Alternative Histories
Thursday, July 10th, 2003 21:40![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kittiwakeI'm currently reading "The Difference Engine", which is set in an alternate Victorian England in 1855, where technological progress has increased up due to Charles Babbages's Difference engine (the first computer) being a success. The split with our history appears to have occurred after the Napoleonic Wars, as Wellington still became Prime Minister, but by the time of the story he had been assassinated and was remembered as a villain rather than a hero.
Science and technology rule in this England, they already have steam powered cars (although horse-drawn vehicles are also in use) and the meritocratic Industrial Radical party is in power, with Lord Byron as its leader (which is odd really, as in our world he was sympathetic to the Luddites and his maiden-speech in the House of Lords was in support of the Nottingham cloth-workers who were being put out of work due to the increased mechanisation of the rag trade ). Ah - I've just got to the part where they mention Byron's maiden speech, which they have to explain away (rather feebly) as being in keeping with what is known of his personality, since it happened before the date their world split from ours.
Seeing how the lives of historical figures such as Byron differ is one of the most interesting things about reading Alternative Histories. In this book, Disraeli is still a journalist and romantic novelist rather than a politician, and Keats has given up poetry in favour of clacking (computer programming).
The interesting thing for an author must be that they can change one thing in history, and let their imagination roam about how the ripples spread out from that change. I once read an alternative history story in which Genghis Khan was captured by slavers as a boy, sold to the Venetians and became a monk! Unfortunately I can't remember its name or who wrote it. I loved Joan Aiken's alternate histories as a child, which were also set in the 19th century, although her version of was one in which the Stuarts were still on the throne and it was Hanoverian plotters who were fomenting rebellion on behalf of the 'king over the water'. When I first read them I didn't know that they were alternative histories, although I was suspicious about the wolves in the forests in "The Wolves of Willoughby Chase", as I was sure that there were no wolves left in Britain by the 19th century.
If I were to write an alternate history, it would be about 1066. What would have happened if Duke William had landed in Sussex before Harald Hardrada landed in Yorkshire? If King Harold had beaten the Normans at Hastings, then marched his tired army northwards and lost the battle of Stamford Bridge, would modern England be a Scandinavian country? Would the United Kingdom ever have come into existence?
Or maybe I would set it a couple of centuries earlier. If King Alfred hadn't managed to unite the English kingdoms in the fight against the Danes, maybe England wouldn't have become one country until much later (the German & Italian kingdoms didn't merge until as late as the nineteenth century). So, what might have happened then? No British Empire; North American & the Caribbean settled by Spain & Portugal, except maybe for a French-dominated Canada; Spanish as the lingua franca of the modern world instead of English; India controlled by the Russians if there had been no Great Game in Central Asia; someone else (maybe the Dutch) discovering Australia & New Zealand.
NB: I went to an exhibition about Babbage at the Science Museum once, which featured a full-size model of his difference engine. His design was sound and the only reason it didn't work is that the manufacturing techniques of the time weren't able to produce components with enough precision. It also mentioned how punch cards were first used on Jacquard looms to control the weaving of complicated patterns.
Science and technology rule in this England, they already have steam powered cars (although horse-drawn vehicles are also in use) and the meritocratic Industrial Radical party is in power, with Lord Byron as its leader (which is odd really, as in our world he was sympathetic to the Luddites and his maiden-speech in the House of Lords was in support of the Nottingham cloth-workers who were being put out of work due to the increased mechanisation of the rag trade ). Ah - I've just got to the part where they mention Byron's maiden speech, which they have to explain away (rather feebly) as being in keeping with what is known of his personality, since it happened before the date their world split from ours.
Seeing how the lives of historical figures such as Byron differ is one of the most interesting things about reading Alternative Histories. In this book, Disraeli is still a journalist and romantic novelist rather than a politician, and Keats has given up poetry in favour of clacking (computer programming).
The interesting thing for an author must be that they can change one thing in history, and let their imagination roam about how the ripples spread out from that change. I once read an alternative history story in which Genghis Khan was captured by slavers as a boy, sold to the Venetians and became a monk! Unfortunately I can't remember its name or who wrote it. I loved Joan Aiken's alternate histories as a child, which were also set in the 19th century, although her version of was one in which the Stuarts were still on the throne and it was Hanoverian plotters who were fomenting rebellion on behalf of the 'king over the water'. When I first read them I didn't know that they were alternative histories, although I was suspicious about the wolves in the forests in "The Wolves of Willoughby Chase", as I was sure that there were no wolves left in Britain by the 19th century.
If I were to write an alternate history, it would be about 1066. What would have happened if Duke William had landed in Sussex before Harald Hardrada landed in Yorkshire? If King Harold had beaten the Normans at Hastings, then marched his tired army northwards and lost the battle of Stamford Bridge, would modern England be a Scandinavian country? Would the United Kingdom ever have come into existence?
Or maybe I would set it a couple of centuries earlier. If King Alfred hadn't managed to unite the English kingdoms in the fight against the Danes, maybe England wouldn't have become one country until much later (the German & Italian kingdoms didn't merge until as late as the nineteenth century). So, what might have happened then? No British Empire; North American & the Caribbean settled by Spain & Portugal, except maybe for a French-dominated Canada; Spanish as the lingua franca of the modern world instead of English; India controlled by the Russians if there had been no Great Game in Central Asia; someone else (maybe the Dutch) discovering Australia & New Zealand.
NB: I went to an exhibition about Babbage at the Science Museum once, which featured a full-size model of his difference engine. His design was sound and the only reason it didn't work is that the manufacturing techniques of the time weren't able to produce components with enough precision. It also mentioned how punch cards were first used on Jacquard looms to control the weaving of complicated patterns.
