Harry Turtledove: The Best Alternate History Stories of the 20th Century

In the 1960s, two Englishmen, John Brunner and Keith Roberts, produced stimulating alternate histories on a subject particularly relevant to British hearts: a successful invasion by the Spanish Armada. Brunner’s Times Without Number examined why travel between different time lines doesn’t happen more often, while Roberts’ beautiful Pavane looked at, among other things, the consequences of slowing down technological growth (strictly speaking, Pavane isn’t an alternate history, but a first cousin: a recursive future). At about the same time, Keith Laumer, in Worlds of the Imperium and its two sequels, did a first-rate job of combining alternate history with fast-moving adventure.

But alternate history really became a more prominent subgenre in the last two decades of the twentieth century. There are a couple of reasons for this. One is that, with our much greater knowledge of the true nature of the solar system, we have found that it looks much less inviting than it did a couple of generations ago. There are no canals on Mars, and no Martians, either; nor are there oceans on Venus full of reptilian monsters. Before the space probes went out, these were scientifically plausible speculations. No more; brute facts have killed such possibilities. Furthermore, more people trained in history have begun writing science fiction, and have naturally gravitated to areas with which they find themselves familiar: S. M. Stirling, with a law degree and an undergraduate degree in history; Susan Shwartz and Judith Tarr, both with doctorates in western medieval studies; and myself, with a doctorate in Byzantine history (a subject I was inspired to study, as I’ve said, by Lest Darkness Fall ).

Stirling’s Draka universe, commencing with Marching Through Georgia , is as thoroughly unpleasant a place as any ever envisioned by an alternate historian, but, especially in Under the Yoke , alarmingly convincing as well. His more recent trilogy, beginning with Island in the Sea of Time , drops the entire island of Nantucket back to about 1250 B.C. and examines the consequences with fine writing, splendid research, and careful logic.

Shwartz and Tarr have both combined fantasy and alternate history in intriguingly different ways. Shwartz’s series that begins with Byzantium’s Crown looks at a magical medieval world that might have sprung from Cleopatra’s victory over Octavian, while Tarr’s beautifully written the Hound and the Falcon trilogy and other succeeding books examine what the world might have been like if immortal elves were real rather than mythical.

My own book-length work includes Agent of Byzantium , set in a world where Muhammad did not found Islam; A Different Flesh, in which Homo erectus rather than American Indians populated the New World; A World of Difference, which makes the planet in Mars’s orbit different enough to support life; the Worldwar series, which imagines an alien invasion in 1942; The Guns of the South, in which time-traveling South Africans give Robert E. Lee AK-47s; and How Few Remain and the Great War books, which embroil an independent Confederacy and the United States of America in World War I.

In a slightly different vein, Kim Newman has imagined the Victorian age and the early years of this century controlled by vampires in Anno Dracula and The Bloody Red Baron . The really frightening thing about the latter book is that the World War I he imagines is no bloodier than the one we really had. Newman’s entertaining Back in the USSA looks at a Red revolution in the United States rather than Russia, with Al Capone in the role of Stalin.

And alternate history has not become the sole province of escaped history buffs. Aerospace engineer Stephen Baxter’s Voyage looks at a journey to Mars in 1986 that might have happened had John Kennedy not been assassinated. This is hard science fiction at its best, as is Gregory Benford’s award-winning Timescape , which touches on ecological disaster along with its main theme of communicating across time lines.

Nor has alternate history remained the sole province of science-fiction writers. Spymaster Len Deighton produced SS-GB , a chilling account of a Nazi-occupied Britain. And journalist Robert Harris’s Fatherland became an international best-seller—certainly a breakthrough for alternate history. Fatherland, another tale of Germany triumphant, is carefully researched; its principal flaw seems to be a conviction that the discovery of the Holocaust twenty years after the fact would be a world-shaking event rather than a nine days’ wonder, if even that.

Several anthologies have also highlighted alternate history in recent years. Gregory Benford edited, with Martin H. Greenberg, Hitler Victorious and the four volumes titled What Might Have Been , which examined different ways in which the past might have changed. And the prolific Mike Resnick edited and wrote for a series of Alternate anthologies, including such titles as Alternate Kennedys and Alternate Tyrants . Alternate-history stories have found homes in magazines as diverse as Omni and Analog .

And there is a renewed interest in alternate history outside the confines of science fiction and fantasy. Articles on the topic have appeared in such mainstream publications as USA Today and American Heritage , and academic alternate histories, the parlor game of the 1930s, are respectable once again. Serious historians have played the game in two collections of essays edited by Kenneth Macksey, Invasion: The Alternate History of the German Invasion of England, July 1940 and The Hitler Options: Alternate Decisions of World War II . Peter Tsouras’s recent Disaster at D-Day: The Germans Defeat the Allies, June 1944 and Gettysburg: An Alternate History recall, in their detail and fictional critical apparatus, Robert Sobel’s classic For Want of a Nail , which imagines a failed American Revolution and the subsequent 180 years of history from the perspective of a college history text.

The stories in this collection, in their quality and their variety, show where the field went during the last century. I have no doubt that, with so many talented writers wondering what might have been, we will continue to see many more fascinating, thought-provoking stories in the century just being born. The purpose of any good fiction, after all, is not to examine the created world alone, but to hold up that created world as a mirror to the reality we all experience. Alternate history gives us a fun-house mirror that lets us look at reality in ways we cannot get from any other type of story. That, to me, is its principal attraction—along with the joys of storytelling. Have fun!

Kim Stanley Robinson’s monumental Mars trilogy ( Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars )—a future history of the Red Planet from its colonization through its struggle for independence from Earth—has been hailed a modern classic and acknowledged a landmark of twentieth-century science fiction. Robinson’s first published story appeared in 1976, and since that time he has earned the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, and John W. Campbell Memorial Awards for his short fiction and novels. His first novel, The Wild Shore, published in 1984, produced two thematic sequels, The Gold Coast and Pacific Edge , which form the Orange County trilogy, about the future development of the California coast in the aftermath of nuclear holocaust. Robinson’s other novels include The Memory of Whiteness, A Short, Sharp Shock , and Antarctica , the story of a future Antarctica society threatened by ecological saboteurs. His short fiction has been collected in Escape from Kathmandu, Remaking History, and Down and Out in the Year 2000. His doctoral dissertation has been published as the critically acclaimed The Novels of Philip K. Dick.