Alternate-history "points of divergence" that haven't been done yet

Cafe Society
1

The SF subgenre of alternate history or counterfactual history has produced a lot of novels and short stories. (See Uchronia: The Alternate History List, at www.uchronia.net.) A lot of them are about fairly obvious “points of divergence” – e.g., the Germans win WWII, the South wins the Civil War, the British crush the American Revolution, Kennedy’s assassin(s) miss(es), Pilate pardons Jesus. But there are some fairly interesting PODs* that have never, so far as I know, been exploited by any writer. Some examples:

From 1648 to 1653 there was a prolonged rebellion in France, known as the Fronde, which was ultimately crushed. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fronde) Its original aim was to limit the king’s power, but it soon degenerated into aristocratic and bourgeois factions. Louis XIV was a child at the time, and historians think his later insistence on royal absolutism was formed by his memories of the Fronde – and that, of course, led to the Estates-General falling into disuse, so that when a new one finally was called in 1789 the prolonged build-up of political pressures quickly got out of hand and the French Revolution happened. If the Fronde had succeeded, would France have evolved into a stable constitutional monarchy, like Britain?

Which itself was not always stable – the Civil War ended in the establishment, in 1649, of a “Commonwealth” or republic, which quickly degenerated into a dictatorship by Oliver Cromwell. What if it had developed into a real republic, and lasted? How would that have affected Britain’s relationship with its American and Caribbean colonies, and the later building of its Empire?

The American Revolution happened, in part, because some leading colonists resented “taxation without representation.” What if representation for the colonies at Westminster had been established early – say, as a concession by Elizabeth I to Sir Walter Raleigh when he founded Virginia? At first the colonies would have been so underpopulated compared to the British Isles that representation would have made little political difference – but in our time-line there came a time, in the mid-19th Century, when the population of the U.S. outgrew the UK’s. If the two countries had remained united – and if Parliamentary representation were periodically reapportioned based on population – would the British Empire have developed into a de facto American Empire?

In 1848, liberal-democratic revolutions swept across continental Europe. Most failed; the old government was shortly restored, with some minor concessions made. (France became a republic – but its first president was Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, who made himself Emperor within a few years.) What if the revolutionaries had been more successful?

Are there any PODs you would like to see used for an AH treatment? And what outcome do you see as likeliest from the ones I’ve described here?
*According to Science Fiction: The Illustrated Encyclopedia, by John Clute (Dorling Kindersley, 1995), p. 62, a POD is sometimes called a “Jonbar Point (or Hinge), after a Jack Williamson character from the 1930s, who creates one world if he picks up a pebble and another world if he picks up a magnet and becomes a great scientists.” The book or story is not identified.

2

While the population seemed pretty sparse from my memories of the book, that premise is the basis of Harry Turtledove’s The Two Georges, if I remember correctly. I didn’t much care for it.

3

I’m not sure if it was the premise of Two Georges (I think that’s more in the lines of ‘British crush American Revolution’, but I’m sure that premise has been done before in the AH.

4

You sure about that? The title refers to a painting of George Washington and King George and it seems unlikely that they’d be painted together if General Washington had been defeated in open rebellion against the king.

5

The premise of The Two Georges is that Washington and other prominent Americans formed a delegation to London to negotiate a peaceful settlement of the colonies’ grievances, and succeeded. So in 1997, the “North American Union” has a considerable degree of self-government – but it is still ultimately subject to a Westminster Parliament in which it has no direct representation. So my scenario is still one that hasn’t been done yet.

6

As my interests lie in black history there are a few POD I’d like to explore:

  1. What if Denmark Vesey had succeeded in the Charleston slave uprising?

  2. What if Harriet Tubman had been captured and executed by the Condeferate government as a Union spy and subsequently martyred?

  3. What if the NAACP and the Civil Rights Movement had been essentially separatist and not integrationist?

  4. What if Dr. George Washington Carver had developed and patented bakelite plastic at the turn of the 20th century for the Tuskegee Institute?

7

Askia, I think your #2 sounds really good.

8

Thank you, Baker.

9

Did you ever think of writing the story yourself?

10

Baker. It was a subplot of a period novel I was once writing, only in my version Harriet Tubman would quickly escape detention by the Condeferate unit who’d captured her, disguise herself as a male slave before heading north again, with the aid of my protagonist. That was the resolution that best serviced the main plot. But I really preferred the idea of her getting caught and executed; the ramifications of THAT happening intrigued me. But that wasn’t the novel I’d signed on to write, and rather than just move past it or start over (at the time my research wasn’t going anywhere and I was still in college) I dropped it. Abortive novel #15.

I need to get into the speculative fiction/alternate history genre more. I’ve read Bradbury’s A SOUND OF THUNDER, Robert Harris’ FATHERLAND and seen the movie WHITE MAN’S BURDEN – and that’s about it. The Civil War battle stuff and WWII stuff doesn’t interest me.

11

I recall an old story, from a magazine I guess, that had the Library of Alexandria surviving and a technological society developing from the shared knowledge and easy access of such knowledge, leading to the bypassing of the Dark Ages.

I would have very much like to have seen a larger scale extrapolation of that idea.

12

One of my favorite pieces of alternate history was the short story “He Walked Around the Horses”, authored by H. Beam Piper. It is based on the true story of a British diplomat, Benjamin Bathurst, who disappeared in the courtyard of a German in, in 1809, and was never seen again. The story is about what happened to him, and is told in the form of a series of letters between German and British authorities, trying to decide what to do with this guy whose documents seem so authentic(the “point of divergence” was very recent)

The final letter is written by a British authority, who is detailing the intriguing differences and similarities between people mentioned in Bathurst’s papers, and those in their world. There’s only on correspondence he can’t make.

The point of divergence was that the American Revolution failed. There was also no French revolution. The final letter writer can’t figure out who the Duke of Wellington was supposed to be in their world. He signs his letter Sir Arthur Wellesley

13

Booth’s assassination plot goes even better than planned—Lincoln, Vice-President Johnson, and Secretary of State Seward are all murdered. (Possibly another varient: more of Lincoln’s family dies. Say, Booth himself uses a coach gun in Ford’s Theater, killing Mrs. Lincoln. Or Abraham, Mary, and Tad Lincoln are killed when Booth’s wagonload of explosives detonates in front of the White House.)

I had a glimmer of an idea for this in some kind of short film—he camera opens on a closeup of a newspaper headline about the mass killing, and the paper blows away, revealing the city of Richmond on the night of April 16th, 1865, being laid to the torch by enraged Union troops. Something like that.

14

I was recently playing with the idea that Henry Ford’s “peace mission” succeeded during World War One, or at least he was able to spin it to look that way. Being the man who brought peace to the world, he was a shoe-in for President in the 1920 elections. His acceptance of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” as a factual document would have allowed him work closely with some visionary young Germans, bringing the horrors of Fascism to America even earlier than it appeared in Europe.

Then Phillip Roth wrote a novel using Charles Lindberg in the same role. I’ll never get it published now.

15

Here’s a few:

  1. Working forward from people like Hero of Alexandria, the Roman world undergoes an industrial revolution. It’d have to be an anthology of pieces, but it’d be an interesting read.

  2. Good to see some Columbus ones on that list. But I’ve never seen anything where he never sailed. I’ll have to look closer. Be interesting to see how a dirt-poor Spain would have dealt with their would-be conquistadores. Ship them to North Africa, or Ottoman Turkey to fight?

  3. Ming dynasty China does not turn insular. Does this lead to expansion into the Indian Ocean, or even Africa, Europe, and the Americas? Or does China get screwed over that much faster when the Europeans come, like the Mughals a few centuries later?

  4. Jacques Necker restructures France’s American war debt successfully, and the Revolution is averted. No Bastille, no Rights of Man, no Terror, no Napoleon and his code and conquests. Hard to imagine a different Europe.

  5. Way too many “Germany wins!” books that aren’t even credible. How about America declares war in 1939 and wins faster? The Axis is conquered, but without the popular support Pearl Harbor gave the war. The USSR is still branded a villain over the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. The Manhattan Project never got far underway. More isolationism, or a conventional-arms WW3?

  6. Adolf Eichmann and aides come to the Final Solution. The previously floated “kill 'em all” solution was batted down for fear it would divert resources and antagonize the locals, but the planned rail deportations and camps are amended for the Balkans and Greece to facilitate deporting Europe’s Jews to German-occupied Palestine. Will the killing take place anyway? Will a Zionist state emerge? And if it does, would it back Germany or not?

16

It would make a good story, but why would it make any difference in the outcome of the Civil War?

17

There’s something like that in What Ifs? of American History. What basically happens is, After Booth’s plan succeeds, Union citizens are angry and cry out for blood. For a target, they go after Robert E. Lee. Lee escapes, but gives his blessing for former Confederates to “take to the hills” and wage a guerilla war against the North. The scenerio ends with President Grant contemplating cutting loose the South, because it just isn’t worth it.

18

L. Sprague de Camp did that one in a short story – forget the title, but it involved the Spanish, colonizing America from the East Coast, bumping up againt musket-armed Chinese colonizing it from the West.

19

I don’t know how you could make this realistic, but what about the Aztecs taking over Spain? India taking over Britain? Congo taking over Belgium? Native Americans taking over the colonists?

20

•In the weeks after the German defeat in 1945, the Red Army in eastern Europe mutinies, and turns on Moscow. Maybe spurring the other allies to put “Operation Unthinkable” into effect.

I don’t know enough about the Soviet military structure to hammer this one out to anything resembling plausible, though.

•Chiang Kai-Shek either

A) Wins the Chinese civil war, or

B) Doesn’t “win,” but isn’t driven out of mainland China, leading the war to continue for many more years, possibly drawing the Soviet Union into a military quagmire trying to support Mao’s communists.

•Stalin is killed by a freak air strike during Operation Barbarossa. (Not neccesarily meaning the Germans win the war, though.)

•I thought of one just now that I think I’ll try to make into a short story. I’ll let you know if it gets published.