Alternate History: When You Travel From the Future to the Past

A poster for a 1980 movie in which a contemporary aircraft carrier travels through time to World War II.

Alternate history is fiction that imagines a dramatic point of divergence from real history, often at a real historic turning point (the North loses the Civil War, Hitler successfully crosses the Channel, the Spanish Armada succeeds) or else by bringing in something no one has ever much considered (the British adopt Major Ferguson’s breechloader in 1776—and kick off S. M. Stirling’s astonishing Draka trilogy).

Alternate-history novels are a fairly recent phenomenon. In fact it is hard to come up with a dozen examples written before the twentieth century. One remarkably influential one, though, if rarely identified as such, is Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, first published in 1889 and in print ever since. Twain in fact originated what has lately become a distinctive subgenre: History branches because a modern person is somehow transported to the past and consciously accelerates or otherwise alters it.

Twain’s Yankee, Hank Morgan, transported to a cruel, filthy, and barbaric mid-sixth-century Camelot, sets out to enlighten and industrialize the place. He introduces a republic and provokes a revolt by the church and aristocracy, which he first opposes with dynamite and then crushes by electrocuting and machine-gunning 25,000 knights, before Merlin puts him to sleep for 13 centuries so history as we know it can resume.

Reading A Connecticut Yankee by flashlight under a blanket at a tender age, I found my untroubled and undivided sympathies lying with Hank Morgan. In graduate school I listened to a Southerner interpret Morgan as an all-too-typical Yankee, gleefully, mass-murderously, and unhesitantly smashing a working society. After I pondered that critique, my untroubled and undivided sympathies still lay with Morgan. Nonetheless, I could see that one might detect some ironies and moral ambiguities in Twain’s text.

One of the classic alternate histories, L. Sprague de Camp’s Lest Darkness Fall—published as a novella in 1939, expanded to a novel in 1941, and still in print—sends its modern American to sixth-century Italy, where he industrializes the place and averts the Dark Ages. Lest Darkness Fall has never been suspected of having ironies and ambiguities, nor have many doubts about progress plagued this subgenre. Lest Darkness Fall has a jaunty Enlightenment sense of the superiority of the present, and so do most of its descendents.

Alternate histories sending moderns back to the past, usually to accelerate progress, have never since gone out of fashion, and there is something of a mini-boom underway at present. A small number envision people trying to improve the past and instead producing a perversely worse future. Stephen Fry’s Making History (1996), where no Hitler means a less crazy, thus much more dangerous, German leadership in World War II, is a fair example. A smaller number, some quite haunting, have the overly cocky modern person crushed by the sheer cultural otherness of the past. Very occasionally, wicked moderns go back to the past to avert progress. Harry Turtledove sent Afrikaners back to the 1860s to give AK-47s to Robert E. Lee (The Guns of the South, 1992), but most protagonists in this sort of alternate history are firmly on the side of progress.

After producing the horrifically dystopian Draka trilogy, S. M. Stirling wrote Island in the Sea of Time, the first book in a trilogy in which the island of Nantucket is sent back to the bronze age, where it fosters industrialization and republicanism, and the writer Eric Flint and some collaborators have sent a small West Virginia coal town back to the Germany of the Thirty Years War, to likewise modernize the seventeenth century. The past’s elites struggle to preserve their privileged positions, and they generally lose. Small wonder. A denizen of our present who goes back to the past has a knowledge of modern technologies and the incalculable advantage of knowing what really could and did happen. The past doesn’t usually stand a chance, for only the displaced moderner “can look into the seeds of time, And say which grain will grow and which will not,” in Shakespeare’s words.

It is thus a pleasure to encounter a new alternate history series, set in an alternate World War II, that by working some changes on this trick becomes improbably exciting. John Birmingham’s Designated Targets is the second volume of a trilogy, The Axis of Time. What’s different with Birmingham derives from some tricks he plays with his point of divergence, which is sort of an alternate-history insider’s joke. His first volume, Weapons of Choice, began with a U.S.-led naval task force in 2021 being dispatched to crush a new and nasty Islamic republic in Indonesia and getting misdirected back to 1942. This recalls the origin of the startlingly dull 1980 movie The Final Countdown, where an American supercarrier, the Nimitz, time-traveling from Pearl Harbor in 1980 to the same waters in December 1941, can effortlessly destroy the 1941 Japanese fleet. (When the Nimitz came along in real life, some defense analysts feared that destroying a 1941 Japanese fleet was precisely what it had been designed to do, at very great expense.) The Final Countdown degenerated into the do-we-dare-change-history debate of an old Star Trek episode (watching F-14s take on Zeros was not suspenseful, and immediately returning the Nimitz to 1980 was cheesy).

Having a whole carrier task force built several generations in the future engage a World War II fleet ought to be duller yet—but Birmingham shows his mettle. His future ships do not encounter Yamamoto; rather they emerge in the middle of the U.S fleet on its way to Midway, are fired on, and destroy much of our own navy in the confusion. Attempting to avoid doing so, they take significant casualties and use up irreplaceable munitions.

When this is sorted out, the surviving Uptimers, as the visitors from the future are called, join the effort to destroy the World War II Axis powers, but it isn’t a simple business. By the end of his first volume, what will become our history has leaked out from the Uptimers, and all the World War II belligerents know it. The Axis powers, at the height of their strength, are determined to avoid their historical mistakes, and Stalin wants to avoid the path that leads to our twenty-first century. The British Empire, like the Soviet empire, knows that in the long run it will be destroyed by its victory in the war, and neither is eager to become its own gravedigger.

Many of the Americans of 1942 are disquieted or even disgusted by learning about the sexually and racially egalitarian future, for by 2021, 20 years of war on Islamo-fascism have significantly accelerated Western feminism and further weakened old-style American racism. In Birmingham’s 1942, U.S. military personnel rape and murder some Uptimers in a riot, their most grossly brutalized victim being a black, gay, female U.S. naval officer, and relations between the Uptimers and their ancestors become precarious. What makes Birmingham’s trilogy at times mesmerizing is his focus on reactions to the future by 1942 Americans and Englishmen. In other words, he recognizes that when we fought Hitler we were not yet what we would become because we fought Hitler.

One interesting difficulty is the problem of figuring out which parts of the technological future can be brought to birth before their time and win a desperate war, and which parts are, for the immediate future, necessarily blind alleys. In our 1942 Germany was closer to producing ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, jet fighters, and precision-guided munitions than were the historical Allies, but German leaders assumed that nuclear explosives could never be developed in time to affect the Second World War; in Birmingham’s 1942, the Germans learn that they are grievously mistaken about the latter. Birmingham’s Uptimers, limited in numbers, in munitions, and in ideological appeal, bring into the past only one thing in abundance, and that is knowledge—but it’s knowledge that can be deadly in the hands of their enemies.

With Designated Targets, the second volume of his trilogy, Birmingham has written an extremely ingenious alternate-history thriller and breathed new life into his subgenre by fusing and reworking some of its most traditional themes. By the book’s end most of his characters know the seeds of time, but no one knows which will sprout and which will fail. It turns out to be very exciting that way.

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