Examining Alternate Histories

Abstract

499 BOOKS IN REVIEW Examining Alternate Histories. Glyn Morgan and C. Palmer-Patel, eds. Sideways in Time: Critical Essays on Alternate History Fiction. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2019. 203 pp. $120 hc. Glyn Morgan and C. Palmer-Patel’s new anthology Sideways in Time, which was nominated for a 2019 British Science Fiction Association Award in the nonfiction category (although it did not win), brings together an array of wellrespected scholars in their examination of alternate-history fiction. The editors rightly highlight the pioneering quality of their work, following as it does several scholarly monographs on the topic; they may be the first to present a collection of different perspectives in an anthology form. While such books as Karen Hellekson’s The Alternate History: Refiguring Historical Time (2001), Kathleen Singles’s Alternate History: Playing with Contingency and Necessity (2013), Derek J. Thiess’s Relativism, Alternate History, and the Forgetful Reader: Reading Science Fiction and Historiography (2014), and Catherine Gallagher’s Telling It Like It Wasn’t: The Counterfactual Imagination in History and Fiction (2018) are in-depth studies of alternate history narratives focused on specific issues, the present anthology addresses a wide range of topics and authors in this genre, providing the reader with a broader variety of subjects and perspectives. Consequently, this book nicely complements such previous scholarship. Sideways in Time is organized into two parts of five chapters each, with an introduction, a foreword, and an afterword as well. The foreword by Stephen Baxter, an award-winning author of alternate history and science fiction and a judge of the Sidewise Award for alternate-history fiction, provides a general idea of the genre. Baxter traces the genre’s antiquity to 35 BCE in Roman historian Livy’s writing, but then mostly discusses examples from the twentieth century Anglo-American tradition (including his own novels). This laid-back foreword gives way to a more rigorous introduction by the editors. Morgan and Palmer-Patel explore the history of the genre in a more consistent manner from ancient Rome to nineteenth-century France; they see Louis Napoléon GeoffroyCh âteau’s Napoléon et la conquête du monde [Napoleon’s Conquest of the World, 1836] as the first modern instance of alternate history fiction. Their introduction further provides an interesting discussion about the relationship between non-fictional speculations regarding history and alternative-history fiction, and that between alternative history and science fiction. In addition, the editors conveniently lay out the basic characteristics of the genre and important terminologies to guide readers in the rest of the book. The two main parts of the book are organized under the categories of “Points of Divergence” and “Manipulating the Genre.” The first category explores works of alternative fiction that utilize the major tropes of the genre, such as specific points of divergence that create alternative historical developments, the “great man” theory, and the Tolstoian vision of history; in part this establishes a discourse of an emerging canon. The second part questions the basic tenets of alternate-history fiction. Sideways in Time nicely balances its attention on conformity and subversion with dominant genre expectations and consequently 500 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 47 (2020) exposes the developments of such genre qualities as functions of an oscillating historical process. The first chapter by Adam Roberts, “Napoleon as Dynamite: Geoffroy’s Napoléon Apocryphe and Science Fiction as Alternate History,” foregrounds the two major trends of the genre’s points of departure—alternative historical outcomes as determined by the actions of a great person (or a few persons) and the dispersed collectivity of small actions creating parallel historical streams—and shows that the historical divergences in this type of fiction are an ideological representation of the author’s own sense of historicity. His examination of early works in this vein establishes the prominence of the “great man” approach. Roberts’s chapter, coming after the introduction, creates a comprehensive idea of the genre’s early development, which, in addition to providing a thorough analysis of the text in question, establishes the groundwork for approaching the later chapters. Although the remainder of the chapters deal with much later works, similar historiographical concerns dominate the discussion. Chris Pak’s chapter, “‘It Is...