Changing the Past

I've recently finished the latest book by S. M. Stirling (best known for alternate history SF), a time-travel adventure, TO TURN THE TIDE, first volume in a new series. Partially inspired by L. Sprague DeCamp’s vintage novel LEST DARKNESS FALL (but Stirling's book is better), TO TURN THE TIDE transports a Harvard professor of history and four graduate students to central Europe in 165 A.D., era of the Roman Empire under Marcus Aurelius. They know they've made a one-way trip, since the time machine is stationary instead of a vehicle like the one in H. G. Wells's classic, so they decide to use the literal ton of supplies sent with them as planned by the inventor of the machine (who accidentally fails to come along as he'd meant to). They set out to change history for the better, beginning with simple improvements, e.g, sterile medical procedures and wheelebarrows, and building on their early successes. In this first installment of the series, their innovations consist of “Type A” changes, things the inhabitants of that era and locale can implement with available tools and materials once they’re given the concepts. “Type B” developments, those that require inventing the tools to make the tools to construct the new things, will come later.

In fiction, altering the past in an attempt to improve the future produces a wide range of effects. At one extreme, we have Ray Bradbury's story of a tiny, accidental change with disastrous results, when a visitor to the age of dinosaurs crushes a butterfly, thereby generating a future worse than the one he originally came from (yet unrealistically similar, but, then, it's a short story with no real pretense of scientific rigor). At the other extreme, some of Heinlein's fiction, notably THE DOOR INTO SUMMER, postulates that any alteration you make in the past isn't a real change at all. You're just doing whatever you did in the first place but weren't aware of in hindsight until after you went back and did it. (Is your head spinning yet?) Likewise, in one of the Harry Potter books, the actions of Harry and Hermione when using the time turner simply cause things to happen just as they had all along, previously unknown to the characters. In Diana Gabaldon's "Outlander" series, Claire (the traveler from the 20th century to the mid-18th) and Jamie strive to prevent the 1745 Jacobite rising and Bonnie Prince Charlie's invasion of Scotland. Although not completely powerless, they find their major goals unattainable. After the war unfolds on schedule, culminating in the catastrophic battle of Culloden despite their strenuous efforts to influence the course of events, they realize they can make only minor changes. It's as if the flow of time resists any significant alterations.

Time travel seems to work similarly in Connie Willis's series about mid-21st-century historians from Oxford. The transporting device can't send them anywhere close to a major historical event. If they deliberately or inadvertently aim for a critical nexus point, the traveler is simply bounced to a different nearby location. Thus the timeline corrects itself, smoothing out any ripples the characters create. Or so they believe -- this postulate is tested in the two-volume World War II epic BLACKOUT / ALL CLEAR, in which the historians fear they may have triggered disastrous changes in the original history.

The major theoretical issue with trying to improve the future -- one's own present -- by altering the past is what happens if you succeed. You would have had no reason to go into the past in the first place, and therefore you couldn't have peformed the actions that result / resulted / will or would result in achieving your goal. Many time-travel authors simply ignore this paradox. Some stories work on the premise that the travelers exist in a sort of bubble, in which only they remember both the original timeline and the new one, while everybody else is oblivious that anything has changed. The most logical solution is the outcome Stirling implies: The paradox makes it impossible to reshape one's own original history. Instead, the chrononaut's actions generate a new timeline branching off from the point of intervention. The protagonist of TO TURN THE TIDE can never find out whether that's what happens in the history he and his friends are creating, but the question is moot anyway. In the future they left, every person and thing they knew and loved has almost certainly been wiped out in a nuclear holocaust. Their hope is to spawn a new future without that apocalyptic destruction, even though they'll never know whether they've succeeded.

Although the "branching timelines" model makes the most rigorous sense, I do enjoy stories in which the protagonist achieves positive change by tweaking the past and returns home to enjoy the fruits of his or her efforts.

Margaret L. Carter

Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt.

Parallel Lives in Different Worlds

Speaking of living one's life over again, have I mentioned Jo Walton's novel MY REAL CHILDREN before? Having reread it last week, I'm impressed anew by its unusual approach to alternate history, possibly unique. At least, I don't remember encountering anything else like it. The British protagonist's personal timeline splits into two at the end of her Oxford education, and the story follows both of her lives in two separate worlds from that point in early adulthood to her old age.

The prologue introduces the elderly Patricia in a nursing home. As the nurses often note on her chart, she's Very Confused. She remembers her life as Tricia, in which she accepted Mark's proposal at the crucial point of divergence, but also her life as Pat, in which she refused him. Did she have four children plus multiple miscarriages and stillbirths, in an emotionallly abusive marriage from which she escaped in middle age, or three children in a fulfilled, mostly happy life with love, travel, and success as a writer? After the prologue, chapters alternate episodes from the timelines of Tricia and Pat, each helpfully labeled with the years covered in that chapter.

Interestingly, neither of her worlds corresponds to the history we know. Therefore, the reader can feel no temptation to prefer either timeline as "real." Both alternate Earths are more scientifically and technologically advanced than ours, having colonies on the Moon by the 1990s, at the end of Patricia's life. In one history, there's a multi-national research station; in the other, two mutually hostile lunar military bases confront each other. In the latter world, President Kennedy died from an assassin's bomb; in the former, he served out his term and declined to run for reelection in 1964. In one history, international chaos, local wars with a constant threat of nuclear holocaust, and repressive political systems even in advanced Western nations plague the world. The other timeline, although of course not perfect, enjoys prosperity, widespread freedom, international cooperation, and relative peace.

In the novel's most intriguing twist, Pat leads her fulfilling life in the dystopian world, while Tricia suffers through her miserable marriage in the much better world. Suppose she could relive the decisive conversation with Mark and make one timeline definitively real. Which would she pick? Ordinarily, I snarl in frustration at novels that leave the reader hanging at the end. This book's "Lady or the Tiger?" conclusion, however, strikes me as perfect. What alternative does Patricia choose? What SHOULD she choose? Leaving that question open makes the ideal culmination for this thought-provoking narrative.

Margaret L. Carter

Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt.

A World Without Christmas

The Hallmark channel has already begun its annual Countdown to Christmas movie marathon. For us (Episcopalians) the season runs from the first Sunday of Advent (early December) to Epiphany (January 6, aka Twelfth Night), and I keep the tree up at least until Epiphany. But starting before Halloween?!

Last Saturday night, I watched WHERE ARE YOU, CHRISTMAS? The protagonist wishes Christmas didn't exist and wakes up from a minor car crash to discover she's got her wish. She finds herself in an alternate reality where nobody else has heard of the holiday.

Does the script take into account any of the implications of a world with no Christmas? If they even thought of that aspect at all, they didn't bother, maybe to avoid complications that would distract from the theme of rediscovering the joy of the holiday. No Christmas implies no Jesus and no Christianity, a change that would make the history of Europe, Britain, and the Americas almost unrecognizable. As far as religion is concerned, you'd have Judaism, Asian religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism, and modern-day versions of the various pagan cults. As for Islam, I conjecture it might not exist without Christianity, at least in a form we'd easily recognize. So we should see pagan temples all over the place and people celebrating Saturnalia and/or Yuletide. (Earth's history as portrayed in the cartoon series STEVEN UNIVERSE takes this sort of thing seriously. There's no Christianity, so we don't see Christmas, Halloween, or Valentine's Day.)

For a less drastic point of divergence from actual history, suppose the Reformation as a whole concurred with the Puritan belief that the feast of the Nativity shouldn't be celebrated because it's merely a Christian veneer over a pagan festival, and the Catholic Counter-Reformation adopted that position, too. In that case, we can imagine Christmas being abandoned in the early modern era. Therefore, some people would recognize the word "Christmas" when the heroine mentions it, but for the most part they'd be medieval historians, which she probably wouldn't encounter in a typical Hallmark-movie small town. Moreover, in every human society outside of the tropics (as discussed in Stephen Nissenbaum's delightful book THE BATTLE FOR CHRISTMAS), the winter solstice has been celebrated by feasting and other forms of excess. In the absence of Yule or some other pagan observance, what, in this alternative universe, replaces Christmas? Apparently New Year's celebrations dominate the winter festive season, although this point is mentioned only once. The dialogue includes a slyly self-referential remark about New Year's-themed TV movies starting to air in June.

Aside from the practical difficulties of fitting this kind of speculation into a two-hour feature film (including commercial breaks), I suspect there's not much overlap between writers of alternate-history SF and made-for-TV romance movies.

Margaret L. Carter

Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt.

Based on a True Story

Historical fiction typically places invented characters and plotlines against the backdrop of real events, sometimes including encounters with famous people of the past. But historical novels of another type retell actual episodes from the past and differ from straight history or biography by introducing made-up incidents and characters without violating the recorded facts as generally accepted. Then there's the oxymoronic "nonfiction novel," exemplified by works such as Truman Capote's IN COLD BLOOD and Alex Haley's ROOTS, purporting to report history as it happened but in novelistic style, also with the insertion of invented walk-on characters, minor incidents, and dialogue:

Non-Fiction Novel

Wikipedia remarks that the definition of the form can be "flexible." Judging from the range of their examples, the word I'd use is "fuzzy." Some of the books they mention strike me as simply standard-model historical fiction. So the difference between that genre and the so-called nonfiction novel seems to be one of degree.

Sharyn McCrumb has written several novels based on murder cases in American history, notably THE BALLAD OF FRANKIE SILVER, THE BALLAD OF TOM DOOLEY, and THE UNQUIET GRAVE. She includes afterwords supplying the real-life background of the stories. In the author's afterword to THE BALLAD OF TOM DOOLEY, she answers the question of how much is true with, "As much as I could possibly verify." In the story itself, she fills in the gaps with her own conjectures based on what she considers the best evidence. THE DEVIL AMONGST THE LAWYERS, while also retelling an actual trial, takes some liberties with history, as McCrumb explains in her afterword.

Barbara Hambly's novel about the later life of Mary Todd Lincoln, THE EMANCIPATOR'S WIFE, with flashbacks to the former First Lady's youth and her marriage to Lincoln, follows a similar narrative strategy. It adheres to historical facts as known while creatively expanding on them.

Alternate history is a different thing, making deliberate changes in critical events to create a counterfactual world. For instance, S. M. Stirling's currently running series based on the premise that Theodore Roosevelt regained the presidency in the 2012 election is one outstanding example. Secret history, on the other hand, tells stories of critical events that fall between the cracks in documented history, without contradicting recorded facts (e.g., magical combat between British and German witches during World War II in a world otherwise resembling our own past).

What about autobiography? CHEAPER BY THE DOZEN, by Frank Bunker Gilbreth Jr. and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey, has been labeled a "semi-autobiographical novel," although from what I've read about it, the contents are factual. The book does skip around chronologically, however, and it omits some facts, mainly that the Gibreth family never had twelve children living at the same time. The death of one daughter in childhood is not mentioned. The "All Creatures Great and Small" series, by James Herriot (real name Alf Wight), shifts further toward the fiction category. While the incidents in the books really happened, names and other identifying characteristics of people in the episodes have been changed.

How far can a work that claims historical accuracy go with author-created elements before it crosses the line between straight history or biography and fiction?

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Crossing Genres

A publisher called Obsidian Butterfly is assembling an anthology to be titled "NecronomiRomCom," comprising Cthulhu Mythos romantic comedies:

Obsidian Butterfly

Working on a story to submit to this project reminded me of a panel at this year's RavenCon about mixing genres. A panelist asked what would be the most unlikely combination of genres. Of course, many mashups of classic novels with horror exist, such as PRIDE AND PREJUDICE AND ZOMBIES, SENSE AND SENSIBILITY AND SEA MONSTERS, and LITTLE WOMEN AND WEREWOLVES, but I'm not sure they count, consisting mostly of slightly revised texts of public-domain originals with horror content tacked on. Paranormal romance and various permutations of historical, SF, or futuristic romance have become recognized subgenres in their own right. Historical mysteries are also commonplace, as a natural outgrowth of the quest for fresh settings in which to place unsolved murders. Historical fantasy and horror aren't much of a stretch, either. Mystery is compatible with many other genres, and a romance subplot can be included in almost any kind of fiction. Randall Garrett's Lord Darcy series combines alternate history, fantasy, and mystery. Effective, credible crossovers of that kind require the setting and the magical rules to be clearly and consistently laid out for the reader, with no cheating.

Novels of secret histories that transform famous people of the past into fighters against supernatural evil demand more suspension of disbelief. Authors have made Abraham Lincoln a vampire slayer and Queen Elizabeth the First a hunter of demons. A duology by Cherie Priest, MAPLECROFT and CHAPELWOOD, pits Lizzie Borden, in her reclusive later years, against Lovecraftian monsters. (In this version of her life, she really did kill her father and stepmother, but only because they were possessed by eldritch entities from the sea.)

The Cthulhu Mythos seems to be a favorite candidate for genre-blending. The anthology SHADOWS OVER BAKER STREET merges the worlds of Lovecraft and Sherlock Holmes, a not terribly unbelievable combination. There's at least one anthology of stories set in a postapocalyptic world where HPL's extradimensional monsters have conquered Earth. Plunging into the realm of the absurd, SCREAM FOR JEEVES, by Peter H. Cannon, retells several of Lovecraft's best-known stories by inserting P. G. Wodehouse's characters and style into them. Probably the most incongruous cross-genre mashup I've ever encountered, however, is an anthology titled THE CALL OF POOHTHULHU--H. P. Lovecraft meets Winnie-the-Pooh.

Or how about colorful Lovecraftian board books for small children? A Mythos alphabet book is one of several cute products from the "C Is for Cthulhu" project:

C Is for Cthulhu

Has anybody here run into an unlikelier combination?

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Do-Overs

A vintage short story that was filmed as a TWILIGHT ZONE episode features an elderly millionaire who wants to relive his life, with his memories intact, for the thrill of making his fortune all over again. He stikes a deal with a demon and is duly returned to his home town in the early 20th century. Unfortunately, the past turns out to be less golden than he imagined, and, most important, he forgets to specify having his youth restored. Therefore, he suffers a heart attack and dies for lack of modern medicine. As he faces death, the demon taunts him about his request that he keep his memories: "Can we help it if your memory is lousy?"

The hypothetical question often arises, "Would you live your life over again, knowing what you know now?" Occasionally pondering that fantasy, I definitely would not accept a do-over from childhood or even my early teens. Go through all that again, with the added horror of being treated like a dependent child while having the mind and memories of an adult in my seventies? No, thanks! In the movie PEGGY SUE GOT MARRIED, a middle-aged woman reverts to her high-school self with her memories intact, faced with the decision of whether or not to repeat the choices that led to marrying her present-day husband, from whom she's currently separated. After reliving part of her senior year (spoiler), she reawakens to her reasons for loving her husband and, upon returning to the present, decides to stay with him.

Would I repeat my life starting from, say, my marriage at the age of eighteen? In T. Kingfisher's latest horror novel, A HOUSE WITH GOOD BONES, the narrator returns to her grandmother's house (now her mother's), where she lived for part of her childhood and teens. Upon waking up in her old bedroom on the first morning, she experiences a disorienting moment of terror that her entire life since the age of ten has been a dream, and she'll be condemned to repeating high school, college, and graduate school—and writing her PhD dissertation all over again. I can identify with that nightmare. I'm not sure I'd have the stamina to struggle through all my university courses and the rewriting of my dissertation from scratch, although I might perform better in my advancement-to-candidacy oral exam with the memory of my previous blunders. On the other hand, I would have a fair chance to avoid most if not all of the worst mistakes and wrongdoings of my first lifetime. And yet, knowing I'd have to relive some painful events that are outside my control, would I want to face them again?

A further concern: If I repeated my life from my wedding day on, we might end up without all the children we've had in this timeline. Alternate history novels often include real people from the primary world but in different roles from the ones they played in our version of history. Although that's an entertaining trope I enjoy reading, in fact it's a vanishingly remote possiblity. A minor change in the timing of a sexual act could more likely than not result in the conception of a different individual. A difference of a month would, of course, definitely do so. Given a point of departure in the 19th century—say, the familiar scenario of the South winning the Civil War—virtually none of the people alive today, at least in this country, would ever have been conceived. On a lesser scale, the same result would happen in a family after a point of departure in one couple's married life. In Jo Walton's novel MY REAL CHILDREN, the protagonist faces a moment of decision in early adulthood when she decides whether or not to marry the man whom she's been dating. That decision splits her life from then on into two separate timelines, one in which they marry and one where they don't. In her final years, she remembers both lifetimes and families she's had. One interesting aspect of this novel, by the way, is that neither timeline is our own history. One alternate world turns out worse, the other better; in a further intriguing twist, the protagonist's personal life is happier in the dystopic world than in the optimistic one.

So if a genie offers to grant me a wish to re-do my adult life, I think I'll turn it down. That scenario would hold too many risky variables.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Real People as Characters

I've just finished reading the ten Catherine Le Vendeur novels by Sharan Newman, mysteries set in twelfth-century Europe (mostly in France). Catherine begins as a novice at the Abbey of the Paraclete and a student of Abbess Heloise. At the end of the first book, Catherine leaves the convent, rather than taking final vows, and gets married. Thus she's not only an intelligent young woman but highly educated for a lady of that era. Like any reluctant amateur detective, she frequently stumbles over corpses or gets entangled in events that endanger her family and friends. She applies the logic she learned from her teacher to probe these mysteries. Over the course of her adventures, she crosses paths with many distinguished historical figures in addition to Heloise, Peter Abelard, and their son, Astrolabe. (Yes, that was actually his name.) Significant historical events such as important church councils, with the associated political controversies, provide backdrops to the stories. Judging from Newman's afterwords to the books and her expertise in medieval studies, she clearly took care to place the real people in the series at locations where they're known to have been or could have been in the given year and not to show them doing anything that conflicts with their documented personalities and behavior.

I once read a post on Quora that vehemently objected to including people who actually existed, regardless of which century they lived in, as characters in fiction. That attitude baffled me. I can't think of a valid reason to consider such fiction disrespectful, and a lot of excellent works would never have been written if authors accepted that prohibition as a rule. Several of Sharyn McCrumb's Appalachian "Ballad Novels" tell stories based on real events—for instance, THE BALLAD OF TOM DOOLEY, whose afterword explains that the narrative sticks as close to reality as she could manage. Since it's a novel, though, McCrumb was free to speculate about motives and invent incidents and dialogue. Barbara Hambly does the same in THE EMANCIPATOR'S WIFE, about the later life of Lincoln's widow but with flashbacks to earlier periods. I see no problem with portraying historical persons in fiction if the author does conscientious research, sticks to the recorded facts except when filling in gaps where creative license is appropriate, and doesn't show the subjects behaving in ways incompatible with their known characters.

Writers of alternate history and secret history, of course, have much greater scope for invention. "Secret history" refers to fiction that doesn't change the facts of the past as generally known and accepted but inserts other events, often supernatural, occurring behind the scenes: Vlad the Implaler was a vampire. Lincoln was a vampire slayer. Elizabeth I was a demon hunter. Wizards on both sides shaped the course of World War II. I can enjoy these kinds of novels as long as the depictions of historical figures stick close to their true-life personalities. Otherwise, why bother writing about them at all instead of inventing your own characters?

The closer we get to the present, it seems to me, the more problematic it becomes to use actual people as protagonists. Successful books, however, have been published on plot premises such as H. P. Lovecraft and Robert Howard on a road trip to confront eldritch horrors or C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien fighting the forces of evil. Personally, I might have qualms about making fictional protagonists of people with still-living relatives and friends who remember them.

I do draw the line at the use of live, present-day celebrities as fictional characters, except as walk-on "extras" or as part of the cultural background. (E.g., the protagonist attends a concert by a famous singer or watches a presidential debate.) There's a subgenre of fan fiction, "real people" fanfic, that consists of stories about celebrities such as singers and actors. It even includes, incredibly, slash scenarios between living individuals. While I'm adamantly opposed to censorship and therefore don't advocate making this sort of privacy invasion illegal, one would think it would be precluded by good taste and simple courtesy.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Reviews 56 - Winds of Wrath by Taylor Anderson

Reviews 56

Winds of Wrath

by

Taylor Anderson

Reviews haven't been indexed yet.

In Reviews 53, 54, and 55 we scrutinized three very differently structured Series, long-running Series in different  genres, none of them Romance Genre.

Reviews 53
https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2020/06/reviews-53-fenmere-job-by-marshall-ryan.html

Reviews 54
https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2020/06/reviews-54-resurgence-by-c-j-cherryh.html

Reviews 55
https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2020/07/reviews-55-walking-shadows-by-faye.html

Note Gini Koch's ALIEN series
is not among these because it is Romance.  A romance reader striving to sell their own novels into the Romance genre can't really learn much new from reading perfect mixes of Science Fiction, Fantasy, Romance and Gaming -- which is what Gini Koch's ALIEN series is.

Here are 16 novels in the series listed in order on Amazon, rated as steamy paranormal romance, but that's not how I see it.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B074C6WPPK

And today we look at the structure and pacing of Winds of Wrath (June 2020 Book 15)  by Taylor Anderson, a wrap-up ending for his long-running Destroyermen Series (which I adore!).

There is a reason all these series are so long, other than that I love long series of large books.

Each of these series tells A story - one-long-continuous-story.  Each is "the story of" something very different from the others.  They make a set to contrast/compare and learn from.

The Destroyermen series features a wondrous lesson in THE EXPOSITORY LUMP,

C. J. Cherryh's exposition style in the Foreigner Series

makes an informative contrast too Destroyermen.  Cherryh's exposition recounts the Situation and Relationships begun in previous books and advanced just a tiny bit in the current book.  As the series progresses, the expository train becomes larger than the current novel's advancement.  Some fans are losing patience with the apparently static pacing of the series.

The Destroyermen also has a long-long expository trail of the things the Characters did and what happened because of it in previous books.  But in this current book, the explosive (literally, as it is a war-story) pacing carries the plot and story to CONCLUSION.

War is a tedious thing to live through.  "Hurry up and Wait" is the mantra of the soldier being moved about on a worldwide chessboard by Generals who don't know their names.

And that has been the pacing core of the Destroyermen Series - hurry up and wait.  The developments flash across the page at a dizzying rate, then slow to a creep for pages and pages.

Anderson usually moves some characters through action, great battle scenes, and long-range maneuvers, then jumps to another set of characters on a different side of the World War, on a different continent.

The astute reader (and student of our World Wars) will recognize the structure.  It is a World War.

To keep his readers fascinated, Anderson inserts long, detailed descriptions of the ordnance development, of the science and inventiveness of the natives of his invented world.  It is description, all static exposition, tedious as war itself, but precisely based on the developmental stages this world went through during World Wars.

War spurs industry, creativity, invention.  The non-humans of this parallel world at war learn fast and prevail by creativity alone.

Here, in the final book of this story, survival depends entirely on creativity, on guts, and on freehand invention of strategy and tactics by a total amateur, the Captain of a Destroyer whipped from World War II Earth's South Pacific and plunged into a parallel Earth's war for survival.

The Alternative History creation is superb, the imagination fabulous, and the characters engaging

But it's the pacing you should focus on.

Here is the index to the entries on Pacing.

https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2020/07/index-to-mysteries-of-pacing.html

If you want a Character to do an "about-face" in life-direction, to change from "I'll never get married" to "Will you marry me" -- you need more space than just one novel.

Gini Koch's Alien is susceptible to the marriage idea at the beginning, before they meet and become irrevocably entangled.

Other soldiers of fortune types are resistant, as resistant as guys who believe there can never been any such thing as Happily Ever After.

To change such a Character's ideas about Love and Romance, you need TIME and SPACE for him to arc.

https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2020/05/theme-story-integration-part-5-how-to.html

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com