Alternate history, also called counterfactual or “what if?” history, is a genre that can be very interesting to read and immensely intriguing. It is also a genre that is immensely difficult to write, or rather to write well. As an historian, I try to explain why past events happened and why they transpired the way they did. That is in fact the whole point of the ‘science’ of history.
Harry Turtledove is himself an historian by training and has a Ph.D. in Byzantine history from UCLA. He is also one of the most prolific authors around; in his close to twenty years as a full-time writer, he has published almost a hundred(!) novels, many of them 600+ page tomes, both adult and YA, in different genres such as science fiction, fantasy, historical fiction, and – most prominently – alternate history. Unlike some authors, however, who seem to value quantity over quality, Turtledove is actually able to churn out really well-written books almost as fast as his fans are able to devour them.
Turtledove has been dubbed “the Master of alternate history” and “the Wizard of If”, and rightly so. Not only are his books generally well-written, they are also based on extensive research (whereever he gets the time; one wonders of the man ever sleeps) and a profound understanding of how history works.
Perhaps the finest example of Turtledove’s alternate history writing is an 11-book series which has no official title; the fans, however, have given it various names. One is Southern Victory, because it is based on one of the two most popular PODs among alternate historians: the South winning the American Civil War (the other of course being a Nazi victory in World War II). Another title often used to descibe the series is Timeline-191, since the South are able to win the war because, unlike in our timeline, enemy forces do not find a copy of Robert E. Lee’s Special Order 191.
The series starts out with the stand-alone ‘prequel’ How Few Remain, telling the story of the ‘Second War between the States’ in the 1880s, caused by the Confederacy buying some land from the near-bankrupt Empire of Mexico to gain access to the Pacific, and goes on to describe the rise of two great powers rather than one on the North American continent – the USA and the CSA – and the wars they fight against each other as parts of one long, ongoing conflict throughout the first half of the 20th century. The Great War trilogy (American Front, Walk in Hell, Breakthroughs) tells the story of a World War I that is both very different from and very similar to the one we know from our history books; the trenches are not in France and Belgium, but in Virginia and Texas. The American Empire trilogy (Blood and Iron, The Center Cannot Hold, The Victorious Opposition) goes on to recount the interwar years, with the brewing enmity between gloating winners and downtrodden and humiliated losers, massive economic depression and the subsequent rise of fascism, culminating in an even bigger and more awful World War II, as depicted in the Settling Accounts tetralogy (Return Engagement, Drive to the East, The Grapple, In at the Death).
All the books are written with multiple viewpoint characters, and this is a big part of their strength. We follow the fates of individuals throughout the continent, from privates to generals and from peasants to presidents, some of them for brief periods and some across three decades. We watch them change and grow (some of them literally), we inevitably become engaged in their lives – and eventually we even start to think like them, ‘good’ and ‘bad guys’ alike. Because Turtledove understands that history isn’t black and white, good vs. evil, he manages to humanize even the vilest of criminals and make us understand how someone could end up doing the things they do; the mark of a true literary master.
Turtledove is quite obviously a war buff, which becomes very clear in his sometimes quite detailed description of the mechanics of war and his almost eerily realistic fight scenes. The strongest point of the series, though, is the way it shows us how much society changed – technology as well as peoples’s mindsets – in just one generation. It truly was the birth of the modern world. In order to write convincing alternate history, one has to understand the basic mechanisms of history, and considering how history might have turned otherwise can provide a different and very fruitful perspective when working with ‘real’ history. With Timeline-191, Turtledove provides just such a perspective, and this brilliant series should be required reading for all students of 20th century history, as well as a must-read for all alternate history buffs.
Southern Victory / Timeline-191 (1997-2007) by Harry Turtledove. Approx. 5500 pp. All 11 books available on play.com
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