An Alternative History Novel Primer

finally got to see the Ridley Scott series Man in the High Castle so I'm reblogging my article on alternative history novels from the Guardian. I'm not attempting to be comprehensive here, it's more of a trawl through some of my favourites...
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With Ridley Scott’s adaptation of The Man In The High Castle on Amazon and SS GB on the BBC we can safely say that the alternative history genre is hotter than ever. The Man In The High Castle was not the first alternative history novel, nor even the first Nazis-win-the-war novel but it is still probably the most influential book in the genre. Anyone who likes historical fiction should be able to enjoy good counter-factual scenarios. It’s fun imagining how things could have been otherwise. As Ray Bradbury demonstrated in ‘A Sound of Thunder’, one tiny change in the past could have momentous consequences in the future. A “Butterfly Moment” (from the so called butterfly-effect) is the point from which our timeline diverges from the AH timeline. Structuralist historians tend to discount such moments but clearly if Franz Ferdinand’s driver had driven straight on instead of turning right the entire history of the twentieth century would have been different.

           Of course the most successful AH novels are good novels per se with interesting well rounded characters and a plot that moves. Some writers such as Harry Turtledove, SM Sterling, Jasper Fforde and Ken Flint have spent nearly their entire careers writing alternative histories, others such as Kingsley Amis, Iain Banks, Stephen Fry, Stephen King, Kim Stanley Robinson and Philip Roth have merely dabbled in the genre. Wikipedia has compiled a rather daunting list of alternative history novels, here but if that’s too much to contemplate you could do worse than try some of the following:

The first real AH best seller was L Sprague De Camp’s 1939 novel Lest Darkness Fall in which a modern time traveller attempts to prevent the collapse of the Western Roman Empire by introducing steam engines, pencils, double entry book keeping and other exciting innovations.

World War 2 and its aftermath really got the AH genre going in earnest. Spawning many copycats/homages such as Fatherland, SS-GB, The Plot Against America, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, etc. The Man In The High Castle by Philip K Dick is still the best what-if-the-Axis-had-won novel. The butterfly moment was the successful assassination of Franklin Roosevelt in 1934. Set in the early 1960’s the victorious Germans and Japanese have divided North America between them. Juliana Frink, a judo instructor, discovers that there is a resistance movement to the Axis which has been inspired by a novelist called Hawthorne Abendsen. Abendsen, with the help of the Chinese book of prophecy, the I Ching, has written an alternative history novel called ‘The Grasshopper Lies Heavy’ set in a world in which the Nazis lost the war. Subtle, menacing and utterly brilliant this is Philip K Dick’s masterpiece. In a nice touch of crazy Dick believed that he had only dictated the novel which had really been written by the I Ching to prove the existence of other Earths.

Directly inspired by Dick’s novel, The Alteration by Kingsley Amis, takes place in a 1970’s England where the Reformation never happened and where the all powerful Catholic Church is in a cold war with the Ottoman Empire. A talented boy chorister is forced to become a castrato to preserve his beautiful voice, but in so doing his gift as a composer is lost. (Amis following Nietzsche believed that sex lay behind all great art.) The fragmented and weak resistance to the church militant is motivated by a novel called ‘The Man In The High Castle’ authored by a certain Philip K Dick who dares to imagine a world in which the Reformation triumphed. Look out for odd cameos from Harold Wilson, Michael Foot and Tony Benn in this neglected tour de force.

The Alteration incorporates some elements of the steam-punk genre, one of the most entertaining of the AH sub-genres. The who-invented-steam-punk debate is a surprisingly vitriolic one that I shall neatly sidestep here, instead I’ll briefly draw your attention to some of the best steam-punk authors. Michael Moorcock and K W Jeter really got things going in the late 1970’s and by 1990 William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s wonderful The Difference Engine saw steam-punk reach its maturity with a novel about the brilliant Ada Lovelace (Byron’s daughter), Charles Babbage and a mechanical computer that achieves sentience Terminator style. Other great books in this oeuvre are Leviathan by Scott Westerfield, Boneshaker by Cherie Priest, Mark Hodder’s The Strange Affair Of Spring Heeled Jack (which contains a  very clever butterfly moment) and Neal Stephenson’s fabulously detailed Baroque Cycle.

I’m not sure that books that contain magic really count as AH novels as the butterfly moment is somewhat ill-defined, however if you want to stretch a point Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell and JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series could be seen as alternative histories of the Napoleonic Wars and Britain in the 1990s/early 2000’s respectively. The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August the very impressive debut novel by Claire North is an interesting spin on butterfly-wing tinkering over multiple lives within the same time-line.  

What about some big really big canvas AH novels? Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Years of Rice and Salt takes place in a Europe that has been utterly devastated by the Black Death and is being repopulated by Muslims from the south and Chinese from the west. The world gets divided up between China and Islam and a dazzlingly imagined alternative Middle Ages is the result. West of Eden by Harry Harrison takes alternative history as far back as anyone ever has attempted, imaging what would have happened if the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs at Chicxulub and of course Philip Pullman's universe keeps expanding with his new Book of Dust...
             Anyway, I hope that you have enjoyed this little run through the AH genre and that I’ve given you some ideas for future reading... 

The Invention of Lying

The premise of The Invention of Lying is that no one on Earth is able to lie, no one, that is, until Ricky Gervais discovers his ability to do so and exploits it for his own ends, rather in the way Bill Murray exploits his immortality in the world of Groundhog Day. The difference between Groundhog Day and The Invention of Lying however is the difference between Dr Strangelove and Fail Safe - both operate from a similar conceit but one transcends the conceit to become a cinematic masterpiece for the ages and the other, er, doesn’t.
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Apart from the fibbing deficiency, the Earth of The Invention of Lying is very similar, in fact, identical to our own. Ricky Gervais works for a company producing non fiction historical films (lying also extends to pretending so there are no jokes or stories either) until he gets fired for reasons that aren’t particularly clear. It’s also not clear how Napoleon came to exist - they mention a recent film on the Little Corsican’s career - when lying isn’t possible (as I’m sure you’re aware many of Napoleon’s victories were won through deception); in fact it made me wonder how any part of our culture could possibly be remotely similar to the world of the film. Gervais obviously hasn’t read Ray Bradbury’s classic A Sound of Thunder or even watched The Simpsons Season 6 Treehouse of Horror episode. Change one thing in the past and everything changes: if man couldn’t lie from the dawn of time the world would be utterly different.
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The movie is thus philosophically incoherent but its also flat and rather dull. Gervais's character invents a religion and from then on the film plays out like a riff you come up with when you're stoned: Gervais has to think up the 10 Commandments, the afterlife, what God looks like etc. Still none of this would really matter if the film was funny. Unfortunately it isn’t. I didn’t laugh at all but I did smile once when I saw Ed Norton's moustache, which is thin gruel for a comedy. How this picture got successfully pitched and made is baffling to me. How it got any good reviews is less of mystery: insecure critics who don’t understand the nature of satire have seized upon The Invention of Lying as some sort of brilliant atheistic spoof on contemporary mores. Xan Brooks in The Guardian called it “smart, supple, and radical” and if it really is those things, then we as a culture are totally up shit creek. Radical? It seems to me that Gervais is just preaching to the choir. A brave movie would be one that shows, say, Catholicism in a positive light. Actually what I think happened is that in the UK the good reviews were assisted by British reviewers unwilling to knock a (powerful and media savvy) local lad. Outside Blighty I suspect that Gervais’s accent has convinced many poor colonials that he’s somewhat sharper than he really is. (Hugh Grant’s gotten away with this scam for years.)
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And its Gervais himself who is an even bigger problem than the unfunny script or the lazy direction. The reason The Office worked as a BBC TV series was because David Brent was not the person with whom we were supposed to identify. Tim Canterbury was our conduit into that universe and Brent was the anti-hero that we enjoyed squirming at and being horrified by. Since The Office however Gervais has cast himself as the lead in the TV series Extras and in several feature films. Extras didn’t work, not just because it wasn’t that funny or because its brain splittingly obvious central premise (celebrity culture is shallow) was beaten to death by episode 2, but more because Gervais is not a leading actor and his glum or grinning visage (it was always one or the other) grew tiresome.
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What is true of TV is a fortiori applicable to cinema. George Clooney is a good leading man because he has charisma and presence. We like seeing Clooney’s big mug on the silver screen, even when he’s doing that thing that he does where he looks at his shoes trying to fake unhappiness. Actually Clooney is not a good example of what I’m talking about. John Turturro is a better one. Turturro is certainly not a classically handsome guy but he’s terrific on the screen and always watchable, either as a lead or as a scene stealing second banana. Looks aren’t everything. Bette Davis had ‘it’. Joan Crawford had ‘it’. Gene Hackman has ‘it’. Tommy Lee Jones has ‘it’. Gervais lacks ‘it’ whatever ‘it’ is that works on film. Gervais though is going to be at our multiplexes for decades to come. He is now rich beyond the dreams of the avarice and he has many influential friends in the business (several of whom make ghastly cameo appearances in The Invention of Lying). And maybe his next film will be better but if he casts himself in the lead and the reviews start mentioning the words “radical” and “smart” sure, feel free to lay down your hard earned bucks but don’t say I didn’t warn you.