The Lure of Alternate History (Plus the 14 Best Novels and Stories)

What if the Confederacy had won?

(PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY LES JORGENSEN)

Everyone is fascinated by what-ifs on every level, from what if I hadn’t gone to that party and met Mary to what if Lee had won at Gettysburg and captured Washington. In recent years, what-ifs—in the form of alternate history—have become one of the most vigorously growing fields in publishing.

In 1978, mesmerized by a book jacket, I bought a thriller set in a past that had never happened. The book was Len Deighton’s SS GB, and the illustration on its jacket displayed a collection of mundane objects on a white background, including a crumpled envelope with a cancelled British postage stamp featuring the head of Adolf Hitler and some German-issued Occupation currency. The objects looked disorientingly realistic and darkly fascinating. In 1978 the summer and fall of 1940 seemed a pivot on which history turned, and the history of World War II was sacred history in an otherwise secular age. That book cover evoked a world in which history was hideously, plausibly otherwise. The very ordinariness of that imagined detritus of a German occupation of Britain was uncanny. It was not the first alternate history of the war I had ever read—someone at summer camp had lent me a copy of Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle—but that photograph, far more than the text of Len Deighton’s fairly humdrum thriller, exerted a spell from which I have never quite escaped. I still read almost any alternate history of World War II I come across.

Alternate histories are fictions or essays that imagine a different past leading to a different future. The field has been booming over the last couple of decades, with a different World War II far and away the genre’s most popular subject. Professional historians normally ignore alternate history, neither writing it nor writing about it, and when they do take notice they tend to scorn the enterprise. Nonetheless two scholarly works on the subject appeared this past summer. One of them, The World Hitler Never Made, by Gavriel D. Rosenfeld (Cambridge, 2005), surveys, classifies, and interprets 116 works of World War II alternate history. True to form, Rosenfeld does not appear to derive much pleasure from the genre. So how and why does a professional historian engage with alternate history?

Rosenfeld is initially a bit dismissive about his subject. He essentially sees the medium as escapist and frivolous, as mere entertainment. He divides World War II alternate histories into two categories: pleasurable fantasies, in which the alternate past is better than the real one, and nightmare pasts, in which it is worse. He proposes that the better past usually implies the author’s dissatisfaction with the present, and thus is politically liberal, because it suggests that we can imagine and create a better world than we are enduring now. He takes the nightmare past for a conservative apology for the present, implying that what actually happened was the best possible outcome. He finds that nightmares predominated from the end of the war until some point in the 1960s, and that fantasies have prevailed ever since.

This seems a little crude. Many conservatives obviously can imagine a better world, and Rosenfeld’s readings of novels on both sides of his divide are often debatable. For example he considers Robert Harris’s best-selling Fatherland—in which a German victory produces a Nazi regime no more brutal than Brezhnev’s USSR, and the United States eventually pursues a strategy of détente with Hitler—a liberal fantasy past. After all it’s hardly the worst nightmare possible. But does it really normalize a monstrosity when you compare it to a comparable monstrosity? Couldn’t Fatherland be a stern critique of détente, with a willed forgetting of the horrors of Stalinism compared to the denial and erasure of the Final Solution that is at the heart of Harris’s plot?

For Rosenfeld, who has previously written about our evolving historical memory of the Third Reich, what historians of memory call “normalization” is the key to understanding alternate history. His idea is that World War II and the Holocaust, initially considered uniquely horrific, have over time become assimilated into “normal” historical memory, so we increasingly feel that they hold no urgent or painful lessons. Such normalization is both a bad thing and a good thing—bad for all the obvious reasons; good because it adds perspective (the Holocaust is not the only example of genocide) and strips away what Rosenfeld thinks are jingoist and self-congratulatory uses of the past. In any event, distinguishing between alternate histories of World War II written through the mid-1960s, and those written since, he judges those of the earlier period to have been more “ethically grounded” than later ones, more fully informed by a sense that the war holds urgent lessons worth keeping.

The World Hitler Never Made surveys its material with some skepticism, and its readings are often mechanical, but it asks a very good question: Why has there been a vast increase in alternate history, especially about World War II? He offers several answers. One of the more convincing is that as belief in the inevitability of progress has faded, we have grown better aware of historical contingency and the role of chance. When history was the working out of God’s will, it would have been blasphemous to contemplate alternative versions; when it was the irresistible march of progress, it would have been whimsical (and even Edward Gibbon sounds playful in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire when he imagines the Koran proclaimed from Oxford’s minarets, in a world where Charles Martel failed to turn back the Moors from the Frankish kingdom in 732).

Rosenfeld notes that the impulse to rewrite World War II often has powerful political motivations, and he’s surely right. His speculations about what drove Newt Gingrich to imagine a different World War II in a novel (1945), and Pat Buchanan to do so in a polemical nonfiction book (A Republic, Not an Empire: Reclaiming America’s Destiny), along with possible motives of others who have done this in Great Britain, the United States, and Germany, are sometimes shrewd and suggestive. Probably World War II dominates alternate fiction for a reason the opposite of normalization—because we continue to understand the war as truly momentous both in its effects and in its moral meaning. But if Rosenfeld may not have all the right answers, he has at least come up with some of the right questions.

The other new scholarly work about alternate history is Roger L. Ransom’s The Confederate States of America: What Might Have Been (Norton, 2005). Ransom, unlike Rosenfeld, is fascinated by the stuff, and is not too proud to admit that he was mesmerized by his first exposure to a 1953 classic of the genre, Ward Moore’s Bring the Jubilee, in which the South has won the Civil War. He notes that a few professional students of military and economic history do pays serious attention to alternate histories, and after pondering the theoretical difficulties he writes one of his own. Three of the book’s five chapters and its epilogue chronicle the creation and fate of an independent Confederate States of America.

Ransom believes that the makers of alternate histories like to focus on wars simply because wars produce broad and striking outcomes in a relatively short time. As he puts it, no single event could have derailed the industrial revolution or the discovery of the New World, but a very small number of events can decide wars, and wars decide very much indeed. Arguing that the Civil War was almost inevitable, Ransom suggests that a Union victory was likely but scarcely certain, and he imagines slightly different occurrences over a couple of years producing war-weariness, British and French pressure for an armistice, a Democratic victory in the election of 1864, and recognition of the Confederacy. Nor does he stop there. He argues that an independent Confederate States would almost certainly have become involved in the European balance of power as an ally of Great Britain, France, and Russia, with the likely result that the United States would have become an ally of Germany. In his alternate future, World War I ends with the destruction of the Confederacy in 1918.

As Ransom knows, when one imagines an alternate path the result will be much more satisfying if one follows the path some distance. Military historians can and do propound alternate Gettysburgs in great detail and quantity, but detailed visions of a surviving Confederacy years later are much rarer. Ransom’s alternate path includes an elaborate analysis of his Confederacy’s emancipation of its slaves, and the economic causes and consequences of that are very carefully worked out, but to my taste the outcomes are a little too inevitable. His book disappoints not in its admirable goal of selecting and then describing truly plausible alternate paths, but in its success in reaching that goal. He shies away from imagining the darker possibilities of a Confederate victory, and he is too optimistic about what we can actually learn from alternate histories. Still, on the rare occasions when professional historians have worked this vein, they have done some good analysis, much of it stressing logistics and, for instance, suggesting the true unlikelihood that Germany could have successfully invaded Britain in 1940, defeated the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941, or reached the Suez Canal ever. It is very much worth knowing what could not have happened.

But how do we determine what truly could have happened? And what do we really learn from doing so? Those are hard questions.

My next article on alternate history, to appear on AmericanHeritage.com in November 2005, will assess a new novel published this fall: the latest in the immensely popular Harry Turtledove’s series imagining a World War II fought in a world with an independent Confederacy.

Meanwhile, here are fourteen very good alternate histories, and the best non-fiction volume on the subject.

The Plot Against America, by Philip Roth, 2004. Roth is surely the greatest novelist to write an alternate history. The point of departure is 1940, when the Republicans nominate Charles Lindbergh instead of Wendell Willkie for President.

“The Curfew Tolls,” by Stephen Vincent Benét, a story, first published in 1935 and often reprinted since, about Napoleon born a generation too early. Eerie, pitch-perfect, and very satisfying.

Marching Through Georgia (1988), Under the Yoke (1989), and The Stone Dogs (1990), by S. M. Stirling, published in one volume, as The Domination, in 1999. For my money the most disturbing alternate history ever written, about an anti-America established in late-eighteenth-century South Africa by American Tories, reinforced by French émigrés and then defeated Confederates. Chilling.

The Resurrections, by Simon Louvish, 1992. Set in 1968 in a world in which neither Stalin nor Hitler took power, yet nonetheless a much worse world than our own.

Pavane, by Keith Roberts, 1968. In a world in which Elizabeth I was assassinated, and the Armada triumphed.

The Alteration, by Kingsley Amis, 1976. In this world there was no Reformation in England.

The Difference Engine, by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, 1991. Thomas Babbage’s would-be Victorian-era computer actually works, and the age is transformed.

The Dragon Waiting: A Masque of History, by John M. Ford, 1983. Set in a late fifteenth century in which the Emperor Julian enforces religious toleration. Tricky and wonderful.

If Lee Had Not Won the Battle of Gettysburg, by Winston Spencer Churchill, 1930. A complex and fascinating short story by the great prime minister.

Lest Darkness Fall, by L. Sprague de Camp, 1941. An un-ironic version of Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, set in sixth-century Italy. It delighted me as an adolescent and has delighted many other adolescents over the years.

Fatherland, by Robert Harris, 1992. One of the few alternate histories to break through as mainstream fiction, and pretty good, too. It’s a thriller set in 1964 in a world in which Hitler won and suppressed evidence of the Final Solution; now the United States, under President Joseph Kennedy, is considering an alliance.

“Counting Potsherds,” by Harry Turtledove, 1989. Turtledove, probably the most popular author of alternate histories, is generally a ham-handed novelist. He has written some very effective short stories; this is one that supposes that the Greeks lost at Marathon.

Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle, 1962. First a cult classic, now simply a classic, a novel about America after Germany and Japan won World War II.

Bring the Jubilee, by Ward Moore, 1953. Probably the best Confederate victory novel, bleak and influential.

Plausible Worlds: Possibility and Understanding in History and the Social Sciences, by Geoffrey Hawthorn, 1991. The most careful and serious academic work on alternate history.

—Fredric Smoler teaches literature at Sarah Lawrence College and is a contributing editor of American Heritage magazine.