The Best Alternate History Novels

You’ve written in many genres, but you’ve been dubbed the ‘master of alternate history’ by Publishers Weekly… What’s the appeal of writing these imagined histories?

There are a couple of things… I’ve always been a science fiction person, and I was trained as a historian. If you’re trained as a historian and you want to write science fiction, what are the sorts of things you’re likely to do? Alternate history comes to mind right away because it works the same way as most science fiction, except that it works in a different place on the timeline. Most science fiction changes something in the present or in the near future, and then looks at what happens farther on in the timeline. Alternate history changes something in the past, and then looks at the closer past or the present to see what that might be like under changed circumstances. It’s the same technique, it’s just not in the same place.

Alternate history, like any fiction, is not really about the world that you’re creating. It’s about the world you live in. And alternate history gives you a chance to look at the real world in a kind of fun-house mirror, which I don’t think you can get any other way.

As a writer, there’s a double burden – you’ve got to do the imaginative work of creating an alternative society and make sure you’re ‘correct’ on the historical features that don’t change…

If you are a research obsessive like me, that’s part of the fun!

Let’s talk about your first book, perhaps the best-known alternate history. Could you tell us about The Man in the High Castle by Philip K Dick?

The Man in the High Castle is, for my money, Philip K Dick’s best book. It’s set in the 1960s, in a world where Germany and Japan have won the Second World War and jointly occupy the United States: the Japanese in the western half and the Germans in the eastern half. And it’s about trying to stay alive under those circumstances. It also features the I Ching, which Dick used to write the novel.

The fictional author in the novel wrote an alternate history – talk about meta! – called ‘The Grasshopper Lies Heavy’, in which Germany and Japan lost the war. It’s not quite our world, but it’s pretty close to it. The fictional author, Mr. Abendsen, used the I Ching to write the novel, and believes it to be true, in some sense. The interesting thing, if you’re a bit of a science fiction insider, is that Mr. Abendsen is rather closely modelled on Robert Heinlein, whom Dick knew. Heinlein lent him money now and then when he was broke, which he often was.

I read it for the first time when it was new, when I was 13 or 14 years old, and it created a sizable impression on me. It was one of the first alternate histories that I read. I can’t prove it was the first one, after more than 60 years! – but it was certainly one of the first.

The changed outcome for the war is kicked off by Roosevelt’s assassination… There’s a lot of faith, in this list, in the importance of great leaders for changing the course of history. 

When you’re writing a novel you need to have interesting characters in it, and big exciting things going on. It’s much easier and much more dramatic to imagine a world where, say, John Kennedy survives, or where FDR doesn’t survive. Those are easy to dramatize. It’s much harder to dramatize historical forces, because they’re just there. They aren’t exciting, they just happen. And you need both to explain, as much as anyone can explain, the way things really did turn out.

The historical forces are there, but the people are there too. If Alexander had not been born, if his father Philip of Macedon had gone to war against Persia instead, the world would look different now, because Philip was much more pragmatic than Alexander was. The others who immediately leap to mind who changed the world are Jesus and Muhammad; the world would look different without them. How different? That’s why you write the stories…

In his story, Dick is playing with parallel universes, while some of your choices have time travel, and some are simply straightforward alternative retellings…

Yes – you can change a history altogether, organically, or you can do time travellers meddling in history. I’ve got a story under submission right now that does that, and we’ll see if anybody’s rash enough to buy it… You can change things however you want to change things. I had South Africans give Robert E Lee a whole raft of AK-47s in what’s probably my best-known book, The Guns of the South.

Yes, and that brings us to your next choice, which is also an alternative civil war novel: If The South Had Won The Civil War, by MacKinley Kantor.

This is also one of the first alternate histories I ever read. I know I was 13 years old because my ninth grade English class had a bookcase full of paperbacks, so I pulled it off the shelf and read it. It did have a considerable influence on me when I was writing the Timeline-191 books. It not only lets the Confederacy gain its independence; it also tracks the history of the Confederate States and the United States for the next hundred years, because MacKinley Kantor was writing it just about the time of the centennial of the American Civil War. And I just want to note that If The South Had Won The Civil War first ran in Look magazine in 1959, it’s maybe 30,000 words, and he got 25,000 1959-dollars for it – which is something like getting a quarter of a million dollars now. So I am most sincerely jealous that he had the clout to do that! Of course, he was just coming off winning the Pulitzer Prize for Andersonville, the story of the Confederate prisoner-of-war camp in Georgia. So he was a writer to look for.

“Alternate history, like any fiction, is not really about the world that you’re creating. It’s about the world you live in”

When he got to World War One, he had Teddy Roosevelt as President of the United States and Woodrow Wilson as president of the Confederate States. And those were such perfect choices that I used them too, when I was doing Timeline-191. Although my look at what an independent confederacy might have been is rather less sunny and optimistic than his…

So he’s positive in this novel?

Yes! This is spoilers, but the USA and CSA fight on the same side in World War One, and again in World War Two, and as the centennial of the Civil War rolls around they reunite so that they’re one country again. This is optimism, in my opinion.

Yes! It’s striking to me that the starting premise here is Ulysses S. Grant being killed in an equestrian accident, not a planned assassination or a battle going a different way – really leaning into the idea of pure chance.

Yes – and a lot of life is based on chance. I wrote a short story called “Must and Shall” from the line “The federal union, it must and shall be preserved”. It postulates that when Jubal Early, in the summer of 1864, attacked Washington DC, Lincoln went out to Fort Stevens to watch the fighting, and there were bullets whizzing around… And of course, Lincoln was an enormous target: here is this six foot four bean pole who really stood out in the 19th century, when people generally ran smaller than they do now. So, what if he stopped a bullet? What would the world look like if the radical Republicans had reconstructed the conquered South? It’s not a tremendously optimistic story! But yes, a random chance works too.

Your choices so far have covered the same periods as your own most famous works – the world wars and civil war. Your most recent book looks further back – could you tell us about The Wages of Sin?

The Wages of Sin is set in 1850s England, in a world where HIV got loose in the early 16th century, instead of in the late 20th century. It spread and was, of course, untreatable: if you got it, you were going to die, unpleasantly. It would take a while for doctors to realize that something new and horrible was loose in the world, especially as – in real life – this is the same time that syphilis spread so explosively. Is this the same disease? Is it a different disease? Do they work together? And how do you balance the interests of staying alive and staying strictly monogamous, with the very human impulse to screw anything that moves?

I think my favourite ramification was that Henry the Eighth, of course, died of what they call “the wasting.” So we’re still in a Catholic country.

Sure! Henry went after anything that moved, and if it didn’t move, he would shake it.

We’re a few hundred years into the wasting changing the politics of the world, and the technology too –most of the people who do a lot of the inventing would never have been born, because there’s a large die-off, and the population is much smaller. Europeans are clinging to the east coast of the Americas in the mid-19th century, and barely penetrating past the Appalachians. India has not been assimilated into the British Empire. There are British and Portuguese and French and Dutch trading stations on the coast. There are no steam engines, there’s no telegraph, these things just haven’t happened yet. And of course there are women all over the world, regardless of which culture they live under, who are oppressed even more systematically than they were in the real 1850s – which really says something.

Yes – your female protagonist muses on what the world would be like for women without the wasting, and she’s so optimistic about it! With history so radically changed, what was the research process like?

There was  a lot! I’ve been to Salisbury, which is one of the reasons that I picked it as my provincial town. I did my homework on what the real London was like in the early 1850s, and then subtracted some, because it wouldn’t be that big or that important. In this world, Scotland is still independent…

It’s a thought experiment. You can’t prove whether it’s right or wrong. It’s designed to give people something to think about, and to be entertaining and reasonably convincing at the same time.

Ah, the difficult balance. I think it’s achieved!

Thank you! And I would just like to tell all the kindly people out there who will be seeing this that one of the things they should do is look for me in their local bookstores or at Amazon or Barnes and Noble or wherever you shop for books. I’m there, and with a little bit of luck, I may even be interesting…You never can tell!

Yes, absolutely! Ok, let’s go on to your next choice: Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen by H Beam Piper.

Piper is one of those writers of the 40s, 50s and ’60s who is not remembered well enough. And I think this is one of his two best books, the other being Space Viking. It’s set in western Pennsylvania, in the area where he lived his whole life, so it has the local colour baked in. It drops a policeman from our world into a world where the Indo-Europeans, instead of having gone west across Asia and into Europe as they did in most timelines, went east – they went across by raft and boat, and settled North America. They have 16th century technology, more or less, and their kingdoms are dominated by the god Styphon, who is the god of gunpowder. Only the priests of Styphon know how to make this stuff – except that our policeman, Calvin Morrison, who rapidly becomes Lord Kalvan, also knows. He went to college and studied military history, he fought in the Korean War. It’s a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court kind of story, where someone who knows things that the locals don’t know goes about showing them how to do stuff – and it’s very nicely done.

The other thing about Lord Kalvan is that it’s kind of tragic, not for the story itself, but for the story about the story. Piper wrote it as three long novelettes, which he then sold to Analog one at a time, and planned to put them together as a book when they were all out in Analog. Unfortunately, though, Piper was chronically broke; then his agent took sick and died at about this time, throwing his affairs into a large mess; and very sadly he shot himself.

Oh, that’s  terrible. They’re together now as he intended?

Yes. They were sold together as one before the third one ran in the magazine, because the fellow who had taken over the agency that had represented Piper didn’t know that Analog had prior claim to the third one. So there was a mess.

The short story and novelette worlds are so important in sci fi… does alternate history go to the same magazines, and the same readers?

You try to sell them usually to the regular science fiction markets. So many science fiction writers have done alternate history every now and then, it’s an accepted sub genre. I probably do it more than most people do, just because I have the weird academic background.

Yes – we spoke to P. Djèlí Clark about fantasy histories, and he’s a historian too…

This goes back at least to Tolkien, if not further. One of the reasons that I fell on the Lord of the Rings with glad cries when I first read it in the mid-60s, was going through the appendices with gun and camera, trying to figure out – what does this lead to? What does that mean? It gives the world a depth and a lived-in feel that you really can’t get any other way, if you remember that what happened ‘back then’ is still important to the fictional now – as it would be to the real now.

And the Victorian influences on Tolkien were all medievalists! There’s certainly a thread… Let’s go on with your list. This is your most recently-published choice: The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, by Michael Chabon.

Yes, this is my favourite recent alternate history. It’s set in the 1980s in a world where a whole bunch of argumentative Jews have been settled in Alaska to get them out of Germany during the Second World War. Michael Chabon, the author, used it to find a place where Yiddish would be a living language. My own folks spoke Yiddish fluently – they spoke it with each other when they didn’t want me to understand what was going on, which was a great incentive to learn some. After my dad died, my mom spoke Yiddish much less, which meant that I have only fragments of it these days, which I do regret. I can read it, with the dictionary and patience, and because I’ve taken some college German too –  but only after a fashion.

Chabon is just such a marvellous writer. As a writer, sometimes you have to know who’s just better than you are, and Michael Chabon is better than me. Every writer has people like that. Shakespeare looks at Marlowe and thinks, ‘How do I do that?”. But then of course Marlowe got killed, and Shakespeare didn’t have that kind of competition anymore.

I’m very encouraged by Viola in The Wages of Sin, who starts out writing thinking that she won’t be Marlowe, but she’ll be better than a lot of what’s in print. A useful attitude for getting started!

It’s a very common reaction for somebody who’s trying to write – they read something and say, “Christ, I can do better than this!”

Of course,  in Viola’s world, there’s no Shakespeare…

But Marlowe lasts longer! So things even out.

The Yiddish Policeman’s Union is also a murder mystery. Do the alternate world and the plot interact closely here?

Oh, everything in that book fits together. That book is like a Swiss watch, to use an antiquated simile.

The other amusing thing is that there’s a spear carrier in the book who’s named Turteltaub. My grandfather translated Turteltaub from the Yiddish – he got tired of people asking what it means. That kind of stuff happened a lot in early 20th century America, as people took Anglo Saxon sounding names to try to fit in – I used to play softball on a team with a guy whose last name was Eagle, whose grandfather had translated it from Adler, and there are bunches of baseball players who played under names they were not born with – like Jimmie Reese was born Hyman Solomon.

So I saw Turteltaub, and I did a double-take. I got in touch with Chabon, whom I do not really know, and I asked him, “Hey, did you borrow my name?” And he said, “Yeah, I like your stuff!” – which made me walk on air for quite a while. Peter Beagle did that too, tucked my name in a story. I’ve got a funny last name.

There’s a lovely trope of writers nodding to each other in sci fi books, and even writing whole novels about sci fi writers… Your last choice you’ve described as the book that made you who you are. Tell us about Lest Darkness Fall, by L. Sprague de Camp.

Yes, this is the book that made me what I am in a ridiculous number of ways. It is another Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court kind of story. It drops a modern archaeologist back to Italy in the sixth century, when it’s ruled by the Ostrogoths, and when the Byzantine Empire under the Emperor Justinian I is trying to reconquer as much of the lost west as he possibly can. The archaeologist, Martin Padway, decides that the Ostrogoths would make better rulers for Italy than the Byzantines would, and does his best to help them and to pass on modern knowledge as he’s doing it.

As for why it’s the book that made me what I am, there’s a story that goes with that. I found this book in a second-hand store when I was 14 or 15. I think I paid 13 cents for it, a used paperback. I’d already read some other stuff by Sprague de Camp, and I liked it; and I read this, and I started trying to find out how much he was making up and how much was real. And I got hooked! I soon found out that he was making up very little, and most of what he was writing about was quite real, except changed by the addition of the modern man… When I graduated from high school, I wanted to be an astronomer, and I got into the California Institute of Technology; and then I flunked out at the end of my freshman year, because calculus was much tougher than I was. I had to do something then to stay in college. What was I going to study if I was going to stay in college and if I was too dumb to be an astronomer? I became a history major, and I ended up at UCLA doing Byzantine history. In 1977 I got my PhD in Byzantine history. I was highly educated, totally unemployable. I was also trying to write. I wrote my first novel that sold in parallel with my dissertation, which meant my dissertation took longer than it would have otherwise…

So Lest Darkness Fall changed what I studied, which changed what I wrote about (it didn’t change the fact that I was going to write, because I was always going to write anyway.) It changed what I knew, and most of what I have written, because that either comes from research I did for my dissertation, or from learning how to do research.  For two years after I got my doctorate, I taught at UCLA while my professor had a guest gig in Greece, and while I was teaching there, I met the lady that I’m married to – so I can blame that on Lest Darkness Fall. I have the kids I have and the grandkids I have because of Lest Darkness Fall. I’m living where I’m living because of Lest Darkness Fall. I’m writing what I’m writing because of that book. Other than that, it didn’t change my life at all…

This is what you could call alternate history on the micro-historical level. If somebody else had bought that book the day before I walked in, my whole life would be different now in ways I can’t even imagine.

Yes, I was very struck by your perspective, listening to you tell the story: this is very much an alternative historian’s view of life! We’re all subject to these chance changes, but don’t always think that way… 

Yes! It’s really fascinating: real science fiction, Jules Verne and all those people, didn’t develop until the 19th century, when change became rapid enough that you could see it inside the space of one lifetime. It became visible. It became obvious – now people could say, “When I was a kid, we didn’t have that new-fangled telegraph. You couldn’t take a train here, you had to ride a horse or walk.” It’s the same impulse that had spawned historical fiction a generation earlier, when they recognized that the past was another country and they did things differently then…

But alternate history does not require technology. The earliest example of alternate history that I know of was written right around the time of Jesus Christ by the Roman historian Livy, who wondered what would have happened if Alexander the Great had not died in Babylon in 323 BC, but had turned West and attacked the young Roman republic. Good old patriotic Livy was sure that his noble Roman ancestors would have beaten the Greeks. My personal opinion is that Livy was an optimist, but that’s neither here nor there. The point is that he imagined what would have happened if history had worked differently. We all have these ‘What if’ moments in our lives. And you can think, ‘If this could happen to me, this could happen to a whole country – this could happen to a whole world. That’s interesting. Let’s tell a story about that.’ And it is interesting, and I’ve been telling stories about it for a long time now.