Strange Horizons, July 2002 Page 4
Tor's Starscape novels are split between undeservedly little-known gems like Will Shetterly's Dogland and Jane Yolen's Briar Rose, and adult best-sellers like Ender's Game and Robert Jordan's first Wheel of Time novel. The latter reprint has been divided into two volumes, presumably to be less intimidating to the youngsters. (That seems unnecessary given the length of the latest Harry Potter volume, which a harried father of my acquaintance dubbed Harry Potter and the Brick of Death.) Few of the Starscape titles were originally published for teenagers.
Penguin Putnam's Firebird series is reprinting more novels originally published as YA, like Nancy Farmer's African SF novel The Ear, the Eye, and the Arm and Lloyd Alexander's masterpiece The Kestrel. The latter draws on Alexander's experiences in WWII, and is one of the best war novels I've read in any genre or publishing niche.
Both lines take some chances—such as Starscape's selection of the leisurely and ultra-subtle Dogland and Howard Pyle's old-fashioned classic The Garden Behind the Moon, and Firebird's of the wrenching The Kestrel and gloomy I Am Mordred—but hedge their bets with proven bestsellers. Both lines are attractively packaged and intelligently chosen. I can't predict whether they'll succeed in hooking new readers, or whether the new faces of SF will be children who proceed from J. K. Rowling to Diana Wynne Jones. Or perhaps the future of SF lies where it always has, far from careful analysis of what teenagers are or aren't interested in:
Somewhere, some twelve-year-old is wandering over to a part of the library they've never ventured into before. They're going to pick up some book, and read a paragraph that, years later, they'll notice was badly written or clichéd, or that, years later, will be every bit as good as they remembered. But in that paragraph will be some image or situation or turn of phrase unlike anything they've ever encountered before. Something weird. Something different. Something that resonates with their teenage hearts.
They'll be hooked.
* * * *
Rachel Manija Brown has been a development executive at the Jim Henson Company, a staff writer on Fox Family's horror-comedy “The Fearing Mind,” and a disaster relief worker for the Red Cross. She has an MFA in playwriting from UCLA, and had a play produced off-Broadway before she was old enough to drink. She lives in Los Angeles, where she studies Shotokan karate and works on her first novel, a fantasy set in 1850s India which combines her favorite bits of weird history, like the practice of using monitor lizards as live grappling hooks for sneak night attacks on forts, with Indian mythology. She is collecting self-defense success stories, especially from women; if you have one or know anyone who does, please contact her.
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The Time of the Other: Alternate History and the Conquest of America
By Fred Bush
7/15/02
It takes imagination and courage to picture what would happen to the West ... if its temporal fortress were suddenly invaded by the Time of the Other.—Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other.
In the history that I learned in grade school, Native Americans were a helpful people who shared their food with the Pilgrims and then quietly faded away into the background, allowing Europeans to spread over this vast, empty continent. By the time I got to high school, the story had gotten more complicated, complete with mentions of Bartolome de Las Casas, a lone voice crying out in the wilderness for better treatment of the Native Americans. In college a woman from the Mohawk nation came to speak, to upbraid her listeners for not doing anything to help the Native Americans. No one seems quite sure how to address the United States’ complicity in the deaths of millions of Native Americans. However, science fiction writers and others have for many years been producing accounts where the Native Americans are no longer eliminated, because of changes in history.
Critics have called these texts “uchronias,” “alternative histories,” and “allohistories.” I use the term alternate history, primarily because readers, writers, and marketers all seem to agree on this term to distinguish books where the Nazis win World War II, the South wins the Civil War, or Napoleon conquers the world, for instance. Alternate history can be distinguished by its alteration of the historical course of events as we know it, and its exploration of the effects of this change. Historical fiction is not alternate history, because historical fiction doesn't result in a change in known history: it operates in the unrecorded margins of history, or invents new characters entirely. In alternate history, something that we all assume to be true has changed, and this change alters things in the narrative's future. Sometimes the change, termed a point of divergence, is the result of an alteration from a time-traveling meddler; sometimes the change goes unexplained, but it is recognizably different from what's happened in the real world.
Since, like all commercial science fiction, the genre is dominated by Americans, alternate history often presents an America highly altered by the events of the past. I'm going to spend much of the time in this article discussing a recent work, The Years of Rice and Salt, by Kim Stanley Robinson, which features an Iroquois league holding North America in the face of Islamic and Chinese conquerors, but it's just one of many works to display a strengthened Native American community. My question throughout this article will be, what sorts of freedom does the alternate history form allow for “history's losers,” the peoples and nations that have been cast aside in the struggle for power?
I've found Johannes Fabian's book Time and the Other particularly useful in working on this subject. In order to properly explain other cultures, Fabian says, we have to grant them coevalness—we have to accept that they're living in the same timeframe that we are in (33). Alternate history breaks this assumption: we really aren't living in the same timeframe as these others ... or are we? I argue that alternate histories implicitly compare the fictive timeframe that they've created to the actual timeframe that historians have recreated for our lives, and that this comparison inevitably limits the abilities of history's losers to act. Furthermore, I argue that alternate history is constrained by the history of our own time in order to appear plausible, and that this further limits the abilities and powers of oppressed peoples. The Other has to deal not only with the baggage of the past, but also the baggage of the future.
The fate of Native Americans in a changed world
The world that Kim Stanley Robinson lays out in The Years of Rice and Salt is one in which what are today marginalized societies seem to have free play to expand and explore. He extrapolates the future that would result from a Europe completely depopulated by the Black Death. The Islamic world, China, and India are the primary powers vying for supremacy in the world that ensues.
As a result of Europe's collapse, the discovery of the New World is delayed until about 1620, when the Vietnamese Admiral Kheim leads a Chinese fleet to Japan—but it's blown way, way off course, then becalmed and caught on an ocean current and brought to America. The fleet encounters a tribe in the Pacific Northwest, who quickly develop smallpox and perish. Conscience-stricken at the deaths, Admiral Kheim departs, but not before one of his men stows away. (This sailor, we later learn, travels the continent teaching the natives how to inoculate themselves against smallpox.) Later on, a Japanese exile fleeing the conquest of his homeland by the Chinese enters the New World, travels from Gold Mountain (San Francisco) to the Great Lakes on foot and encounters the Hodenosaunee (Iroquois). Becoming a chief, he rallies the Iroquois to resist the expansion from Europe's Islamic successor states, who are slowly invading the East Coast. This chief teaches the Iroquois gunsmithing (evening the military edge) and literacy (the technology identified by Todorov as that which would have allowed the Native Americans to resist colonizers). The ultimate outcome is that the Iroquois are now able to resist European power, and bring the gifts of democracy to the world. I give this little plot summary to show the degree of narrative contrivance that Robinson is willing to go through in order to ensure a strong Native American presence—his two miraculous saviors who teach the Native Americans how to resist dise
ase and how to resist Europeans are the most strained parts of his narrative. Clearly he sees a need for a strong Native American presence in his future world.
The strengthening of Native Americans is a common outcome of points of divergence in history: Poul Anderson's The Time Patrol contains Native American nations battling Celtic settler states; L. Sprague de Camp's “The Wheels of If” has a small Celtic-ruled East Coast overrun by “Dakotians” led by Crazy Horse. Jake Page's Apacheria posits an Apache-controlled country in the southwest. (Of course, this increased Native American presence is possible only for stories which locate the point of divergence with reality before 1850. Since they have to maintain historical plausibility, as I discuss below, stories with points of divergence in the Civil War period or later can do little to allow for Native American dominance, since by then the damage was done, the tribes a shadow of their former size.)
While the natives of North America fare strongly in these books, the South Americans, particularly the Aztecs, are often early casualties. In The Years of Rice and Salt, Admiral Kheim's fleet encounters the Aztecs after leaving the natives of the Northwest. Various members of Kheim's expedition are kidnapped and almost sacrificed before they manage to escape. In the process, they level the Aztec city they've encountered. Upon returning to China, they point to the Aztecs as a culture ripe for conquest, and China grows rich looting Aztec gold. The Aztecs are a recurring villain throughout these books. Whether it's due to their oppressive monarchy, their ruthless military machine, or their custom of human sacrifice, they serve as the “justified” victims of military campaigns in many novels, from The Years of Rice and Salt to King of the Wood to “The Wheels of If.” I identify the Aztecs with the Cannibals which Ted Motohashi explores. Motohashi suggests that the mere existence of “Cannibals” provided a convenient reason for Europeans to invade the New World: to exterminate the evildoers and protect other “innocent” tribes from their ravages. Like these cannibals, the Aztecs prove to be a pretext for imperialist ventures. They are the universal “bad guys,” and their historical fate changes little: they are ground down and destroyed.
This focus on military effort is typical of the alternate history genre. Science fiction critic Darko Suvin has pointed to The Battle of Dorking as a crucial early text—involving a successful German conquest of England. (While not precisely an alternate history, the pseudo-historical style of The Battle of Dorking makes it a close cousin.) Most written alternate history focuses on World War II (usually allowing the Axis a chance to win the war) and on the American Civil War (with Gettysburg being the biggest point of divergence). In French fiction the most popular subject has been Napoleon, and one of the first known pieces of alternate history was an Italian story offering conjectures about Lorenzo de Medici (Chamberlain). Obviously there is a compulsion to reach into the meaningful battles of our past.
Alternate history was also, at the beginning, a form guided by historians, philosophers, and statesmen. Some of the first pieces of alternate history were written by political leaders like Louis Blanqui, Benjamin Disraeli, and even Winston Churchill. Many of these novels had an overtly political purpose. They're the converse of the paranoid fantasy that insists “it could happen here,” they say instead: “it could have happened here!” But the exhortation demands the same response: change in order to meet the challenge. The Battle of Dorking was intended specifically to change British military doctrine, through playing on the fears of a German conquest, and it succeeded. Alternate history, particularly of a Nazi victory in World War II, plays with the same fears.
What I've identified as the “it could have happened here!” fearmongering agenda explains one possible motive for strengthening the Native Americans in an alternate history: it makes them more dangerous and more credible opponents, and thus makes the victory over them seem the greater. One story, “In the Circle of Nowhere,” does indeed feature Native American war canoes enslaving the European mainland. Other stories feature tough Aztecs battling Vikings, or Crazy Horse leading a unified army out of the hills to battle a weak Irish confederation. The threat of a real Indian war looms.
Just as the terrain of America becomes a battleground, so too does the entire world seem up for grabs in alternate history. Alternate history portrays itself as a genre at the limits of possibility. It asks, “what if?", much like science fiction, and indeed author Harry Harrison has said that alternate history “is the very essence of what science fiction is all about” (Hellekson 3). The liberating power is the idea that history is arbitrary and that history's winners could just as easily have been history's losers. In Ray Bradbury's “A Sound of Thunder,” the prototype for many historical change works, a man stepping on a butterfly in the Jurassic period causes the results of a (fictional) presidential election to shift in the modern day. The outcome of a hard-fought political battle is shown to be the sign of chance, casting doubt on the inevitability and even the permanence of our historical events. If every footstep can bring about a new leader of the free world, alternate history seemingly has limitless possibilities for change. However, alternate history has some hard-bitten rules that come with the history part of the terrain.
The rules of the game
Just like any other piece of commercial fiction, alternate history must be compelling, or no one will read it. It's not easy to persuade us that history could have gone differently. The impact of an alternate history story comes from its ability to convince us that it is just as rigorous and just as plausible a historical treatment as any other book. To perform this feat, alternate history relies on two things: a plausible simulation of history and an implicit comparison to the history of the real world.
There are two principles to the plausible simulation of history. Would-be writers at the Usenet newsgroup soc.history.what-if are confronted with an imposing set of dos and don'ts in order to attain plausible explanations. One is to create minimal, believable points of divergence. Giving the Zulus atomic bombs (or giving the South AK-47s, as bestselling author Harry Turtledove did in Guns of the South) is inelegant; giving them better tactics at a key battle is allowable. It is also considered advisable to make as few changes as possible. For instance, “The Wheels of If” postulates the Muslims winning the battle of Tours, and King Offa deciding in favor of the Celtic church rather than the Roman Church at the Synod of Whitby. Most books make do with just one change.
The plausible simulation of history also means that all of what follows in the novel needs to seem believable within the framework of history. The word “history” in alternate history holds writers up to a higher degree of precision and probability than usual. Historians don't like to admit that they're creating fictions when they write; they think they're creating the truth. And fiction writers who create “alternate history” need to hold themselves to the same degree of persuasive explanation as historians do.
(I should make mention here of author Howard Waldrop, whose stories are more surrealist explorations than plausible projections of an altered future. “Ike at the Mike” features Dwight D. Eisenhower as a jazz singer jamming with president Elvis Presley, who used to dabble in music when he was young, while “Custer's Last Jump” features fighter ace Crazy Horse shooting down paratrooper Custer at Wounded Knee. But he is the exception that proves the rule—he's usually classified as “unique” or a “fantasist,” and none of his brilliant works were selected for a recent “best of” collection of alternate history.)
But more than that, the idea of an alternate history relies on the history of the real world. Calling it “alternate” presupposes the existence of an originary history, and indeed the genre relies for much of its force on comparisons to the original. Without recognizable historical mechanisms driving the story, it loses its place as an alternate history and becomes historical romance, shedding the eerie plausibility which is the hallmark of the genre. Every alternate history is grounded in the history which its writer believes in, or which the writer believes the audience will believe in.
Literary theorist Tzvetan Todorov identifies an “implicit reader” as a necessary component to the fantastic: the reader is left confused as to the ultimate state of affairs, whether supernatural or natural, and that is what creates the genre of the fantastic (31). Alternate history relies on a similar compact between author and reader, and a similar sense of confusion between reality and fiction.
Here, the implicit reader is one who is versed in the history of the world. In an alternate history, as in parody, knowledge of the original form is necessary to properly appreciate the work. The special pleasures of the alternate history come through the perception of difference—for instance, spotting historical personages in different roles. But to make this happen, the story has to be close enough to the real to be recognizable. Historical characters under alternate identities/alternate occupations (Blake the ranting prophet, Castro the pitcher, Hitler the painter) or different names (Herr Schicklgruber, Mr. Wellesley, Richard Starkey) must somehow express their “characters” through their new identities. Those characters, of course, are historically driven through our knowledge of what they did in the real world. The character is supposed to be fresh and new and surprise the reader. But it also must be old, and fit the implicit reader's foreknowledge.