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Inventing Alt-History
Mar. 16th, 2012 03:28 pmWhen I first heard about If It Had Happened Otherwise from the Wiki article about counterfactuals, it sounded brilliant: Churchill writes alt history!! As do a bunch of other learned dudes I've heard of but never read!
Too bad they suck at it.
The short stories got repetitive: most of them posed as a piece of history from an alternate universe in which such-and-such had (not) happened, with comments about Hahaha wouldn't it be funny if Napoleon had won at Waterloo. A few were just plain weird, like G. K. Chesterton rhapsodizing about the awesomeness of Mary Queen of Scots (and what she would've accomplished if only she'd married Don Juan of Austria) or the editor tripping about Bacon being the author of "Shakepeare"'s plays. The toughest one to read was Ronald Knox's "If the General Strike Had Succeeded": maybe that title was illuminating in the 1930s, but I had to Google for a while to figure out what the hell he was talking about (what general strike?) and why we care. It didn't help that it was formatted to look like a 1930s newspaper, so it was 12 pages of densely packed text in small columns. *sighs* I almost didn't finish the book bc of that chapter.
I found the stories about Archduke Ferdinand and Emperor Frederick (the father of Kaiser Wilhelm) the most clever what-ifs, but I can't recommend hunting down the book for just them: just read the Wiki article instead. The Churchill short story on "If Lee Had Not Won the Battle of Gettysburg" is slightly interesting, for language and for the MP's insights into how different Anglo-American relations would've been and how a different outcome in the Civil War would've affected British politics. I think he's crazy to think Lee would've emancipated the slaves and thus could not suspend my disbelief long enough to appreciate his insights. I'm glad he stuck with his day job.
Too bad they suck at it.
The short stories got repetitive: most of them posed as a piece of history from an alternate universe in which such-and-such had (not) happened, with comments about Hahaha wouldn't it be funny if Napoleon had won at Waterloo. A few were just plain weird, like G. K. Chesterton rhapsodizing about the awesomeness of Mary Queen of Scots (and what she would've accomplished if only she'd married Don Juan of Austria) or the editor tripping about Bacon being the author of "Shakepeare"'s plays. The toughest one to read was Ronald Knox's "If the General Strike Had Succeeded": maybe that title was illuminating in the 1930s, but I had to Google for a while to figure out what the hell he was talking about (what general strike?) and why we care. It didn't help that it was formatted to look like a 1930s newspaper, so it was 12 pages of densely packed text in small columns. *sighs* I almost didn't finish the book bc of that chapter.
I found the stories about Archduke Ferdinand and Emperor Frederick (the father of Kaiser Wilhelm) the most clever what-ifs, but I can't recommend hunting down the book for just them: just read the Wiki article instead. The Churchill short story on "If Lee Had Not Won the Battle of Gettysburg" is slightly interesting, for language and for the MP's insights into how different Anglo-American relations would've been and how a different outcome in the Civil War would've affected British politics. I think he's crazy to think Lee would've emancipated the slaves and thus could not suspend my disbelief long enough to appreciate his insights. I'm glad he stuck with his day job.