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Path: bloom-beacon.mit.edu!hookup!swrinde!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!ames!newsfeed.gsfc.nasa.gov!osiris.giss.nasa.gov!nirgal.giss.nasa.gov!user From: pcrxs@nasagiss.giss.nasa.gov (Robert B. Schmunk) Newsgroups: alt.history.what-if,alt.answers,news.answers Subject: alt.history.what-if FAQ Followup-To: alt.history.what-if Date: Fri, 08 Apr 1994 10:11:14 -0500 Organization: NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, NYC Lines: 471 Approved: news-answers-request@MIT.Edu Distribution: world Message-ID: <pcrxs-080494101114@nirgal.giss.nasa.gov> Reply-To: pcrxs@nasagiss.giss.nasa.gov NNTP-Posting-Host: nirgal.giss.nasa.gov Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Summary: Frequently asked questions and answers for alt.history.what-if, a newsgroup which debates such questions as "What if the South won the Civil War", "What if there were no Internet", etc. Xref: bloom-beacon.mit.edu alt.history.what-if:5011 alt.answers:2366 news.answers:17831 Archive-name: history/what-if Last updated: 6 April 1994 Version: 1.01 Posting-Frequency: Bi-weekly Frequently Asked Questions in alt.history.what-if This list is maintained by R.B. Schmunk (pcrxs@nasagiss.giss.nasa.gov). It is also Copyright 1994 R.B. Schmunk. It may be freely distributed electronically provided this copyright notice is attached. Corrections and additions should be mailed directly to me, rather than posted to the newsgroup, if you want to guarantee their consideration. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 0. Recent changes Genl: Word wrap problem with my newsreader (hopefully) fixed. Q 6: Corrected a citation. Q 9: Altered availability description of anthologies. Q 10: Corrected some grammar. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Table of Contents 0. Recent Changes 1. Introduction 2. What is alternate history? 3. Are there other names for alternate history? a. Alternative history b. Uchronia c. Allohistory d. Counterfactuals 4. What is secret history? Why isn't it alternate history? 5. Are there any rules about posting to alt.history.what-if? 6. What are the most common what-ifs in literature? * 7. Can anybody recommend a good book about alternate history? 8. Is there an (on-line) alternate history book list? 9. What alternate histories should I read? * 10. What other newsgroups are good for historical discussion? * 11. Why not soc.history.what-if? * Significant modification to this entry ** New entry ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 1. Introduction alt.history.what-if is a newsgroup for the discussion of history divergent from that of our own. A very common example thread would be "What if the South won the Civil War?" The literary genre where most such stories are lumped is science fiction, but most discussion in this newsgroup tends toward historical debate rather than toward discussing published fiction. A typical thread might begin with someone stating that if such-and-such an event had happened differently then certain other events would follow and the world today would be different in certain ways. Follow-ups generally advance arguments for or against the premise. Although this is a low-volume newsgroup, if you are new to the net, please read the questions/answers below, plus postings to the newsgroup news.announce.newusers, in order to learn a bit about appropriate "netiquette" in this newsgroup and elsewhere. It will make life somewhat easier for all of us, and you're more likely to get polite responses to the questions you do ask. And even though the following are re-stated constantly on the net, keep in mind that: There are real people at the other end of the wire leading out of your computer. Please be as polite to them as you would like them to be to you, especially if you should happen to meet them face-to-face. Keep an eye out for un-marked humor and irony. ASCII text does not ably convey the tone/mood in which a posting may have been written, and flame- wars can result from simple misinterpretations. Use of the smiley, :-), to indicate humor is encouraged but not all netters use it. Propagation of postings through the net follows odd paths. It may take a couple days for your posting to reach some remote sites, and it's not uncommon for follow-up postings to reach places before the original. Furthermore, if you are posting a question, please wait a couple days before getting upset about the lack of an answer. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 2. What is alternate history? "Alternate history" essays/stories are often referred to as the "What ifs" of history. A typical example is to ask, "What if the South won the Civil War?" Places where you will frequently find such questions asked are in science fiction literature, wargaming magazines and stuffy historical journals. However, it can also be occasionally found in such mainstream publications as Time magazine or Entertainment Weekly. In science fiction, alternate histories are a distinct subset of parallel worlds and alternate universe stories, in which some emphasis has been put on an historical element. In case those terms are meaningless to you, I should point out that an alternate world may have no historical or physical similarity to our own. A typical example is for someone in our world to be mysteriously transported to a "magical" alternate. Alternate history fiction, on the other hand, requires that the world described be historically the same as ours up to some point prior to when the author wrote the story, after which things begin to differ. Arguably, any wargame which does not precisely duplicate the original battle(s) could be called an alternate history, but often the term is reserved for battles that never occurred, such as playing out the German invasion of England in 1940. Magazine articles usually provide the information necessary for setting up such a scenario (i.e., troop availability and strengths, etc.) but generally do not advance it beyond the starting point. In history journals, alternate history, or "counterfactuals", is not always treated with the greatest of respect, and it should be noted that many historians will only state things that *might* or *probably* would have followed the historical divergence point in question. This is particularly common in afterwords to biographical texts (i.e., "What if Frederick had been Kaiser longer than 91 days? Well, Germany *might* have been a more liberal state in the 1910s."). When historians do make a serious attempt at treating alternate history, they can be surprisingly ignorant of its use in science fiction (e.g., the introduction to Polsby, Nelson W. (ed.), WHAT IF? EXPLORATIONS IN SOCIAL-SCIENCE FICTION [Lewis 1982]). ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 3. Are there other names for alternate history? 3.a. Alternative history As noted by sf author Brian Stableford in "An Introduction to Alternate Worlds", in Alternate Worlds #1: "Some years ago I used the term 'alternate worlds' in front of Brian Aldiss, who took me to task for it. 'They should be called alternative worlds', he said. 'Calling them alternate worlds makes it sound as if they somehow take turns.'" The same argument could be applied to alternate/alternative histories, and indeed, when Charles G. Waugh & Martin H. Greenberg decided to put together a genre-defining anthology, they chose the title ALTERNATIVE HISTORIES: ELEVEN STORIES OF THE WORLD AS IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN (Garland 1986). 3.b. Uchronia "Uchronie, n.f. ... Utopie appliquee a l'histoire; l'histoire refaite logiquement telle qu'elle aurait pu etre." Nouveau Larousse Illustre (1913) <<Utopia, n. ... Utopia applied to history; history refashioned as it might have been.>> The term "uchronie", or "uchronia", was apparently first used by Charles Renouvier in an anonymous article in REVUE PHILOSOPHIQUE ET RELIGIEUSE in 1857, and later in the title of his 1876 book, UCHRONIE (L'UTOPIE DANS L'HISTOIRE), ESQUISSE HISTORIQUE APOCRYPHE DU DEVELOPMENT DE LA CIVILISATION EUROPEENNE TEL QU'IL N'A PAS ETE, TEL QU'IL AURAIT PU ETRE (Bureau de la Critique Philosophique 1876; Alcan 1901; Artheme 1919; Fayard 1988), which translates as UCHRONIA (UTOPIA IN HISTORY), AN APOCRYPHAL SKETCH OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION NOT AS IT WAS BUT AS IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN. "Uchronie" is still the preferred term in French for alternate history literature. 3.c. Allohistory "Allohistory" literally means "other history" and is the term preferred by Gordon B. Chamberlain in his essay "Allohistory in science fiction", in ALTERNATIVE HISTORIES (eds. Waugh & Greenberg) (Garland 1986), pp. 281-300. As noted by Chamberlain, "In English uchronia and uchronian will do for the thing described, by analogy with utopia; but for the theoretical discipline and the literary genre uchronics seems uncouth, uchronian romance wordy, metahistory and parahistory ambiguous. Even alternative history has been used to mean something else (a sort of social-commentary sf). Allohistory is short, ambiguous, and used here." [The maintainer of this FAQ notes that he also prefers the term "allohistory", but since nobody knows what he means when he uses it, he generally uses "alternate history".] 3.d. Counterfactuals "Counterfactuals" appears to be the preferred term of professional historians and economists. Despite the fact that so much of history is interpreting past writings, some historians will assert that theirs is an entirely factual field. Thus, examination of something that didn't happen is counterfactual. Despite the fact the study of why something didn't happen can be useful and interesting, there are historians that look at counterfactuals with something less than favor. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 4. What is secret history? Why isn't it alternate history? Often confused with alternate history, a "secret history" story involves the revelation that something that we know about the past is in fact untrue. Nevertheless, history itself is unchanged, and the present is certainly still the present. Why what we know is untrue may vary, but in many secret history stories, there's some sort of a conspiracy at work to hide the truth from the masses. Some examples are: Corley, Edwin, THE JESUS FACTOR In which the atomic-bomb dropped at Hiroshima fizzled. Flynn, Michael, IN THE COUNTRY OF THE BLIND In which Charles Babbage really did complete his computer. Poyer, David, VENGEANCE 10 In which Nazi scientists at Peenemunde build a moon rocket. These are items that fit a fairly strict definition of secret history, but if one applies a loose definition, virtually any historical fiction could fit. Of course, they might also fit a loose definition of alternate history, too. The above-mentioned books are all fiction, and thus a related side-issue is whether a purportedly non-fiction book can also be secret history. A typical example might be Baigent et al.'s HOLY BLOOD, HOLY GRAIL, or even one of the Von Daniken books. This is a can of worms you'll have to sort out for yourself. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 5. Are there any rules about posting to alt.history.what-if? Since alt.history.what-if is an un-moderated newsgroup, there are no enforceable rules. However, please keep the following in mind: a) The word "history" appears in the newsgroup name. Thus, questions like "What if Luke had not destroyed the Death Star?" are not appropriate. There's likely a more appropriate newsgroup for such questions. b) The general feeling is that the newsgroup is for discussing history that has already happened. Questions such as "What if Bill Clinton was assassinated tomorrow?" have been asked and debated, and will probably continue to come up. Such questions are *probably* inappropriate to this newsgroup, but until someone creates alt.history.future, we're not going to hunt you down for asking them. (Of course, you could try talk.politics.) c) There is no official style guide. The level of historical knowledge possessed by posters to this newsgroup varies, and many new subscribers sometimes feel intimidated by the detail in some postings. Don't let that prevent you from posting. Just keep in mind: The only "rule" that seems to have general agreement is that it is impolite to ask a question and then not to provide some (partial) answer of your own. An example of such rudeness is "What if the South won the Civil War? Jump on it, dudes. I'll sit back and read your answers." In advancing a timeline that might result from a historical divergence, don't be afraid to explain why you think certain things would happen. Provide some historical background rather than just state that such-and- such would happen, followed by a-later-event and then something-even- later. Be prepared to defend your assertions; i.e., don't state something is true without being able to provide evidence. Some "common knowledge" about the past is actually untrue (whether it be because of television, the blandness of grade school textbooks, or myth-makers such as Parson Weems), and posters to this newsgroup are more than willing to tell you so. For example, Spanish brutality and decadence is believed to have been peculiarly prevalent about the time of the Inquisition and of Columbus (the so-called "black legend"), but turns out to have been much exaggerated and derives from anti-Spanish propaganda of the time (Powell, TREE OF HATE [Basic Books 1971]). ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 6. What are the most common what-ifs in literature? Without making an actual count, it seems safe to accept the assertion by Gordon B. Chamberlain (see 3.c above) that: "For the winner's plate it is Hitler's war first, the rest nowhere; for place money, surviving Roman Empires apparently nosed out victorious Napoleons, Lees, and Montezumas and defeated Revolutions and Reformations. Barring the weak showing of World War I and the near-absence of classical Greece and Israel [...], the finish reflects the sort of Sellers-and-Yeatman history that Anglo-Americans remember from school [...]" As Chamberlain's essay was printed in 1986, he missed the recent explosion in stories devolving from November 22, 1963, and the rise in interest in the American Civil War created by Ken Burns 1990 PBS program. However, WW2 holds a comfortable enough lead that it will be some time before alternative Kennedys and Gettysburgs overtake it. However, Evelyn Leeper (ecl@mtgpfs1.mt.att.com) points out a count made by alternate history buff Mark Keller at an sf con in 1991: "'Histories: The Way We Weren't' panel at Boskone 28. Mark Keller said that the most common change points were (in English-language science fiction, anyway) was 'What if Germany (Japan) had won World War II?' (over a hundred that he found). The next most popular was 'What if the South had won the Civil War?' (about eighty). Third was 'What if the Spanish Armada hadn't been defeated?' The most popular in French was 'What if Napoleon had not been defeated?' which Keller said usually resulted in a better world than we have, while most American alternate histories show things as being worse. When someone in the audience asked why, Mark Olson replied, 'We look at this as the best of all possible worlds, but the French know it isn't, because most people speak English.'" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 7. Can anybody recommend a good book about alternate history? About alternate history itself? There are a number of anthologies, but only one also includes non-fiction material, to wit an essay and a bibliography. It is: Waugh, Charles, G., & Martin H. Greenberg (eds), ALTERNATIVE HISTORIES: ELEVEN STORIES OF THE WORLD AS IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN (Garland 1986) Unhappily, the book was only published in hardback and can be difficult to find. The most likely place you'll locate it is at a reasonably well- stocked public or university library. There is also word that sf author Brad Linaweaver (author of MOON OF ICE) is involved in the production of an all-non-fiction book about alternate history which might be published in late 1995. Rumors of essays by such luminaries as Gregory Benford and Harry Turtledove abound. Otherwise, the most recommendable alternate history book is the first, and probably still the best, alternate history anthology: Squire, J.C. (ed), IF IT HAD HAPPENED OTHERWISE: LAPSES INTO IMAGINARY HISTORY (Longmans, Green 1931; exp Sidgwick & Jackson 1972; St. Martin's 1974); rev as IF: OR, HISTORY REWRITTEN (Viking 1931; Kennikat 1964) This, too, is hard to find and you'll certainly have to try a library. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 8. Is there an (on-line) alternate history book list? But of course, and the maintainer of this FAQ list maintains it. It is posted to this newsgroup and to rec.arts.sf.written and news.answers in mid-January, April, July and October. If you would like a copy and can't wait until the next posting, it's available in a number of archives. The following sites are fairly reliable about carrying the latest version. To get the list all in one piece, try: ftp://gandalf.rutgers.edu/pub/sfl/alternate-histories.txt Warning: in early 1994, the book list ran about 350 kbytes, so be cautious downloading from gandalf if you have limited disk space. Europeans may want to instead try: ftp://ftp.lysator.liu.se/pub/sf-texts/lists/Alternate_History_v* The * indicates a version number, as lysator keeps some non-current copies of the list around. Take a look in the directory and grab the copy with the highest version number. To get the list in eight smaller chunks, try: ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet/news.answers/sf/alt_history/part* The * indicates a section number, as the book list is broken up when posted to Usenet and then archived at rtfm. For Web addicts who would like to look at the list using NCSA Mosaic, try: http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/hypertext/faq/usenet/sf/alt_history/top.html This last version is the same as that at rtfm, broken down into parts, and the http URL above is an index to them. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 9. What alternate histories should I read? Everyone has different tastes, but the most widely acknowledged classics of the field apparently are: de Camp, L. Sprague, LEST DARKNESS FALL (Ballantine 1949, etc); exp of "Lest Darkness Fall", in Unknown Dec 1939 Dick, Philip K., THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE (Putnam's 1962, etc) Garrett, Randall, LORD DARCY (SFBC 1983); omnibus of MURDER AND MAGIC (Ace 1979); TOO MANY MAGICIANS (Doubleday 1967, etc); and LORD DARCY INVESTIGATES (Ace 1981) Moore, Ward, BRING THE JUBILEE (Farrar, Straus & Young 1953; etc); exp of "Bring the Jubilee", in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction Nov 1952 Piper, H. Beam, LORD KALVAN OF OTHERWHEN (Ace 1965, etc; vt GUNPOWDER GOD, Sphere 1978); rev of "Gunpowder God", in Analog Nov 1964 and "Down Styphon", in Analog Nov 1965 Roberts, Keith, PAVANE (Hart-Davis 1968; Ace 1968; etc) Spinrad, Norman, THE IRON DREAM (Avon 1972, etc) As these go in and out of print, they can be difficult to find unless you have a friend with a personal library of sf classics. Some more recent novels (not necessarily as good as the above) that earned some attention and which are fairly easy to find are: Deighton, Len, SS-GB: NAZI-OCCUPIED BRITAIN 1941 (Cape 1978, etc) Evans, Christopher, AZTEC CENTURY (Gollancz 1993) Harris, Robert, FATHERLAND (Hutchinson 1992, etc) Hogan, James P., THE PROTEUS OPERATION (Bantam 1985) Turtledove, Harry, THE GUNS OF THE SOUTH: A NOVEL OF THE CIVIL WAR (Ballantine 1992) Some decent collections of alternate history short stories which you may want to sample (besides those mentioned in question 7) are: Adams, Robert, Martin H. Greenberg & Pamela Crippen Adams (eds), ROBERT ADAMS' BOOK OF ALTERNATE WORLDS (NAL/Signet 1987) Benford, Gregory, & Martin H. Greenberg (eds), HITLER VICTORIOUS: ELEVEN STORIES OF THE GERMAN VICTORY IN WORLD WAR II (Garland 1986; Berkley 1987) Benford, Gregory, & Martin H. Greenberg (eds), WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN? VOLUME 1: ALTERNATE EMPIRES (Bantam 1989) Benford, Gregory, & Martin H. Greenberg (eds), WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN? VOLUME 2: ALTERNATE HEROES (Bantam 1990) Benford, Gregory, & Martin H. Greenberg (eds), WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN? VOLUME 3: ALTERNATE WARS (Bantam 1991) Resnick, Mike (ed), ALTERNATE KENNEDYS (Tor 1992) Resnick, Mike (ed), ALTERNATE PRESIDENTS (Tor 1992) Except for the Resnick, retail editions of these books are out-of-print and you'll probably have to scour used bookstores to find them. However, the WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN books are available via the Science Fiction Book Club. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 10. What other newsgroups are good for historical discussion? At one time, we smuggly believed that the quality of historical discussion in alt.history.what-if was better than in soc.history, primarily because that newsgroup was wracked by cross-posting, flame wars, etc., mostly diverging from "discussion" about the Jewish Holocaust during World War II and the history of anti-Armenian activity in Turkey and the Soviet Union. However, to filter and/or eliminate such noise, soc.history.moderated was recently (mid-March 1994) created, and sane and intelligent discussion is again available. Note: there are some newsgroups devoted to certain historical events or periods (e.g., World War II), often in the alt.* heirarchy. My newsserver doesn't carry them, so I can't provide a comprehensive list. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 11. Why not soc.history.what-if? Because nobody's done an official RFD, "Request for Discussion", yet. rbs -- Robert B. Schmunk NASA/Goddard Institute, 2880 Broadway, New York, NY 10025 USA