and Israel's actions during and after the war. An opponent to Zionism uses the hardships of Palestinians to support his point, so the purpose of that part was to say "Well, if Zionism is defeated Palestinians still wouldn't be better off and their situation will remain the same, so the current situation was the lesser of two evils since while Palestinians aren't better off at least the Jews weren't slaughtered".
 
It's just I'd expect a Gotcha that the Palestinians are worse off - "they're sent back but are dominated by Arab occupational forces just like Israel is", or "ah but now they all live in even worse poverty now they've been sent back and nobody cares, checkmate libs" - in a political tract, not that the Arabs decide they like having refugee camps.
 
Very interesting article. I remember first coming across Livy's speculation on what would have happened if Alexander the Great had lived for longer and tackled Rome when I was a Sixth Former (ie equivalent of modern educational Year 12) doing Classical History 'O' Level, and thinking that his conclusion was sheer Roman chauvinism. It was a political response ignoring the liklihood of one smallish mid Italian state defeating a huge empire run by a super-flexible military genius (albeit one who was often dangerously careless as to casualties and risks). At the time of the probable confrontation had A lived, which in my own imaginings as a teenager (made before I read Livy) I put at c. 314 BC once Alexander had led his Greek 'league' plus his Asian troops to destroy Carthage, Rome barely controlled the Campagna and Tuscany and at the most had a precarious grip on mid-Italy, and was loathed by equally strong tribal-based southern Italian states led by the Samnites (inland of Naples) with whom it was fighting on and off for 20 years. The main consular army of Rome was trapped in a mountain pass , the 'Caudine Forks', by the Samnites in 321 and was forced to surrender and pass under a yoke as humiliation - the Rome of the 310s was not the great power that it became after uniting Italy and defeating Carthage, and Livy of all people should have admitted that given that he had written 'official' histories of early Rome. His verdict seems to be Augustan-era propaganda and 'we are the greatest' spin, not logic.

On the issue of one man's life, ie Alexander's, making a major difference to the trajectory of Macedonian power, it is worth going back to the reported celebrations in M's foe Athens after Alexander's father Philip II, who had created the army and administrative back-up that Alexander used, was assassinated in summer 336. The Macedonians had routed Athens (and Thebes with its famous 'Sacred Band' regiment, allegedly of pairs of homosexual partners) at the battle of Chaeronea in 338 and forced it into the Macedonian-led 'League of Corinth' ready to invade the Persian Empire, so Demosthenes the anti-Macedonian orator and others assumed that killing off Philip would end the threat. One of the more canny Athenian moderates - Aeschines? - retorted that it would make no difference, except that the Macedonian army had been reduced by one man. In other words, the overall 'military machine' was what counted more than who was leading it. The same theory can be applied to Rome and its army - but not in the C4th BC.

The issue of a presenting a plausibly united 'military machine' under a stable leadership long-term and this mattering the most to creating a 'realistic' CF timeline is one of the keys to my Late Roman timelines . One of the main underlying themes is the question of 'what if the huge and , when led properly, effective Roman army had had no civil wars or coups at the time of its C4th and C5th challenges'? Instead, there is a reasonably stable run of leaders with few, instead of constant , coups, murders and other disruptions - thus we get a run of adequate or sometimes first-class leaders from Constantine 'the Great' to Julian to Theodosius to the OTL Western Empire leaders Stilicho, Constantius III, Aetius and Majorian. The result is a powerful and largely uninterrupted Western Empire military 'high command' able to dominate the weaker and more unstable German tribal leadership and create a long-term machine that can take over the East after 500 and later finish off Persia (and incorporate the Arabs). And in Greek/ Hellenistic history we can ask if a longer-lasting Alexander creating a stable military 'high command' and living until he has an adult son could have created at least a sort of 'combined Seleucid-Ptolemaic- Macedon' Middle Eastern/ Mediterranean state. This could have held off Rome - as in OTL the Seleucids under Antiochus III in the 190s and 180s BC tried to do . We end up with a 'Greek E Meditterranean' vs a 'Roman W Mediterranean', as a sort of 'Western vs Eastern Roman Empire' situation 500 years early?

One question which I also considered for my Roman timelines but which has universal potential - if there is a dominant and seemingly stable state with a united army that can outmatch its potential challengers, does the greater risk or hopelessness of challenging it (except if there is a civil war or incompetence at the centre) put off potential rebels and create a long-term momentum for unity? This is the key to my vision of how a longer-term Roman Empire could have worked as a sort of 'European/ Middle Eastern super-state', and if the 'Great Power' dominating a region also has a technologically superior and capable, flexible administrative apparatus it adds to its potential. I can see either a Hellenistic 'United Successor States' kingdom (Alexander's or possibly the Seleucids or pre-301 BC Antigonids) or a Byzantine Empire of Justinian's era - that was not hit by the 542 pandemic (now an apposite topic for commentary?) or economic exhaustion from the Gothic wars - doing this. The Western European Germanic states, even Charlemagne's, were probably too unsophisticated, institutionally weak, and dependant on feuding hereditary dynasts; the Arabs' C8th and early C9th Caliphate was probably too open to ideological/ tribal/ provincial military governor breakaways. But there's certainly a lot of CF timeline scope for creating a long-lasting European/ Middle Eastern equivalent of the Chinese cycle of 'collapsing militarily under external pressure or dynastic failure but surviving as a cultural entity and later being re-created' . Or if there's a longer and stronger Alexandrian/ Seleucid presence in the Indus region, eg a super-charged kingdom of Gandhara, then we could have a fusing Greco-Indian state under a capable dynasty creating a 'Successor'-style power that lasts longer than the short-lived Ganges/ Indus kingdom of Menander, adopts Indian cultural terminology but creates a Greco-Indian army, and adds a new layer to N Indian state development?

On the issue of political manifestoes wrapped up in CF fiction, there's also the question of Kingsley Amis' 'alt hist of a 1970s which has a surviving pre-Reformation Papal power in Europe' in his 1970s novel 'The Alteration'. Reading it at the time, I could see that he had mixed in elements of the (then very much a political bogey-man) USSR and its secret police with the Nazis and the real life Spanish Inquisition to create his dystopia of a papal secret police and bureaucracy dominating Europe - headed in his version of history by a cunning and cynical Yorkshire politician as Pope. (Some said that he had taken a swipe at then PM Harold Wilson, seen as clinging onto power by devious tactics and lacking ideological 'depth'.) And Amis' cardinals heading the Papal police and ministries included the then tabloid-feared Tony Benn as a sinister statist 'enforcer' targeting dissent, plus in the recent past Himmler and Stalin's sidekick Beria.
 
I've always thought this obvious millenia-old trend in AH was one reason for the often-true stereotype of academic historians viewing alternate history with disdain. If most of what they see is this clearly slanted and politicized, I can understand why they'd feel that way.
 
I've always thought this obvious millenia-old trend in AH was one reason for the often-true stereotype of academic historians viewing alternate history with disdain. If most of what they see is this clearly slanted and politicized, I can understand why they'd feel that way.

It must be for them like if half of the sci-fi that scientists saw was a colleague or a politician who disagreed with a theory writing What If Everyone Listened To Me: How We'd Go To Mars.
 
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