Uchronie
Ozarque wrote an alternative history (future?) poem about how no one voted in the 2008 election and the judges and journalists were angry, to many complaints. The complaints came in two forms:
- Hey, that means I wouldn’t vote. I would totally vote.
- No way would all the politicians and their families and these angry judges etc also be not voting.
The second argument was not as much responded to, though I think it’s a much stronger argument (and was my problem with the poem).
But this has turned into an even more interesting discussion of probability in alternative history, and what readers will and won’t accept.
I said:
Well, what do you mean by “history is essentially the same”?
You have, for instance, Farthing, where history is the same until the early 1940s, when England decided to make a truce with Hitler instead of fight.
But then you have Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, where older history is quite different (Raven King), but more recently past (in the book’s time) history is much the same as now (no more magic), and then magic is used to make book-history happen the same way as real-history.
Or you have the Thursday Next books, which shares only that the same authors wrote (”wrote”, in the books’ universe) the same works. The Crimean War never ended, there’s no such thing as an airplane, but there are televisions and game shows.
Now, arguably two of these aren’t alternate history, but that’s alternate history read very narrowly. (It’s more reasonable to say the Thursday Next — and the Nursery Crimes, I think — books aren’t. But I would find it hard to imagine that Jonathan Strange is not — it’s our world, plus magic.)
What about Orson Scott Card’s alternate historyish about Columbus, where our world continues on for a bit, ends in environmental disaster, then plops three people from our future down into our past. Alternate history, or alternate future?
An alternate history story has to be internally consistent, though — and this is what plausible seems to be about: not likely to happen, not even not impossible, just with a set of rules that it obeys. If the rules are “the world is the same except that Quebec separated in 1995″, you can’t also make Quebec a Russian-speaking province/country. Your poem didn’t seem to obey its own rules. You can make more changes — it’s not really important which or how many — as long as you decide which and inform readers somehow that these are the changes you’ve made. (The changes should also be relevant. If in my alternate history about Quebec the Canadian flag was the three leaf one that was proposed, there should be some reason this matters — it should have an impact on why the story turned out different than reality, otherwise you have the gun in the first act that never goes off.)
I think possibly by allowing JS&MN/Thursday Next into alternative history, I’m opening it up too much to anything at all — Harry Potter is, because hey, it’s the same world as ours except magic, Time-Traveler’s Wife is because it’s the same world, plus a disease that displaces you in time, etc. At the same time, I think in some way JS (at least) really is a kind of alternative history fiction. (Incidentally, the OSC is called Pastwatch.)
My other point is that relevant is sort of in the eyes of the beholder. If it’s a mystery, can’t the clues and the red herrings both be changes from our world to the real one? (Are there any books like this? I’d love to read this book.) That doesn’t actually violate gun in the first, but they’re not some standard definition of relevant.
Anyhow. Anyone have good alternate history books to recommend? Or other fantasy? Or anything that’s good, whatever the genre?