Saturday 24 October 2015

Roads Not Taken, edited by Gardner Dozois and Stanley Schmidt


Another long-standing member of my reading pile! This anthology, published in 1998, consists of alternate history stories which appeared in the magazines Asimov's Science Fiction and Analog Science Fiction and Fact, whose editors have made the selection. The book commences with a brief introduction to alternate history by Shelly Shapiro, Executive Editor of Del Rey Books. There are ten stories, as follows:

Must and Shall by Harry Turtledove (1995). Set in the American Civil War, in which one new event dramatically changes history – but not, unusually, the victor – with dire long-term consequences.

An Outpost of the Empire by Robert Silverberg (1991). One of the author's Roma series, in which the Roman Empire survived to the present day. A new Roman proconsul arrives to take responsibility for Venice, but a high-born lady of the city is determined to be in charge.

We Could Do Worse by Gregory Benford (1989). A dystopian USA in which the changed outcome of a 1950s presidential election has disastrous results.

Over There by Mike Resnick (1991). Theodore Roosevelt successfully campaigns to reform his Rough Riders to take a decisive role in World War 1. For once, this story is not concerned with significant changes in history, but only the consquences of the change for individuals.

Ink from the New Moon by A.A. Attanasio (1992). A world in which the great Chinese naval explorations of the fifteenth century were continued instead of abandoned, resulting in the Chinese occupation of the "Americas". The story concerns what happened when Christopher Columbus arrives and meets the Chinese inhabitants.

Southpaw by Bruce McAllister (1993). Apparently Fidel Castro was once such a promising young baseball player that he was offered a contract by a major US team. He spent some time considering it before turning it down. But what if he had accepted?

The West is Red by Greg Costikyan (1994). Suppose that communism had lived up to its promise and provided a more efficient system of running a country than capitalism? A very different post-1945 world emerges…

The Forest of Time by Michael F. Flynn (1987). A time-traveller, desperate to get home but lost in the ever-branching possible worlds his own journeys are creating, arrives in an alternate world in which the USA has never been formed. Unusually, this story is seen from the perspective of a native of that world, as he tries to judge whether the man is insane, a liar, or telling the truth.

Aristotle and the Gun by L. Sprague de Camp (1958). A disillusioned scientist working on a time-travel machine decides to use it to escape from his unsatisfactory life. He chooses to go back to meet Aristotle in the hope of guiding his scientific development, with unexpected consequences. "Be careful what you wish for" might be the sub-title!

How I Lost the Second World War and Helped Turn Back the German Invasion by Gene Wolfe (1973). An amusing story concerning a late-1930s world in which Hitler had decided to go for economic rather than military domination. Meanwhile, the narrator and his friend were working on a board game involving a war in Europe.


I hadn't come across any of these stories before, so this was an interesting read. They are all good, which should come as no surprise given the editors, but the stand-out one for me was Flynn's tale. It is the longest, at 70 pages, which gave the author the space to develop his characters and their situation. The distress of the time traveller, separated from his lover by the every-growing forest of alternate worlds, strikes a chord. It was nominated for a Hugo award, entirely justified given that it is written so well and to such haunting effect. Like most of the other stories here, it gives a convincing portrayal of how minor changes can have major consequences.

5 comments:

Fred said...

Anthony,

A great lineup of authors. The only one that is familiar is Silverberg's as I read _Roma_ long ago. Another one for my TBR shelf- (sigh)

dlw said...

I might have to order that one. I think I've seen maybe two of those stories in other collections; the rest sound good.

Some time ago I started an outline for an alternate-history novel. It mostly served to drive home the fact that I'm no writer... but I had fun developing the timeline.

I had been impressed by Asimov's "The End of Eternity", where time travelers "adjusted" the timeline by making the smallest possible changes to achieve their outcome. I eventually settled on the Alaska Purchase. The Purchase was only approved by a very narrow margin... and then there was another wrangle and narrow vote before the funding was approved. America had already bought vast tracts of land from France and Spain, and was in the peculiar position of having more land than it knew what to do with, and no real need for a frozen wasteland that wasn't even contiguous with the rest of the country.

So, no Alaska Purchase. As I figured it, not a whole lot would change for a while. Eventually the Tsar's surveyors would probably have found gold in Alaska, but that would only increase the population a bit. For a while.

I figured things would start changing with Lend/Lease. Novy Archangelsk might become a staging point, rather than shipping from San Diego and Seattle to Vladivostok. So there would be a Russian military presence in Russian America. Maybe not a huge one, but an established one.

Then we move into the Cold War, and the Soviets detonate their first atomic bomb... and things get nasty *really* fast. Most of the Cold War brinksmanship the US played was based on the fact that we had forward bases all over Europe if we wanted to attack the USSR, but there was no realistic way they could do much to the USA. With the Soviet Air Force based out of Alaska, all of North America would be within range of their bombers.

Things in most of Europe and North Africa (the forgotten Cold War front...) could have turned out *very* different. And in the late 1940s and early 1950s the Fed saw Reds everywhere, and the House Un-American Activities Committee and McCarthy were trying very hard to become America's thought police. Their Reds were mostly imaginary... but here, they would be real, sitting right next to Canada.

After that, things get very ugly no matter how I roll the dice, and past 1955 or so I usually come up with a USA that looks a lot like East Germany except not nearly as nice. Britain usually comes out looking pretty good, though - with restricted European trade from the early 1950s, the Empire and Commonwealth would be much more important. A few good decisions, and the balance of power could easily become USSR -> Britain -> USA.

dlw said...

I might have to order that one. I think I've seen maybe two of those stories in other collections; the rest sound good.

Some time ago I started an outline for an alternate-history novel. It mostly served to drive home the fact that I'm no writer... but I had fun developing the timeline.

I had been impressed by Asimov's "The End of Eternity", where time travelers "adjusted" the timeline by making the smallest possible changes to achieve their outcome. I eventually settled on the Alaska Purchase. The Purchase was only approved by a very narrow margin... and then there was another wrangle and narrow vote before the funding was approved. America had already bought vast tracts of land from France and Spain, and was in the peculiar position of having more land than it knew what to do with, and no real need for a frozen wasteland that wasn't even contiguous with the rest of the country.

So, no Alaska Purchase. As I figured it, not a whole lot would change for a while. Eventually the Tsar's surveyors would probably have found gold in Alaska, but that would only increase the population a bit. For a while.

I figured things would start changing with Lend/Lease. Novy Archangelsk might become a staging point, rather than shipping from San Diego and Seattle to Vladivostok. So there would be a Russian military presence in Russian America. Maybe not a huge one, but an established one.

Then we move into the Cold War, and the Soviets detonate their first atomic bomb... and things get nasty *really* fast. Most of the Cold War brinksmanship the US played was based on the fact that we had forward bases all over Europe if we wanted to attack the USSR, but there was no realistic way they could do much to the USA. With the Soviet Air Force based out of Alaska, all of North America would be within range of their bombers.

Things in most of Europe and North Africa (the forgotten Cold War front...) could have turned out *very* different. And in the late 1940s and early 1950s the Fed saw Reds everywhere, and the House Un-American Activities Committee and McCarthy were trying very hard to become America's thought police. Their Reds were mostly imaginary... but here, they would be real, sitting right next to Canada.

After that, things get very ugly no matter how I roll the dice, and past 1955 or so I usually come up with a USA that looks a lot like East Germany except not nearly as nice. Britain usually comes out looking pretty good, though - with restricted European trade from the early 1950s, the Empire and Commonwealth would be much more important. A few good decisions, and the balance of power could easily become USSR -> Britain -> USA.

Anthony G Williams said...

Very interesting - and quite feasible, I think. It's difficult to envisage what the consequences might be, but it would certainly change the whole mood and atmosphere of the Cold War. Massed tank armies on the Canadian/Alaskan border...it really would be a "cold" war!

dlw said...

Oooh, even nastier! I grew up in an Air Force family, so I tend to mostly think in terms of air power.

Canada and the USSR were *quite* friendly during most of the Cold War; with the USSR forming their entire western border they would have been in a most interesting political position.

I'll have to think on that for a while. That changes everything... in a "tighter, more powerful Commonwealth", Soviet armor couldn't move through Canada without dragging Britain into the conflict. But if the Canadians pursued their own foreign policy similar to OTL, they'd probably try to play the "neutrality" card to avoid being caught in the middle of a three-way Soviet/British/American war partially fought on Canadian soil...


I blame all this on reading Keith Laumer's "Worlds of the Imperium" when I was ten years old...