The Best Alternate History Stories Of The Twentieth Century Part 1

THE BEST ALTERNATE HISTORY.

STORIES OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY.

edited by HARRY TURTLEDOVE and MARTIN H. GREENBERG

INTRODUCTION.

Harry Turtledove

What if...

Most science-fiction ideas don't come naturally. Most take a degree of intellectual sophistication that came only with the Industrial Revolution. It's hard to write about the effects of technology before there's much in the way of technology to write about. But alternate history isn't like that. It's as natural as those two mournful little words up there. What if...

What if I'd married Lucy instead of Martha, George instead of Fred? What would my life be like? Would I be richer? Happier? What would our kids have been like, if we'd had kids? What if there hadn't been that traffic accident that clogged three lanes of the freeway, so I wasn't late to the interview? How would things have looked if I'd got that job? Or-let's not think small-what if I won the lottery? How would I live if I had sixty million dollars in the bank?

In our own lives, we endlessly imagine these scenarios. We can't help it. There's always the feeling that we're inside G.o.d's pinball machine, bouncing through life and off b.u.mpers at random, and that we could have ended up elsewhere as easily as where we did.

It's certainly true for me. If I hadn't read a particular book- Lest Darkness Fall, by L. Sprague de Camp-when I was about fourteen years old, I wouldn't have ended up with the degree I have (a doctorate in, G.o.d help me, Byzantine history), wouldn't have written much of what I've written (I surely wouldn't be working on this introduction now), wouldn't have met the lady I'm married to, wouldn't have the kids I have. Other than that, it didn't change my life a bit. If someone else had taken that novel out of the secondhand bookstore where I found it...

And from there, from the sense that individuals' lives might be plastic, mutable, comes the sense that the wider world might work the same way. "A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!" Richard III cried. What if he'd got that horse, instead of going down to defeat and death because he didn't? What would England be like today? No different at all? A little different? A lot different? How can we know?

Well, we can't know, not in any absolute sense. Whatever else history may be, it's not an experimental science. How can we make plausible guesses, interesting guesses, entertaining guesses? This is the way in which the alternate-history story was born.

The subgenre is a lot older than you might think, too. As I've noted, alternate history doesn't require a relatively high-tech background. All it requires is the ability to extrapolate from the individual to the wider world, the intuitive leap that lets you see that, just as small things can change individual lives, they can also change wider affairs.

The first person of whom I'm aware who made this leap was the Roman historian Livy, who wrote about the time of Christ. In Book IX, sections 1719, of his monumental (so monumental that it was frequently abridged and extracted, and does not survive complete) History of Rome from Its Foundation, Livy wonders what would have happened if Alexander the Great had turned his attention to the west and attacked the Roman Republic in the late fourth centuryB .C. With fine Roman patriotism, he tries to show that his countrymen could and would have beaten the Macedonian king. My own opinion is that Livy was an optimist, but that's neither here nor there. He clearly invented the game of alternate history-not a small achievement for a man who has been criticized for the past two thousand years as one who made his history with scissors and paste, taking it all from the works of those who went before him and piecing those works together into a continuous narrative as best he could.

Livy proved to be ahead of his time, as inventors sometimes are. In his case, he was further ahead of his time than most: about eighteen hundred years ahead. Not till the aftermath of Napoleon's downfall did alternate history rear its head again, with several French novelists wondering what might have been had the defeated emperor proved triumphant.

It is not till the twentieth century that most-not all, but most-alternate history came to be reckoned part of that new and sometimes strange kid on the literary block, science fiction. To this day, some people wonder why this identification was made. I have a couple of reasons to propose. For one thing, people who wrote other forms of science fiction also came to write alternate-history stories. And, for another, alternate history plays by some of the same rules as (other) varieties of science fiction. In many science-fiction stories, the author changes one thing in the present or nearer future, and speculates about what would happen in the more distant future as a result of the change. Alternate history goes down the same road, but from a different starting point. It usually changes one thing in the more distant past and speculates about what would have happened in the nearer past or the present. The relations.h.i.+p seems obvious.

The American Civil War has offered aficionados of the subgenre a playground full of toys ever since a still fell at Appomattox. In fact, many Civil War officers' memoirs read as if they were alternate history, with the authors trying to seize credit for everything that went right anywhere near them and blaming incompetent subordinates and superiors for everything that went wrong. But, as their purpose was to make themselves look good rather than really to examine what might have been, they cannot in fact be included among early alternate historians.

The crowded, chaotic twentieth century saw the true rise of alternate history. Murray Leinster's seminal story, "Sidewise in Time" (after which the Sidewise Award for alternate history is named), introduced this type of story to the science-fiction pulp magazines. But alternate history was also the province of intellectuals on a lark. In 1931, for example, Winston Churchill's essay "If Lee Had Not Won the Battle of Gettysburg" examined the possible consequences of a Northern victory in the Civil War in a world where the South won it-a neat double twist. And, in the second volume of his A Study of History, Arnold Toynbee, in "The Forfeited Birthright of the Abortive Far Western Christian Civilization," postulated a world in which Celtic Christianity had survived along with the Roman variety, and in which the Muslims defeated the Franks at the Battle of Tours in 732.

This latter speculation was later fictionalized by L. Sprague de Camp in his cla.s.sic novella, "The Wheels of If," which imagined a modern lawyer from our world transported to the twentieth century of that one. That novella, along with de Camp's even more important novel, Lest Darkness Fall, in which an archaeologist is dropped back into the Rome of the sixth centuryA .D., and seeks to keep the Dark Ages from descending on Europe by propping up the Ostrogothic Kingdom of Italy against the resurgent Byzantine Empire and by improving technology, finished the job begun by Leinster's story and brought alternate-historical speculation into the orbit of science fiction.

In the years following World War II, a few writers followed de Camp's lead and produced thoughtful alternate histories of their own. H. Beam Piper's Paratime stories and Poul Anderson's tales of the Time Patrol (and, in a different vein, his stories collected in Operation Chaos, in which magic reappeared in the world as a technology around the beginning of the twentieth century) stand out among these.

For the centennial of the War Between the States, Pulitzer Prize winner MacKinlay Kantor wrote If the South Had Won the Civil War, an optimistic scenario in which the severed parts of our nation reunite in the 1960s. Also coming into prominence during the decades following the end of the Second World War were stories in which the Axis won, which have challenged stories of Confederate victories in the Civil War for popularity. Three of the best of the earlier ones were Sarban's The Sound of His Horn, C. M. Kornbluth's great novella, "Two Dooms," and Philip K. d.i.c.k's Hugo-winning novel, The Man in the High Castle .

In the 1960s, two Englishmen, John Brunner and Keith Roberts, produced stimulating alternate histories on a subject particularly relevant to British hearts: a successful invasion by the Spanish Armada. Brunner's Times Without Number examined why travel between different time lines doesn't happen more often, while Roberts' beautiful Pavane looked at, among other things, the consequences of slowing down technological growth (strictly speaking, Pavane isn't an alternate history, but a first cousin: a recursive future). At about the same time, Keith Laumer, in Worlds of the Imperium and its two sequels, did a first-rate job of combining alternate history with fast-moving adventure.

But alternate history really became a more prominent subgenre in the last two decades of the twentieth century. There are a couple of reasons for this. One is that, with our much greater knowledge of the true nature of the solar system, we have found that it looks much less inviting than it did a couple of generations ago. There are no ca.n.a.ls on Mars, and no Martians, either; nor are there oceans on Venus full of reptilian monsters. Before the s.p.a.ce probes went out, these were scientifically plausible speculations. No more; brute facts have killed such possibilities. Furthermore, more people trained in history have begun writing science fiction, and have naturally gravitated to areas with which they find themselves familiar: S. M. Stirling, with a law degree and an undergraduate degree in history; Susan Shwartz and Judith Tarr, both with doctorates in western medieval studies; and myself, with a doctorate in Byzantine history (a subject I was inspired to study, as I've said, by Lest Darkness Fall ).

Stirling's Draka universe, commencing with Marching Through Georgia, is as thoroughly unpleasant a place as any ever envisioned by an alternate historian, but, especially in Under the Yoke, alarmingly convincing as well. His more recent trilogy, beginning with Island in the Sea of Time, drops the entire island of Nantucket back to about 1250B .C. and examines the consequences with fine writing, splendid research, and careful logic.

Shwartz and Tarr have both combined fantasy and alternate history in intriguingly different ways. Shwartz's series that begins with Byzantium's Crown looks at a magical medieval world that might have sprung from Cleopatra's victory over Octavian, while Tarr's beautifully written the Hound and the Falcon trilogy and other succeeding books examine what the world might have been like if immortal elves were real rather than mythical.

My own book-length work includes Agent of Byzantium, set in a world where Muhammad did not found Islam; A Different Flesh, in which h.o.m.o erectus rather than American Indians populated the New World; A World of Difference, which makes the planet in Mars's...o...b..t different enough to support life; the Worldwar series, which imagines an alien invasion in 1942; The Guns of the South, in which time-traveling South Africans give Robert E. Lee AK-47s; and How Few Remain and the Great War books, which embroil an independent Confederacy and the United States of America in World War I.

In a slightly different vein, Kim Newman has imagined the Victorian age and the early years of this century controlled by vampires in Anno Dracula and The b.l.o.o.d.y Red Baron. The really frightening thing about the latter book is that the World War I he imagines is no bloodier than the one we really had. Newman's entertaining Back in the USSA looks at a Red revolution in the United States rather than Russia, with Al Capone in the role of Stalin.

And alternate history has not become the sole province of escaped history buffs. Aeros.p.a.ce engineer Stephen Baxter's Voyage looks at a journey to Mars in 1986 that might have happened had John Kennedy not been a.s.sa.s.sinated. This is hard science fiction at its best, as is Gregory Benford's award-winning Timescape, which touches on ecological disaster along with its main theme of communicating across time lines.

Nor has alternate history remained the sole province of science-fiction writers. Spymaster Len Deighton produced SS-GB, a chilling account of a n.a.z.i-occupied Britain. And journalist Robert Harris's Fatherland became an international best-seller-certainly a breakthrough for alternate history. Fatherland, another tale of Germany triumphant, is carefully researched; its princ.i.p.al flaw seems to be a conviction that the discovery of the Holocaust twenty years after the fact would be a world-shaking event rather than a nine days' wonder, if even that.

Several anthologies have also highlighted alternate history in recent years. Gregory Benford edited, with Martin H. Greenberg, Hitler Victorious and the four volumes t.i.tled What Might Have Been, which examined different ways in which the past might have changed. And the prolific Mike Resnick edited and wrote for a series of Alternate anthologies, including such t.i.tles as Alternate Kennedys and Alternate Tyrants. Alternate-history stories have found homes in magazines as diverse as Omni and a.n.a.log .

And there is a renewed interest in alternate history outside the confines of science fiction and fantasy. Articles on the topic have appeared in such mainstream publications as USA Today and American Heritage, and academic alternate histories, the parlor game of the 1930s, are respectable once again. Serious historians have played the game in two collections of essays edited by Kenneth Macksey, Invasion: The Alternate History of the German Invasion of England, July 1940 and The Hitler Options: Alternate Decisions of World War II. Peter Tsouras's recent Disaster at D-Day: The Germans Defeat the Allies, June 1944 and Gettysburg: An Alternate History recall, in their detail and fictional critical apparatus, Robert Sobel's cla.s.sic For Want of a Nail, which imagines a failed American Revolution and the subsequent 180 years of history from the perspective of a college history text.

The stories in this collection, in their quality and their variety, show where the field went during the last century. I have no doubt that, with so many talented writers wondering what might have been, we will continue to see many more fascinating, thought-provoking stories in the century just being born. The purpose of any good fiction, after all, is not to examine the created world alone, but to hold up that created world as a mirror to the reality we all experience. Alternate history gives us a fun-house mirror that lets us look at reality in ways we cannot get from any other type of story. That, to me, is its princ.i.p.al attraction-along with the joys of storytelling. Have fun!

KIM STANLEY ROBINSON.

Kim Stanley Robinson's monumental Mars trilogy (Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars)-a future history of the Red Planet from its colonization through its struggle for independence from Earth-has been hailed a modern cla.s.sic and acknowledged a landmark of twentieth-century science fiction. Robinson's first published story appeared in 1976, and since that time he has earned the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, and John W. Campbell Memorial Awards for his short fiction and novels. His first novel, The Wild Sh.o.r.e, published in 1984, produced two thematic sequels, The Gold Coast and Pacific Edge, which form the Orange County trilogy, about the future development of the California coast in the aftermath of nuclear holocaust. Robinson's other novels include The Memory of White-ness, A Short, Sharp Shock, and Antarctica, the story of a future Antarctica society threatened by ecological saboteurs. His short fiction has been collected in Escape from Kathmandu, Remaking History, and Down and Out in the Year 2000. His doctoral dissertation has been published as the critically acclaimed The Novels of Philip K. d.i.c.k.

THE LUCKY STRIKE.

Kim Stanley Robinson

War breeds strange pastimes. In July of 1945 on Tinian Island in the North Pacific, Captain Frank January had taken to piling pebble cairns on the crown of Mount La.s.so-one pebble for each B-29 takeoff, one cairn for each mission. The largest cairn had four hundred stones in it. It was a mindless pastime, but so was poker. The men of the 509th had played a million hands of poker, sitting in the shade of a palm around an upturned crate sweating in their skivvies, swearing and betting all their pay and cigarettes, playing hand after hand after hand, until the cards got so soft and dog-eared you could have used them for toilet paper. Captain January had gotten sick of it, and after he lit out for the hilltop a few times some of his crewmates started trailing him. When their pilot Jim Fitch joined them it became an official pastime, like throwing flares into the compound or going hunting for stray j.a.ps. What Captain January thought of the development he didn't say. The others grouped near Captain Fitch, who pa.s.sed around his battered flask. "Hey, January," Fitch called. "Come have a shot."

January wandered over and took the flask. Fitch laughed at his pebble. "Practicing your bombing up here, eh, Professor?"

"Yah," January said sullenly. Anyone who read more than the funnies was Professor to Fitch. Thirstily January knocked back some rum. He could drink it any way he pleased up here, out from under the eye of the group psychiatrist. He pa.s.sed the flask on to Lieutenant Matthews, their navigator.

"That's why he's the best," Matthews joked. "Always practicing."

Fitch laughed. "He's best because I make him be best, right, Professor?"

January frowned. Fitch was a bulky youth, thick-featured, pig-eyed-a thug, in January's opinion. The rest of the crew were all in their mid-twenties like Fitch, and they liked the captain's bossy roughhouse style. January, who was thirty-seven, didn't go for it. He wandered away, back to the cairn he had been building. From Mount La.s.so they had an overview of the whole island, from the harbor at Wall Street to the north field in Harlem. January had observed hundreds of B-29s roar off the four parallel runways of the north field and head for j.a.pan. The last quartet of this particular mission buzzed across the width of the island, and January dropped four more pebbles, aiming for crevices in the pile. One of them stuck nicely.

"There they are!" said Matthews. "They're on the taxiing strip."

January located the 509th's first plane. Today, the first of August, there was something more interesting to watch than the usual Superfortress parade. Word was out that General Le May wanted to take the 509th's mission away from it. Their commander Colonel Tibbets had gone and b.i.t.c.hed to Le May in person, and the general had agreed the mission was theirs, but on one condition: one of the general's men was to make a test flight with the 509th, to make sure they were fit for combat over j.a.pan. The general's man had arrived, and now he was down there in the strike plane, with Tibbets and the whole first team. January sidled back to his mates to view the takeoff with them.

"Why don't the strike plane have a name, though?" Haddock was saying.

Fitch said, "Lewis won't give it a name because it's not his plane, and he knows it." The others laughed. Lewis and his crew were naturally unpopular, being Tibbets' favorites.

"What do you think he'll do to the general's man?" Matthews asked.

The others laughed at the very idea. "He'll kill an engine at takeoff, I bet you anything," Fitch said. He pointed at the wrecked B-29s that marked the end of every runway, planes whose engines had given out on takeoff. "He'll want to show that he wouldn't go down if it happened to him."

" 'Course he wouldn't!" Matthews said.

"You hope," January said under his breath.

"They let those Wright engines out too soon," Haddock said seriously. "They keep busting under the takeoff load."

"Won't matter to the old bull," Matthews said. Then they all started in about Tibbets' flying ability, even Fitch. They all thought Tibbets was the greatest. January, on the other hand, liked Tibbets even less than he liked Fitch. That had started right after he was a.s.signed to the 509th. He had been told he was part of the most important group in the war, and then given a leave. In Vicksburg a couple of fliers just back from England had bought him a lot of whiskies, and since January had spent several months stationed near London they had talked for a good long time and gotten pretty drunk. The two were really curious about what January was up to now, but he had stayed vague on it and kept returning the talk to the blitz. He had been seeing an English nurse, for instance, whose flat had been bombed, family and neighbors killed.... But they had really wanted to know. So he had told them he was onto something special, and they had flipped out their badges and told him they were Army Intelligence, and that if he ever broke security like that again he'd be transferred to Alaska. It was a dirty trick. January had gone back to Wendover and told Tibbets so to his face, and Tibbets had turned red and threatened him some more. January despised him for that. The upshot was that January was effectively out of the war, because Tibbets really played his favorites. January wasn't sure he really minded, but during their year's training he had bombed better than ever, as a way of showing the old bull he was wrong to write January off. Every time their eyes had met it was clear what was going on. But Tibbets never backed off no matter how precise January's bombing got. Just thinking about it was enough to cause January to line up a pebble over an ant and drop it.

"Will you cut that out?" Fitch complained. "I swear you must hang from the ceiling when you take a s.h.i.+t so you can practice aiming for the toilet." The men laughed.

"Don't I bunk over you?" January asked. Then he pointed. "They're going."

Tibbets' plane had taxied to runway Baker. Fitch pa.s.sed the flask around again. The tropical sun beat on them, and the ocean surrounding the island blazed white. January put up a sweaty hand to aid the bill of his baseball cap.

The four props cut in hard, and the sleek Superfortress quickly trundled up to speed and roared down Baker. Three-quarters of the way down the strip the outside right prop feathered.

"Yow!" Fitch crowed. "I told you he'd do it!"

The plane nosed off the ground and slewed right, then pulled back on course to cheers from the four young men around January. January pointed again. "He's cut number three, too."

The inside right prop feathered, and now the plane was pulled up by the left wing only, while the two right props windmilled uselessly. "Holy smoke!" Haddock cried. "Ain't the old bull something?"

They whooped to see the plane's power, and Tibbets' nervy arrogance.

"By G.o.d, Le May's man will remember this flight," Fitch hooted. "Why, look at that! He's banking!"

Apparently taking off on two engines wasn't enough for Tibbets; he banked the plane right until it was standing on its dead wing, and it curved back toward Tinian.

Then the inside left engine feathered.

War tears at the imagination. For three years Frank January had kept his imagination trapped, refusing to give it any play whatsoever. The dangers threatening him, the effects of the bombs, the fate of the other partic.i.p.ants in the war, he had refused to think about any of it. But the war tore at his control. That English nurse's flat. The missions over the Ruhr. The bomber just below him blown apart by flak. And then there had been a year in Utah, and the viselike grip that he had once kept on his imagination had slipped away.

So when he saw the number two prop feather, his heart gave a little jump against his sternum and helplessly he was up there with Ferebee, the first team bombardier. He would be looking over the pilots' shoulders....

"Only one engine?" Fitch said.

"That one's for real," January said harshly. Despite himself he saw panic in the c.o.c.kpit, the frantic rush to power the two right engines. The plane was dropping fast and Tibbets leveled it off, leaving them on a course back toward the island. The two right props spun, blurred to a s.h.i.+mmer. January held his breath. They needed more lift; Tibbets was trying to pull it over the island. Maybe he was trying for the short runway on the south half of the island.

But Tinian was too tall, the plane too heavy. It roared right into the jungle above the beach, where 42nd Street met their East River. It exploded in a bloom of fire. By the time the sound of the explosion struck them they knew no one in the plane had survived.

Black smoke towered into white sky. In the shocked silence on Mount La.s.so insects buzzed and creaked. The air left January's lungs with a gulp. He had been with Ferebee there at the end, he had heard the desperate shouts, seen the last green rush, been stunned by the dentist-drill-all-over pain of the impact.

"Oh my G.o.d," Fitch was saying. "Oh my G.o.d." Matthews was sitting. January picked up the flask, tossed it at Fitch.

"C-come on," he stuttered. He hadn't stuttered since he was sixteen. He led the others in a rush down the hill. When they got to Broadway a jeep careened toward them and skidded to a halt. It was Colonel Scholes, the old bull's exec. "What happened?"

Fitch told him.

"Those d.a.m.ned Wrights," Scholes said as the men piled in. This time one had failed at just the wrong moment; some welder stateside had kept flame to metal a second less than usual-or something equally minor, equally trivial-and that had made all the difference.

They left the jeep at 42nd and Broadway and hiked east over a narrow track to the sh.o.r.e. A fairly large circle of trees was burning. The fire trucks were already there.

Scholes stood beside January, his expression bleak. "That was the whole first team," he said.

"I know," said January. He was still in shock, in imagination crushed, incinerated, destroyed. Once as a kid he had tied sheets to his arms and waist, jumped off the roof and landed right on his chest; this felt like that had. He had no way of knowing what would come of this crash, but he had a suspicion that he had indeed smacked into something hard.

Scholes shook his head. A half hour had pa.s.sed, the fire was nearly out. January's four mates were over chattering with the Seabees. "He was going to name the plane after his mother," Scholes said to the ground. "He told me that just this morning. He was going to call it Enola Gay ."

At night the jungle breathed, and its hot wet breath washed over the 509th's compound. January stood in the doorway of his Quonset barracks hoping for a real breeze. No poker tonight. Voices were hushed, faces solemn. Some of the men had helped box up the dead crew's gear. Now most lay on their bunks. January gave up on the breeze, climbed onto his top bunk to stare at the ceiling.

He observed the corrugated arch over him. Cricketsong sawed through his thoughts. Below him a rapid conversation was being carried on in guilty undertones, Fitch at its center.

"January is the best bombardier left," he said. "And I'm as good as Lewis was."

"But so is Sweeney," Matthews said. "And he's in with Scholes."

They were figuring out who would take over the strike. January scowled. Tibbets and the rest were less than twelve hours dead, and they were squabbling over who would replace them.

January grabbed a s.h.i.+rt, rolled off his bunk, put the s.h.i.+rt on.

"Hey, Professor," Fitch said. "Where you going?"

"Out."

Though midnight was near it was still sweltering. Crickets shut up as he walked by, started again behind him. He lit a cigarette. In the dark the MPs patrolling their fenced-in compound were like pairs of walking armbands. The 509th, prisoners in their own army. Fliers from other groups had taken to throwing rocks over the fence. Forcefully January expelled smoke, as if he could expel his disgust with it. They were only kids, he told himself. Their minds had been shaped in the war, by the war, and for the war. They knew you couldn't mourn the dead for long; carry around a load like that and your own engines might fail. That was all right with January. It was an att.i.tude that Tibbets had helped to form, so it was what he deserved. Tibbets would want to be forgotten in favor of the mission, all he had lived for was to drop the gimmick on the j.a.ps, he was oblivious to anything else, men, wife, family, anything.

So it wasn't the lack of feeling in his mates that bothered January. And it was natural of them to want to fly the strike they had been training a year for. Natural, that is, if you were a kid with a mind shaped by fanatics like Tibbets, shaped to take orders and never imagine consequences. But January was not a kid, and he wasn't going to let men like Tibbets do a thing to his mind. And the gimmick... the gimmick was not natural. A chemical bomb of some sort, he guessed. Against the Geneva Convention. He stubbed his cigarette against the sole of his sneaker, tossed the b.u.t.t over the fence. The tropical night breathed over him. He had a headache.

For months now he had been sure he would never fly a strike. The dislike Tibbets and he had exchanged in their looks (January was acutely aware of looks) had been real and strong. Tibbets had understood that January's record of pinpoint accuracy in the runs over the Salton Sea had been a way of showing contempt, a way of saying you can't get rid of me even though you hate me and I hate you. The record had forced Tibbets to keep January on one of the four second-string teams, but with the fuss they were making over the gimmick January had figured that would be far enough down the ladder to keep him out of things.

Now he wasn't so sure. Tibbets was dead. He lit another cigarette, found his hand shaking. The Camel tasted bitter. He threw it over the fence at a receding armband, and regretted it instantly. A waste. He went back inside.

Before climbing onto his bunk he got a paperback out of his footlocker. "Hey, Professor, what you reading now?" Fitch said, grinning.

January showed him the blue cover. Winter's Tales, by an Isak Dinesen. Fitch examined the little wartime edition. "Pretty racy, eh?"