Today I'm delighted to present Tim Susman, whose queer furry alternate history novel, The Revolution and the Fox, released on January 15, 2021. Here are his thoughts on alternate history.
When writing alternate history stories, I think sometimes about Dean Koontz’s Lightning, in which a character uses time travel to prevent a horrible accident. But every time they stop it, it happens again in different circumstances at a different time, so they end up jumping around and preventing it over and over. “Destiny,” we are told, “struggles to reassert the pattern that was meant to be.”
Stephen King also personifies history in 11-22-63. The main character, traveling in time to attempt to prevent President Kennedy’s assassination, is told that he will be fighting “the past,” which “doesn’t want to be changed” (disclaimer: I have seen the mini-series but not read the book). Kennedy’s assassination is viewed as a lynchpin that will change history beyond its ability to “push back,” but the implication from both of these books is that it is very hard to change history (to be fair, these are more generally time travel books than alternate history books).
Most people who might believe in destiny would attribute that force to a guiding intelligence behind it, a religious belief. Absent that force, or at least the focused interest of that force, there is a temptation when writing alternate history to err too far in the other direction. The famously named “butterfly effect” encourages us to believe that a small change in one place can spawn massive changes around the world. It may be true that a single person making a different decision at a specific, important time can change the course of the world—one is reminded of Lieutenant Colonel Petrov, who may have prevented a nuclear exchange in the Soviet False Alarm incident of 1983—and events like those are prime fodder for alternate history writers. But when looking at larger world trends, movements built by dozens or hundreds of people, it is harder to divert them with a single decision, and the fictional force of “destiny” does not seem quite so strange to imagine. Rather than being a supernatural force, it is more obviously the result of the collective thinking of a group of people, dozens to thousands or more.
History is, at its core, the story of people. This seems like an obvious statement, but when most of us learn history in school, we learn names and dates and very little about the people behind those names. So when building an alternate history around a specific event, I research the people who shaped and were shaped by that event, and how they might have reacted had the event turned out differently. People are stubborn and tend to cling to their beliefs. So even if, say, the British Empire had access to sorcerers that helped them quell the 1776 rebellion before it properly got started, that wouldn’t change the minds of a generation of American colonists—or their children—who felt that their proper place was as an equal on the world stage.
Fortunately, at least in the last several hundred years, we have access to excellent records: letters written, notebooks kept, public speeches made. We can get at the character of the people in our historical era and get a better sense of how they would have reacted in different circumstances. Even going farther back, there are ways we can make guesses about the characters of people in power or near power at critical times.
Most of my reading when writing an alternate history consists of short biographies including those records. Knowing more about the side characters in my story fleshes them out and makes the world around my main characters more real. Knowing these other characters, I can extrapolate: how would John Adams, for example, have considered a non-human underclass of people? Well, he was a staunch abolitionist, but recognized the necessity of compromise with the slave states. Even though he was married to a firm supporter of women’s rights, he took few steps in that direction himself. We can extrapolate that he would have supported a non-human underclass’s rights, but might not have exerted himself any farther than editorials in the newspaper. Or perhaps, without the burden of government on his shoulders, the private individual John Adams would have been even more outspoken.
When I have a good feel for the people of a certain time, I feel comfortable adding my original characters to that mix. And then the alternate history can really begin to take shape. Because when we write an alternative to our own history, we are not only indulging in a fun game of “What if,” we are building a contrast to what actually happened. The differences—and the similarities—shine a light on human choices and how they affect the world, then and now. What if a person had made a different choice? What if a different person had made that choice? How many different choices, and where, would it take to significantly alter the course of events? What benefits or personal conflicts from hundreds of years ago shaped today’s world? What responsibilities do we, in turn, have to shape the world we are living in?
Destiny doesn’t struggle to reassert any pattern, because no pattern is “meant to be.” Destiny falls into repeating patterns because people fall into patterns, and destiny, history, and the past are all made by people.
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Publisher's site: https://argyllproductions.com/
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