Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (298 page)

Only when I opened my mouth to explain to my involuntary host did something happen. The puzzle which had pursued me for three days suddenly solved itself. I knew why the face of the Southron captain had been so familiar. Familiar beyond any of the better known warriors on either side. I had indeed known that face intimately; seen those features enraged or sneering. The nose, the mouth, the eyes, the expression were Barbara Haggerwells’s. The man dead in the peach orchard was the man whose portrait hung in the library of Haggershaven, its founder, Herbert Haggerwells. Captain Haggerwells—never to become a major now, or buy this farm. Never to marry a local girl or beget Barbara’s great-grandfather. Haggershaven had ceased to exist in the future.

XXI.

FOR THE TIME BEING

I am writing this, as I said, in 1877. I am a healthy man of forty-five, no doubt with many years ahead of me. I might live to be a hundred, except for an illogical feeling that I must die before 1921. However, eighty-nine should be enough for anyone. So I have ample time to put my story down. Still, better to have it down and done with; should anything happen to me tomorrow it will be on paper.

For what? As confession and apology? As an inverted substitute for the merciful amnesia which ought to have erased my memory as well as my biography? (I have written to Wappinger Falls; there are no records of any Hodgins family, or of Backmakers. Does this mean the forces I set in motion destroyed Private Hodgins as well as Captain Haggerwells? Or only that the Hodginses and Backmakers settled elsewhere? In either case I am like Adam—in this world—a special, parentless creation.) There is no one close enough to care, or intimate enough to accept my word in the face of all reason. I have not married in this time, nor shall I. I write only as old men talk to themselves.

The rest of my personal story is simple. The name of the farmer who found me in his barn was Thammis; they had need of a hired hand and I stayed on. I had no desire to go elsewhere; in fact I could not bear to leave what was—and will never be—Haggershaven.

In the beginning I used to go to the location of the Agatis’ garden and look across at the spot where I left our cottage and Catty. It was an empty pilgrimage. Now I content myself with the work which needs doing. I shall stay here till I die.

Catty. Haggershaven. Are they really gone, irrevocably lost, in a future which never existed, which couldn’t exist, once the chain of causation was broken? Or do they exist after all, in a universe in which the South won the battle of Gettysburg and Major Haggerwells founded Haggershaven? Could another Barbara devise a means to reach that universe? I would give so much to believe this, but I cannot. I simply cannot.

Children know about such things. They close their eyes and pray, “Please, God, make it didn’t happen.” Often they open their eyes to find it happened anyway, but this does not shake their faith that many times the prayer is granted. Adults smile, but can any of them be sure the memories they cherish were the same yesterday? Do they know that a past cannot be expunged? Children know it can.

And once lost, that particular past can never be regained. Another and another perhaps, but never the same one. There are no parallel universes—though this one may be sinuous and inconstant.

That this world is a better place than the one into which I was born, and promises to grow still better, seems true. What idealism lay behind the Southron cause triumphed in the reconciliation of men like Lee; what was brutal never got the upper hand as it did in my world. The Negro is free; black legislatures pass advanced laws in South Carolina; black congressmen comport themselves with dignity in Washington. The Pacific railroad is built, immigrants pour into a welcoming country to make it strong and wealthy; no one suggests they should be shut out or hindered.

There are rumors of a deal between northern Republicans and southern Democrats, betraying the victory of the Civil War—how strange it is still, after fourteen years, to use this term instead of the familiar War of Southron Independence—in return for the presidency. If this is true, my brave new world is not so brave.

It may not be so new either. Prussia has beaten France and proclaimed a German Empire; is this the start in a different way of the German Union? Will 1914 see an Emperors’ War—there is none in France now—leaving Germany facing…whom?

Any one of the inventions of my own time would make me a rich man if I could reproduce it, or cared for money. With mounting steel production and the tremendous jump in population, what a success the minibile would be. Or the tinugraph. Or controllable balloons.

The typewriter I have seen. It has developed along different and clumsier lines; inevitably, I suppose, given initial divergence. It may mean greater advances; more likely not. The universal use of gaslight must be far in the future if it is to come at all; certainly its advent is delayed by all this talk of inventing electric illumination. If we couldn’t put electricity to work it’s unlikely my new contemporaries will be able to. Why, they haven’t even made the telegraph cheap and convenient.

And something like HX-1? It is inconceivable. Could it be that in destroying the future in which Haggershaven existed I have also destroyed the only dimension in which time travel was possible?

So strangely easily I can write the words, “I destroyed.”

Catty.

But what of Tyss’s philosophy? Is it possible I shall be condemned to repeat the destruction throughout eternity? Have I written these lines an infinite number of times before? Or is the mercy envisaged by Enfandin a reality? And what of Barbara’s expression as she bade me goodbye? Could she possibly

* * * *

Editorial note by Frederick Winter Thammis: Quite recently, in the summer of 1953 to be exact, I commissioned the remodeling of my family home near York, Pennsylvania. Among the bundles of old books and papers stored in the attic was a box of personal effects, labeled H. M. BACKMAKER. In it was the manuscript concluding with an unfinished sentence, reproduced above.

My father used to tell me that when he was a boy there was an old man living on the farm, nominally as a hired hand, but actually as a pensioner, since he was beyond the age of useful labor. My father said the children considered him not quite right in his mind, but very entertaining, for he often repeated long, disjointed narratives of an impossible world and an impossible society which they found as fascinating as the Oz books. On looking back, he said, Old Hodge talked like an educated man, but this might simply be the impression of young, uncultivated minds.

Clearly it was in some attempt to give form and unity to his tales that the old man wrote his fable down, and then was too shy to submit it for publication. This is the only reasonable way to account for its existence. Of course, he says he wrote it in 1877, when he was far from old, and disconcertingly, analysis of the paper shows it might have been written then.

Two other items should be noted. In the box of Backmaker’s belongings there was a watch of unknown manufacture and unique design. Housed in a cheap nickel case, the jeweled movement is of extraordinary precision and delicacy. The face has two dials, independently set and wound.

The second is a quotation. It can be matched by similar quotations in any of half a hundred volumes on the Civil War. I pick this only because it is handy. From W. E. Woodward’s
Years of Madness
, p. 202:

“…Union troops that night and next morning took a position on Cemetery Hill and Round Top.…The Confederates could have occupied this position but they failed to do so. It was an error with momentous consequences.”

* * * *

Copyright © 1952, 1980 by the Estate of Ward Moore; first appeared in
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
; reprinted by permission of the author’s Estate and the Estate’s agent, the Virginia Kidd Agency, Inc.

Alternate history, the practice of positing “what if” history had transpired differently, is both a flourishing subgenre of science fiction and a subfield of history.  It has been called by many names, such as “uchronia,” “allohistory,” and “counterfactual fiction.”  Grammatically, “alternative history” is more accurate, but because this term is used in a specialized sense by historians, such as history as viewed from a feminist perspective, the preferred term is alternate history.

Like science fiction, alternate history is extrapolative: SF posits a change in our present or future; alternate history posits a change in the past and its consequences on history. Part of the pleasure in reading alternate history is figuring out at what point in history the change occurred and then measuring the created world against known history and noting the deviations. The critic Karen Hellekson says that “The alternate history is a text placed at the crux of temporality, narrativity, and history; these three points engage in a dialogue that…questions these topics by estranging them, by changing events or interpretations to make them unfamiliar” (Hellekson 65).

According to the novelist E. L. Doctorow, “history is a kind of fiction in which we live and hope to survive, and fiction is a kind of speculative history, perhaps a superhistory” (“False Documents” 25). Alternate history can be considered an especially powerful form of superhistory, a means of speculating on and reconceiving history itself.

Alternate history derives from the universal human tendency to speculate about the random and arbitrary nature of existence, and about how our lives might be dramatically altered if one small event in the past were to change. We do it to congratulate ourselves on our good fortune, or to express our fear of the huge role chance plays in human existence, or to wish that our lives had gone otherwise. Says Michael Chabon, author of
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union
(2007), which won the Sidewise Award presented annually for the best novel of alternate history, “I think all of us are wired to lie awake in bed at night going back over the course of our life, looking at the things that led us to the place where we are now, being able to see sometimes only after only after a period of many years certain key junctures.…You can begin to imagine an alternate life for yourself. It’s a fundamental part of the way we look at our own history” (Chabon interview by Greenwood). Alternate history simply extends that tendency from rethinking one’s own history to reimagining the larger patterns of history.

Alternate history permeates contemporary popular culture, in both science fiction and fantasy and mainstream novels. There are dozens of websites catering to fans of the genre, with such features as alternate history role-playing games, instructions on how to create your own alternate timeline, and Rough Planet Guides to Alternate Earths. There are also many alternate history video and computer games and comic books. On television, there have been series such as Quantum Leap (1989–1993), about a time traveler who improves people’s lives, Sliders (1995–200), about a team who use machinery to travel to many parallel Earths subtly or dramatically different from our own, and Time Cop (1997–1998), a TV series based on a 1994 movie, about a policeman who travels through time to correct its course when criminal time travelers alter history for personal benefit. Recent movies such as Run Lola Run (1998), Sliding Doors (1998), and The Butterfly Effect (2004) present a given situation which is played repeatedly, yielding different and sometimes completely contradictory outcomes. Although it may saturate contemporary popular culture, alternate history, like other forms of SF, tends to get little respect from critics who disdain genre fiction.

Nevertheless, alternate history has a long and distinguished lineage, beginning with the Greek historian Herodotus, who wondered what would have happened if the Persians defeated the Greeks at Marathon, and the Roman historian Livy, who pondered what would have happened to the Roman Empire if Alexander had gone west instead of east.

The first known alternate history in English is a chapter in Isaac D’Israeli’s
Curiosities of Literature
(1824). The first novel-length alternate history was Louis-Napoleon Geoffrey-Chateau’s
Napoléon et la conquête du monde
(1836). Nathaniel Hawthorne’s story “P.’s Correspondence” (1845) concerns a man who is considered mad because he sees an alternate 1845. Charles Renouvier’s novel Uchronie (1857) introduced the French term for alternate history. But the best known alternate history of the nineteenth century is Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), where the alteration is caused through time travel, which in the twentieth century became a favorite literary device to create a changed past or present.

Alternate history burgeoned in the twentieth century, both in the speculations of historians and in the creations of the new genre of SF. And its rules began to be codified. Alternate histories basically come in three varieties: 1) the anomaly, 2) the time travel deviation, and 3) the parallel worlds scenario.

First, the alternative reality may be due to an anomaly which is simply given. At some critical juncture in the past—which Karen Hellekson calls “the nexus event” (27) and other critics call “the point of divergence”—history deviated from its known course to follow another path, as in Philip K. Dick’s classic
The Man in the High Castle
(1962), which takes place on the west coast of America, an area governed by the Japanese, decades after the Axis won WW II.

Second, a time traveler may inadvertently or deliberately interfere with the course of events, as in
A Connecticut Yankee
; or L. Sprague de Camp’s
Lest Darkness Fall
(1941), where a twentieth-century time traveler in sixth-century Rome prevents the Dark Ages by introducing the printing press and other modern innovations; or the film series Back to the Future (1984, 1989, 1990), which deals with branching time lines caused by an unwitting time traveler, who must keep traveling up and down the time lines to correct his mistakes.

Third, there is the possibility of parallel worlds, multiple realities, or a “multiverse,” and people may accidentally slip cross-time or else deliberately travel from one timeline to another by machine. These parallel worlds co-exist in separate dimensions, and they may be “virtually identical, right down to the people who inhabit them,” so that the hero can even encounter different versions of himself (Hellekson 51). H.G. Wells’s
Men Like Gods
(1923) may be the first novel about cross-time travel to an alternate universe. H. Beam Piper did a lot to popularize and explain the idea of parallel universes in his “Paratime” short stories in the 1950s and in the posthumously published novel
Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen
(1965). Vladimir Nabokov dabbled in the notion of parallel worlds in his novel
Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle
(1969), in which he conjures up an “Anti-Terra” where the Russian and American land masses are connected. A variation on the parallel worlds theme is the time-loop story, in which a character involuntarily re-experiences a portion of his life over and over, with different outcomes, as in Ken Grimwood’s novel
Replay
(1986) or the film
Groundhog Day
(1993).

British historian John Squire’s
If It Had Happened Otherwise (1931) collected speculations by distinguished historians, including Winston Churchill’s sophisticated fiction, “If Lee Had Not Won the Battle of Gettysburg,” in which a historian from an alternate world in which the South won the Civil War imagines what would have happened if the South had lost. This form of alternate history is known variously as “recursive alternate history,” the “double-blind what-if” or the “alternate-alternate history.” The most famous example is Ward Moore’s classic science fiction novel Bring the Jubilee (1955), in which a historian from a twentieth century in which the Confederacy triumphed time travels to witness the Battle of Gettysburg, but in the process of observing unintentionally changes the outcome. He becomes trapped in a world in which the North wins—that is, in our world, which he has unwittingly helped create. The popular novelist MacKinlay Cantor’s If the South Had Won the Civil War (1961) played on the same notion but brought it mainstream acceptance.

Starting in the 1960s, the publication of alternate histories increased exponentially because, with the coming of postmodernism, history was up for grabs. Theorists such as Roland Barthes and Hayden White began to note the similarity between the strategies of history and fiction. In
Metahistory
(1973), the historian Hayden White argued that historians structured their narratives just like novelists. Writers in the 1960s began to recognize that there was no single “truth” about a historical period, that who was telling the story and how mattered, and that fiction had much to contribute to our understanding of history.

American writers in the 1960s and 70s responded by creating not so much alternate histories as a new kind of historical novel which mixed fact and fiction, or sometimes history and pure fantasy: John Barth’s
The Sot Weed Factor
(1964), Thomas Berger’s
Little Big Man
(1964), Bernard Malamud’s
The Fixer
(1966), William Styron’s
The Confessions of Nat Turner
(1967), Kurt Vonnegut’s
Slaughterhouse-Five
(1969), Thomas Pynchon’s
Gravity’s Rainbow
(1973), and Doctorow’s
The Book of Daniel
(1971) and Robert Coover’s
The Public Burning
(1977), both of which reimagined the Rosenberg case.

Like these new historical novels, alternative histories rewrite history, but they go even further: they rewrite reality. Says Karen Hellekson, “Alternate histories question the nature of history and of causality; they question accepted notions of time and space; they rupture linear movement; and they make readers rethink their world and how it has become what it is. They are a critique of the metaphors we use to discuss history. And they foreground the ‘constructedness’ of history and the role narrative plays in this construction” (Hellekson 4–5).

Gavriel Rosenfeld suspects that the mainstreaming of alternate history in recent decades reflects the postmodern discrediting of deterministic ideologies and skepticism about all metanarratives. In alternate history, everything is contingent and history is open-ended (6). Moreover, according to chaos theory, even a tiny change in a complex system can lead to a cascading series of huge effects (the “butterfly effect”). Now that the twentieth-century threat of totalizing systems such as fascism or communism seems over, we have the freedom to look back and see how easily it could have turned out differently. Meanwhile, new threats, such as resurgent nationalism, religious fundamentalism, terrorism, or environmental catastrophe make the future less certain than ever. “In our current transitional era. . .we recognize that nothing is inevitable at all” (7).

Among the best of the flood of alternate history novels since the 1990s are William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s
The Difference Engine
(1991), in which the Victorian age features gigantic computers run on steam; Harry Turtledove’s
The Guns of the South
(1992), in which time travelers try to change the outcome of the Civil War by importing modern weaponry; and Robert Harris’s
Fatherland
(1992), set in Nazi Berlin in 1964.

Recent award-winning novels by Philip Roth and Michael Chabon re-imagine twentieth-century Jewish history, showing both the imaginative power of fiction and the contingent nature of history. In
The Plot Against America
(2004), Roth, imitating a memoir, tweaks the American involvement in World War II to imagine an America sliding toward fascism and a potential American holocaust for the Jews. In
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union
(2007), Chabon, imitating the hard-boiled detective novel, invents a post-Holocaust Jewish state, not in Israel but in Alaska. Both novels won the Sidewise Award.

SF seems to be histories of possible futures and alternate history to be histories of possible pasts, but both are really about the present. Writes Gavriel Rosenfeld, “When the producers of alternate histories speculate on how the past might have been different, they invariably express their own highly subjective present-day hopes and fears” (Rosenfeld 10).

* * * *

Works Cited

Chabon, Michael. “Michael Chabon Interview,” Helen Greenwood. Sydney, Australia
Morning Herald
, May 3, 2007.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/books/michael-chabon-interview/2007/05/03/1177788267982.html

Doctorow, E. L. “False Documents.”
E.L. Doctorow: Essays and Conversations
. Ed. Richard Trenner. Princeton, N.J. : Ontario Review Press, 1983.

Hellekson, Karen.
The Alternate History: Refiguring Historical Time
. Kent, Ohio : Kent State University Press, 2001.

Rosenfeld, Gavriel David.
The World Hitler Never Made: Alternate History and the Memory of Nazism
. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

* * * *

Andrew M. Gordon
is Professor Emeritus of English, University of Florida and author of An American Dreamer: A Psychoanalytic Study of the Fiction of Norman Mailer; Empire of Dreams: The Science Fiction and Fantasy Films of Steven Spielberg; Screen Saviors: Hollywood Fictions of Whiteness (co-authored with Hernan Vera); and Psychoanalyses/Feminisms (co-edited with Peter Rudnytsky). He also has many essays and reviews on Jewish-American writers, on other contemporary American writers, and on contemporary American science fiction and science fiction films.