Speculative fiction has an ever-growing body of work in the area of “alternative” or “counter-factual” history – stories that assume a premise that is contrary to, or different from, some event in our own past. There are certain periods that have just been done to death; the American Civil War and World War II (in Europe in particular) are examples of ground that has not simply been covered, it has been trampled by writers in the genre as well as in the mainstream.

As a writer with an educational background in history, and as an avid student of the subject, I hold such work to a very high standard, and tend to toss stuff across the room that doesn’t meet it (whether it’s a good story or not). At first blush, this might be merely snobbish pedantry on my part, but remember that as a professional, I hold myself to the same standard when writing such fiction.

In this article I am going to describe the most important criteria I use to evaluate an alternative history piece. These are neither exhaustive nor definitive – they are merely an elaboration of my own views on the subject. Still, I hope that any reader will take away something that will help future efforts to thresh out the wheat from the chaff.

How We View It
We have become accustomed to thinking of history – when we think of it at all – as something like a stone monument: it’s the sort of thing you see in the middle of a park somewhere, a big block pedestal with someone we don’t know standing on top of it. It’s a roost for pigeons, a fixed object that pays homage to people we don’t know for an event about which we have no direct knowledge. It’s places and dates and names, stuff we had to memorize in school.

Worse yet, it’s hard to understand as a whole. Unlike many subjects, it doesn’t seem to have any sort of organized framework to hang one’s knowledge. Foreign languages have grammar for rules and patterns for conjugation; rigorous mathematics relies on deriving one result from previous ones. Sciences have taxonomies – relationships between like objects. But history presents the problem that no matter where you draw the line, whether it be geographical or chronological, there always seem to be things happening before or after or outside. There are no boundaries. There is no beginning point. People who are not “history buffs” are constantly faced with the daunting task of trying to determine where to begin when trying to learn about a period. To understand World War II, where do we start? World War I? The Vienna Congress? Homo Africanus? It goes on and on.

Finding the Key Event
Fortunately, though history lacks boundaries, there certainly is a pattern – and there are events that are key turning points, where there is a reasonable expectation that things might have gone differently. The death or survival of an important individual; the outcome of a particular battle; news arriving a day earlier or help coming a day later would have changed everything. A good alternate-historical work must first of all choose one of those points – and only one – and change it.

A good turning point must meet three criteria. First, it must be important; second, it must be plausible; and third, it must be able to impact history on its own without further meddling in the time stream.

I had an idea for a novel centering around the survival of President James A. Garfield after he was shot in the summer of 1881. Unlike every other American president who was assassinated, Garfield didn’t die immediately: he lived on for 83 days, and was probably killed by the incompetence of his doctors as much as the bullet that entered his body. If he had lived, he might have been a great president instead of a tragic footnote. But the more I looked into it, the more I realized that Garfield’s administration would have produced very little that was different from what ultimately happened – except that he would have lived to see it. Interesting? Yes, to me. Plausible? Certainly. (For example, they almost located the bullet using a magnetic device invented by Edison, but metal coils in the bed interfered with it.) But it wasn’t important enough, and it would have required some further change – for example, for Garfield to have conducted some major effort in foreign or domestic policy. But he was a staunch Republican and a conservative party politican, and wasn’t looking to change things. The idea didn’t have merit.

Finding an important event isn’t hard – though, as stated above, venturing outside the well-traveled paths of Gettysburg and Stalingrad and their fellow-travelers may take some work. But there is a vast tapestry of human history to choose from, starting with our distant ancestors and running into the near future. There is even plausibility in events in speculative fiction: the newest Star Trek movie is an alternate history for the Trek universe, and Batman has had his origin story reworked too many times to count.

Providing a plausible alternative isn’t hard either. A good writer will have to know the subject in order to evaluate the turning point correctly, but if there wasn’t a different possible outcome, it wouldn’t be a turning point. Changing the outcome of the battles of Antietam, Shiloh, or Gettysburg gives us both importance and plausibility; changing the outcome of Petersburg or Appamattox does not. In the first case, there are very real choices that can be made to alter the outcome, resulting in possible Confederate victory in the war; in the second, the war was already lost and a change in the outcome would have prolonged the war and made the loss more painful.

The third criterion is the hardest to pin down, and is where I believe that most alternative history fiction goes off the tracks. A good turning point event – one that is important and plausible – must, in and of itself, change history. For example, we’d like to have a world without a successful American Revolution, so let’s suppose that the Boston Tea Party doesn’t happen. The troublemakers are stopped, or never go out. Does that prevent the American Revolution? I’d say no. Things like the Stamp Act and the Boston Massacre have already happened (in fact, all of human history has already happened unchanged up to that point). Backing up and removing the Stamp Act (which requires a change in the outlook of the British Parliament; see, everything is connected) isn’t good enough either; too much resentment has been built up before. Defeating the Continental Army is your best bet, though that’s a shooting-fish-in-a-barrel proposition; I believe that no reasonable editor would buy the actual history of the American Revolution as alternate history – it’s too implausible. And the unrest wouldn’t go away – it would come back again. Buy me a beer at a science-fiction convention and I’ll do my best to convince you that to avoid the whole business you have to reach back half a century. There is a proof, but there’s not enough room in the margin to write it here. In any case, the single turning point has to be enough to alter the time stream – which otherwise has an annoying tendency to pull back to its original form.

Avoiding Infodump
One of the hardest parts of writing an alternate-history piece, particularly if the chosen period isn’t well known, is clarifying for the reader what has changed. It has a tendency to lead the writer into one of the great morasses of expository writing: the infodump, also known as the “as you know, Bob” syndrome. “Well, as you know, Bob, the success of Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg is what won the war for the Stars and Bars and is why the Confederacy exists today.” Ugh. That might be an extreme example – or maybe not: most Americans have heard of Gettysburg, but most have not stood on the battlefield where Pickett’s Charge took place – so this exposition might be necessary, though hopefully not in that form. The further off the beaten path you get, the harder the problem becomes. The Persians win the Battle of Actium? Constantine is killed at Milvian Bridge? Catherine of Aragon gives birth to a healthy son? Montezuma decides that Cortés isn’t really Quetzalcotl after all? Some readers will not understand why these outcomes are important. And these are historical high points.

How to do it? Subtly. I have an alternate-history piece about the Battle of New Orleans in 1815. As you know, Bob, this battle was won by Americans against British, with Andrew Jackson in command of the American troops including some very talented Kentucky sharpshooters. In my version, the defenders are the French, and the British are attacking – and Jackson wins the battle with the help of the Kentuckians for the British. How do I clue the reader into the idea that this is alternate history? I do it on the first page:

Oh, say can you see / by the dawn’s early light
What so proudly we hailed / at the twilight’s last gleaming
Cross of Andrew and George / Through the perilous fight
O’er the ramparts we watched / Were so gallantly streaming?
And the rockets’ red glare / The bombs bursting in air –
Gave proof, through the night / That our flag was still there.
Oh, say, does His Majesty’s Banner still wave –
O’er the lands of the Free / And the home of the Brave?
– Home of the Brave (1814)
Francis Scott Key
(Written during the French assault on Havana)

“Lots of folks who don’t know Old Hickory for winning the Battle of New Orleans will still pick him out from the front side of a Continental twenty-pound note.”
- Samuel Clemens (as Mark Twain)

(from an unpublished short work, “Home of the Brave”, ©2009, Walter H. Hunt.)

The actual Star-Spangled Banner was written during the British assault on Baltimore in 1814. The change is subtle, though I’m pleased to say that it scans. The second quote puts Jackson on a £20 banknote instead of a $20 bill; you don’t need to know anything about the Battle of New Orleans to understand that you’re not in Kansas anymore, Bob.

Keeping Faithful to History
Finally, in conjunction with the third criterion stated above, it’s important to understand that history has a certain amount of raw momentum that is difficult to deflect. Choosing a good turning point is critical to making a good history – and therefore a good story (note that the German word Geschichte means both ‘story’ and ‘history’ – interesting, isn’t it?); but anything that turning point doesn’t affect will proceed without interruption. If Pearl Harbor turns out differently, it won’t affect the North African campaign – at least not at first. Napoleon’s defeat at Austerlitz doesn’t change the way Kamehameha conquers the Hawaiian Islands. Assume that everything is constant but the one fulcrum point – and consider what impact it does have.

My own current alternate-history work is in the middle eighteenth century, which is mildly obscure. I was asked why I didn’t simply start with stories set in the current era, showing how things are different. My answer was that, as a writer I could imagine it, but as a student of history I simply hadn’t plotted it out far enough. I’m writing in the 1750s; I have things pretty well figured out for the next century. The 20th century is still a blur for me – I’m not sure I’ve read enough, thought enough, plotted enough. The last thing I want to do is to have to throw my manuscript across the room because it doesn’t meet my own criteria.

Here Our Story Begins
Writing in this subgenre is a tremendous challenge and a wonder when it’s done well. The old saw that “truth is stranger than fiction” certainly applies; history is full of characters great and small that are worthy of being included in stories. Benjamin Franklin is my current favorite: he is a superb central character and deserves to be done properly. But making these people come alive in a setting that isn’t quite our own history gives us the ability to explore a world that doesn’t turn out the same – whether to prove a historical point, explore a “might have been” scenario, or just to tell a cracking good story. I look forward to reading (and writing) more and better examples in the future.

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About the Author

Walter Hunt has been writing for most of his life, both professionally as a technical writer in the software industry and as an author of fiction. In 2001, his first novel, The Dark Wing, was published by Tor Books; it’s been followed by The Dark Path (2003), The Dark Ascent (2004), and The Dark Crusade (2005). All four of these books have been published in German by Random House/Heyne.

He is also a contributor to the anthology Hal’s Worlds, dedicated to the late Hal Clement, with his first published short story “Extended Warranty,” drawn from the Dark Wing universe. In 2008 his first novel beyond the Dark Wing universe, A Song In Stone, was published by Wizards of the Coast as a part of their Discoveries imprint. He also has an alternate-history novel in development.

He has a background in history, with a Bachelor of Arts degree from Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, and he speaks two other languages (German and Spanish). A member of the Masonic Fraternity, Walter H. Hunt has served as Master of two different Lodges in Massachusetts, and completed a very successful Master’s year in 2005-06. He and his wife and daughter are involved in a colonial reenactment group.

Walter’s website is http://www.walterhunt.com.