Science Fiction: Alternate History

In an earlier post I mentioned that I have been addicted to reading for most of my life. I cannot imagine not having at least one book going – and it is often more – and like any good, prudent addict, I usually have my next couple of fixes lined up before I actually need them.

Though I will read books in German (again, like any addict, in case of emergency I’m prepared to read almost anything in preference to having nothing to read at all) and although my German is fluent – after a quarter of a century in the country it should be! – I much prefer to read in English. For that reason alone on-line shopping with Amazon has proved to be a great blessing. I also frequent the local library but after ten years in the same town I’ve pretty well read everything they’ve got in their not-so-vast English section that I’m interested in.

To keep my rather strange, quirky conscience quiet, I do make regular efforts to read what an earlier generation might call “improving” stuff, particularly history and philosophy but also other “serious” literature. But primarily I read for entertainment and relaxation and so my staple diet is fiction and particularly what is called “speculative fiction”; science fiction and fantasy, often simply referred to as sf.

It is perhaps excessively old-fashioned and oversensitive to confess that there is a part of me that feels slightly ashamed to admit this preference openly. The time is long past when science fiction and fantasy were regarded as something inferior and slightly vulgar by the arbiters of literary taste. In my youth, however, something of this attitude still remained and I have, perhaps, been slightly tainted by the view that fantasy was something childish and science fiction sensationalist pulp rubbish, devoid of any deeper literary significance. So there is still that lurking feeling in me which believes that professing a preference for science fiction and fantasy is like a well-born elderly lady declaring in a fine restaurant that she’d rather have beer than wine with her dinner. But as I’ve decided to be honest, I’ll even shock my own enlightened liberal left-wing sensibilities by outing myself as a closet fan of military space opera of the kind written by David Weber, David Drake and (oh, the shame of it!) that militaristic reactionary who scatters his books with the corpses of millions of both humans and ghastly aliens alike, John Ringo. But further elucidation of this is perhaps best left for a later post after I’ve come to terms with my own honesty.

Speculative fiction has become so popular and accepted nowadays that it has spawned all sorts of sub-genres; hard sf, soft sf, cyberpunk, sword and sorcery, epic fantasy, space opera, magic realism, steampunk, dystopias, space opera, etc., etc. However, such genres are not hard and fast and many of the best authors switch effortlessly between them or produce works which can be categorised in many genres simultaneously. It can even be difficult to find a definition of speculative or science fiction on which all can agree. Personally, I like the comment of Mark C. Glassy, cited in Wikipedia, best; the definition of science fiction is like the definition of pornography: you don't know what it is, but you know it when you see it.

Of all the various wonderful thematic byways of sf, alternate history is a particular favourite of mine, perhaps because I have always been fascinated by history (and indeed have a degree in the subject). Alternate history generally takes as its starting point a particular event or moment in history and asks what if it happened differently; what would the world look like as a result?

There are various ways the theme can be introduced. Sometimes something unexplained happens so that timelines get tangled up. In Eric Flint’s 1632 series, for example, an act of incompetence by technologically vastly superior interstellar beings sends a late 20^th Century small town from West Virginia back to Germany in the middle of the Thirty Years War. John Birmingham sends a naval task force from 2021 (led by the aircraft-carrier USS Hilary Clinton, named after an assassinated US president) back to the middle of World War II in his Axis of Time novels (in this case it was a scientific experiment someone got spectacularly wrong). While Flint’s series has expanded to several books, some by other authors, and seems to be getting lost in the sheer complexity of working out all the ramifications of the changes the people of Grantville work in the intricate history and society of 17^th Century Europe, Birmingham develops a tight and very well thought out plot to bring the Second World War to an end in three volumes.

World War II is a favourite theme in alternate history books. Frequently Germany wins. The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick, published in 1962 is set in a USA dominated by Japan and Germany. Robert Harris has produced a more recent treatment of the subject in Fatherland, a detective story set in a victorious Germany in the early 1960s, in a world in which the USA is ruled by President Kennedy; President Joseph P. Kennedy.

The master of alternate history is the U.S. author Harry Turtledove. His magnum opus is the 15 book long “Timeline-191” series, an alternate history of America in which the South wins the Civil War and which runs to the victory of the USA over the CSA at the end of a different Second World War in 1944. (The theme of the South winning the Civil War was also treated by Winston Churchill in an essay written in 1931; alternate history can claim many prominent “guests.”) Turtledove has a doctorate in history and his research into and knowledge of “real” history is stupendous, making his complex alternate history completely believable. One of the fascinating aspects of Turtledove’s story is the way he involves figures who played an important role in our history in his alternative; General Custer is not killed by the Sioux but has a successful military career in the Great War, General Patton is a racist fighting for the Confederacy in World War II and the young Confederate sailor, Jimmy Carter, dies defending his home town of Plains, Georgia in 1942.

My favourite work by Turtledove is Ruled Britannia, in which William Shakespeare becomes involved in a plot to free the captive Queen Elizabeth and expel the Spanish for England, years after the success of the Armada. Apart from an exciting story line and a very adroit use of Shakespearian language, Turtledove also manages to create two new plays by the Bard himself, “King Philip” and “Queen Boudicca.”

But if I had to recommend one work of alternate history it would have to be The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson. A book with a span of 700 hundred years, the basic premise is that the Black Death carries off 99% of Europe’s population instead of the estimated 30% it actually killed. Henceforth European culture and religion no longer plays any role in world history. Renaissance, Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment all take place, but within Chinese, Hindu, Buddhist and Islamic contexts – with a more open and enlightened form of Islam than we know basically taking much of the place Christian influenced culture has in our world. Robinson, who wrote his doctoral thesis on the writings of Philip K. Dick, is interested in social and environmental issues as well as the development of science and The Years of Rice, with its vast canvas, its non-eurocentric approach and its strongly Buddhist-influenced context is so different to most other works in the genre that it will continue to rattle around in your head long after you have finished reading it.

I could go on and on about science fiction books worth reading but unfortunately I have to catch a shuttle to the regular hyperspace liner to Arcturus VII, which is due to leave Earth orbit in a few hours time. See you soon in another dimension!

For reasons I do not at all understand, I've always liked this fluffy pop one-hit wonder with a science-fiction flavour from the 80s!

Narnia

A few evenings ago, I had the apartment to myself and needed something new to read. This, in itself, is not so unusual; those who know me better know that I am incurably, deeply addicted to reading and that I always have a book going, frequently more than one, and it is completely unthinkable for me not to have something to read. Reading is as necessary for me as breathing and eating and has been since, at the age of five, I discovered the myriads of worlds contained inside book-covers.

A fortunate aspect of my particular form of this infinitely pleasant addiction is that I am well capable of rereading many books; in fact, one of my basic criteria for judging a book is the question as to whether I could imagine reading it again. So I perused my bookshelves and stopped at a large, handsome hardback volume, a special offer at Amazon for a pittance I happened to stumble across around a year ago, The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis. Now that’s an idea, I thought, just the right evening for it. I made a choice of CDs (Händel’s Wassermusik being the first of the selection), a pot of roibusch tea, settled down into my armchair and returned happily to a world I first discovered over forty years ago.

When I was nine years old, we moved from the village of Tinahely to Wicklow town. I found the move very hard. Tinahely is a small village, beautifully situated in the Wicklow Mountains, and I had felt completely at home there. It was small enough for us as children to know practically everyone (or so we thought anyway) and, as a boy I had, with friends, explored large areas of the hilly countryside round about (http://www.tinahely.ie/index.php?id=1). The move to the larger town of Wicklow left me feeling desperately homesick for many months, even if there were compensations, like a large public library. One cold and wet evening that winter, my father returned from a business trip to Dublin bringing three books by C.S. Lewis with him, The Magician’s Nephew, The Horse and His Boy and The Silver Chair. And so, for the first time I entered the world of Narnia.

I think I would have loved the books anyway; my acquaintance with fantasy went right back to the first book I remember reading, Lewis Carroll’s Alice, and I had already been enchanted by The Wind in the Willows. But I think my unhappiness at that time increased my wonder at the world Lewis had created – it was escapism, pure and simple, but such escapism need not always be bad, particularly for a child. And what an escape! Children having wonderful adventures with marvellous, fantastic creatures in a magical world, written in a beautiful language with a narrative surety which pulls you along effortlessly through the stories. Lewis once said somewhere that he wrote the stories he himself as a child would have liked to read and he knew how to put things into stories which are important for children, like describing good things to eat, and, more generally, taking the time to tell of nice and happy things which happen, as well as portraying the tension, fear, uncertainty and discomfort which are the motors which move an adventure along. He also had the talent of addressing his readers directly with little asides, as an oral storyteller will do, moving briefly with a sentence outside the story (reminding you, often at some of the most frightening parts, that it is just a story), something which generally appeals to younger readers. At any rate it appealed to me.

Lewis wrote the seven Narnia books between 1949 and 1955 (they were published annually from 1950 to 1956). Although their publishing order is somewhat different, they follow a clear chronology, portraying the world of Narnia from its creation in The Magician’s Nephew to its end in The Last Battle (although the first published and perhaps most famous is The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe). My father, I think, knew nothing of this when he brought those three books home to us in the winter of 1969-70, and the fact that I read them out of sequence didn’t particularly worry me at the time. Interestingly, in his choice of three out of seven he managed to select the only books in which none of the Pevensie children play a role. Be that as it may, having read those three, I was determined to read the others as quickly as possible and, in the next year or two I managed to get my hands on all of them (if, in some cases, only temporarily from the local library).

What happened to those original books I do not know. I have four younger brothers and sisters and our family moved house a couple of times after that, none of which facts are particularly conducive to the survival of individual paperback books. During my time as a novice in the Dominican Order, I rediscovered all seven of them in the novel library of the noviciate house in Cork. I reread them, of course, along with many other of the books there – that novel library played a not insignificant role in my surviving that pretty strict, austere year (and I was instinctively careful not to mention to my novice master just how frequently I used it to enliven what were frequently pretty monotonous afternoons and evenings we were supposed to spend “studying,” just one aspect of a fairly completely regulated daily timetable).

The Chronicles of Narnia, as they are generally known, have been read and loved by millions of children (and adults) since they were published over half a century ago. They have also been the subject of some (frequently fierce) criticism. Lewis’ friend, fellow academic and fellow Inkling (a member of their informal literary club in Oxford), J.R.R. Tolkien disliked what he saw as Lewis’ too pervasive use of allegory in the stories, even though Tolkien himself was a convinced Catholic and more than a little instrumental in Lewis’ conversion to Christianity. And, indeed, the allusions to Christianity, particularly in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and The Last Battle, are laid on pretty thick; the former being – in its basic plot line – a retelling of the basic Christian theme of betrayal, execution and resurrection, with Aslan as a hardly-disguised god-man (or god-lion) Christ figure. The contemporary children’s fantasy author and hard-line atheist, Philip Pullman, has been particularly harsh, describing the Narnia cycle as “one of the most ugly and poisonous things I've ever read” (http://www.crlamppost.org/darkside.htm). Pullman, of course, as a member of the Richard Dawkin’s school of muscular atheism, finds Lewis’ Christian apologetics deeply repugnant and resents that innocent children, reading the Narnia stories for fun, are thus willy-nilly subjected to Christian propaganda. He goes on to lambast Lewis’ “supernaturalism … reactionary sneering … misogyny … racism … and sheer dishonesty of his narrative method.”

Although my world-view is much closer to that of Pullman than of Lewis (my own faith-journey having taken the opposite direction to that of Lewis), I think he goes much too far here. Yes, Lewis is pushing Christianity, but I don’t think that really influences his young readers all that much. Children aren't bad at filtering out superfluous stuff and in Lewis' books the story is the important thing, because it's being told so well. And yes, he is (for all that he was Irish born) an English gentleman academic, born at the end of the 19^th Century, with all the residual misogyny, snobbery and racism such a background brings with it. Much the same can be said for Tolkien (although Tolkien had no interest in expounding Christian theology in Lord of the Rings and didn’t). In the end, it doesn’t really matter, because the Narnia books are rattling good stories, exquisitely written. And, if I dare say it, much better than Pullman’s Dark Material trilogy, fine though this undoubtedly is. Pullman writes good fantasy, Lewis wrote classics.

One thing does unite Pullman and Lewis and contrasts them with Tolkien – the film versions of their works (The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Prince Caspian and Pullman’s The Golden Compass) are weak. It took the genius of Peter Jackson to tackle the most complicated and difficult project and produce a worthy cinematographic version of The Lord of the Rings (even if not as good as the literary original, but then, films never are really, are they?).

So, I’ve got to go now. You see, I have an appointment in Narnia (more correctly in Calormen, that threatening empire across the Great Desert to the south) with the Horse and his Boy …Narnia and the North!

Sixpence None the Richer are were a professed Christian group, who gave C.S. Lewis as one of their major influences. "Kiss me" was their biggest hit.

Bloody Steel

I've just finished reading Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith; set in the USSR in 1953, the year of Stalin's death. The book is an excellent thriller, using as a factual inspiration the serial killer, Andrei Chikatilo, also known as “the Rostov Ripper”, who was actually active during the 1980s.

What makes the book so good is the fact that it works on so many different levels. Behind the packing thriller/detective story, Smith explores and exposes the ghastly horror of life in the Soviet Union under Stalin and looks deeply at fundamental questions of individual morality and personal, existential redemption within such a gruesome, dehumanising system of terror.

Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, known publicly as “Stalin” [man of steel], (1878-1953) achieved supreme power in the Soviet Union in the years following Lenin's death in 1924; by 1928 he had pushed all his rivals (the most prominent being Leon Trotsky) aside and basically ruled the USSR alone for the next quarter of a century. It became a period in which the people of the USSR suffered and died on a scale unprecedented before and since, even when compared to the years of civil war and chaos following the October Revolution. Apart from the 35 million Soviet citizens killed during World War II (still preferably known in Russia as the Great Patriotic War, which, incidentally did not begin until 1941), experts reckon that somewhere between 10 and 20 million more lost their lives as a result of famines, purges, forced labour and comprehensive mistreatment and torture in the Gulags (the widespread network of prisons and labour camps, mostly in Siberia), compulsory collectivisation and forced relocations of whole ethnic groups. How could such horrors happen (even leaving World War II aside) and how could a whole people accept it?

There are many complex answers to these questions – the most hair-raising being the old saw that the Russian people (and the nations dominated by Russia up to the early 1990s) has always been one of ignorant, passive, lazy peasants who understand nothing but the whip and the cudgel. This is, of course, ridiculous, but one sometimes gets the feeling that even the present-day Russian elites still have this attitude. From an historical perspective, it can be argued that the former Soviet empire has little of a democratic tradition and that autocracy and rule by decree rather than law are deeply rooted in its tradition and history. This is true, as far as it goes, but the same could be said for a lot of European countries (including many Western European ones) as recently as a hundred years ago. No, I believe that the Stalinist system, building on the Leninist system, which is itself quite a particular perversion of Marxist themes, formed a diabolical structure within which terror was not only possible but predicated and which was so ideologically refined and practically organised that any dissent, or even the possibility of potential dissent was ruthlessly and effectively eradicated. In this sense, apart from all the millions of dead and the hundreds of millions condemned to living for decades in grey distrust, fear and deprivation, Marxism itself is a victim of its Stalinist perversion; enduringly discredited by the horrors carried out in its name.

Marx saw society as being in a state of evolution, a development in which structures arose and became more complex until they self-destructed under their own internal contradictions, the result being new societal structures in which the whole process began once more. This, admittedly drastically simplified, is what he called dialectics, or, more properly, dialectical materialism. Analysing society in the second half of the 19^th Century, Marx posited that the most developed nations of Western Europe and North America – as a result, basically, of the Industrial Revolution – had entered the capitalist phase of societal development, following more primitive forms such as mercantile, feudal or slave-based structures. But capitalism itself was not and could not be the final, optimal form of society; in itself capitalism contained too many contradictions, contradictions which were growing and deepening. Capitalism had brought forth a new class of people, the workers, those who possess nothing other than their children – the proletariat.

As capitalism develops, the conflict between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie (the class of the capitalists) increases because their interests are ineluctably opposed. Eventually the tension becomes too great, the proletariat rises in rebellion, taking the means of production into common collective ownership, wiping out capitalism and inaugurating the perfect society, communism. Perfect, because there are no more contradictions to be overcome. It is the end of alienation and in this condition the state itself withers away because it has become superfluous.

The period of revolution and the eradication of capitalism is a transitional state, socialism, characterised by what Marx calls “the dictatorship of the proletariat,” a state in which hard measures and difficult positions must be taken to protect the revolution against the reactionary forces of bourgeois counter-revolution. The logic of Marx's thinking led him to expect that the revolution would begin in the most highly industrialised societies, where the tensions between capital and workers had reached their extremes – areas like Britain, Northern France, the Low Countries, Western Germany or the North Eastern United States. But it was obviously the duty of all enlightened people who had accepted the truth of his analysis to work to hasten the coming workers' revolution, which was historically inevitable.

This, in a vastly simplified summary, is the kernel of Marx's theory of society and the march of history. In its application to Russia, Lenin, the leader and chief ideologue of the Russian communists was faced with a major problem. Russian society, still dominated by agriculture and an aristocrat/peasant society, was – according to Marxist categories – still primitive, with capitalism still in its infancy there. Much would have to happen before it had developed enough to become an arena for a workers' revolution. Lenin and many other Marxists were, understandably, not prepared to wait. Lenin worked out a theory which would allow the revolution to take place in Russia; it would take an elite, a group of people who understood the processes of history and its inevitable development, who could – on the basis of this understanding – confidently decide which the next steps to be taken were and be sure that these decisions were always correct. A group which would form the “vanguard of the proletariat,” which could guide and lead the workers through the revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat, through the transitional phase of socialism to true communism. The Party.

In Leninism the Party is infallible – even more so than the pope, for the Party is infallible in every area of life and society. Nothing is too unimportant or trivial to escape its scrutiny, for the project during the socialist phase and the dictatorship of the proletariat is nothing less than the purification of society of all remains of bourgeois influence, the practical perfection of communist humanity. The wishes and rights of the individual are insignificant compared with the importance of this project; “the individual is nothing, the collective is all.”

Stalin succeeded in gaining total control of the Party and so attained an unparalleled position of infallibility and power within Soviet society. He did this by a combination of cunning political manoeuvring and absolute ruthlessness. Having achieved ultimate power, he kept it by a combination of the same political manoeuvring and ruthlessness, accompanied by an indomitable will and a terrifying unpredictability. Terrifying is the only applicable word, for terror was Stalin's basic tool and he used it with an unerring instinct, refined probably over years of criminal thuggery prior to the 1917 Revolution.

In much of this, Stalin appears as a mirror-image of his greatest adversary, Adolf Hitler. Perhaps the only real significant difference between them is that Stalin won. There were some who appeared to have realised his dangerous nature; in the last months of his life, Lenin tried to warn against him but by that stage Stalin had already established too much control within the Party and Lenin's misgivings went unheeded or, at least, not heeded enough – Trotsky seems to have recognised the danger, but Trotsky had already been outmanoeuvred by the Man of Steel. In the course of the Second World War, Churchill also seems to have realised it, but was basically powerless to do anything about it; exhausted by the war, the western allies had no stomach for an immediate continuation of the war and Roosevelt in particular, tired and ill, consistently underestimated the Soviet leader. And so, Eastern Europe was handed over to Stalinist domination and the people of the Soviet Union were left in their purgatory. The allies failed the nerve and the strength, the ruthlessness and the stomach for carrying on the war against a new enemy – and given the situation in May 1945 who can blame them? France was in ruins, Britain exhausted and US concentration was now focussed on the Pacific theatre. In practical terms, defeating the Stalinist USSR would probably have entailed the use of atomic weapons on a scale far beyond that used against Japan (and in May 1945, the US still hadn't perfected the bomb).

As far as we can tell, Stalin seems to have believed in the political ideology of the Party he so completely dominated. And it was indeed the widespread genuine belief in Marxist-Leninism within the Soviet system which made his tyranny so effective. Even many of those denounced as dissidents and enemies of the Revolution who were subjected to show-trials and subsequent execution during the thirties accepted their fates as being justified, since the judgement of the Party was the judgement of history and could not err. Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon is a wonderful depiction of this mindset. The personal journey of Leo Demidov, the hero of Smith's Child 44 also has much to do with this viewpoint and its results for those who hold it. Demidov is an officer of the NKVD (the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs), Stalin's public and secret police organisation. His position has involved him in the observation and prosecution of thousands of people suspected of subversion or anti-Soviet actions or opinions. At the beginning of the book, he has no problem with any of this; such actions are necessary to protect and advance the development of Soviet society toward true Communism. The Party and the Soviet state cannot err – those suspected of illicit thoughts and activities are probably guilty because otherwise there would be no reason to suspect them of illicit views and actions and are treated accordingly. His problems begin when he comes across evidence that a serial murderer may be at large. This puts him into an ideological quandary because the Party position does not allow for the existence of such a pathological criminal within socialist society; such deviants can only exist in the corrupt, decadent society of the bourgeois west.

It was this unquestioning belief in the rightness of the Party – and its great leader, Comrade Stalin – which gave his absolute power such a firm foundation. In this context, Stalin's cynical question about the number of battalions commanded by the pope becomes almost modest, for he might also have boasted that he himself commanded more unquestioning fanatical believers than the pope. But, having moved beyond automatic faith in the infallibility of the Party line as defined and determined by the all-wise Comrade Stalin, Demidov is faced with the deepest question of all; what are the options for any decent person who is willy-nilly part of an all-pervasive structure which is fundamentally evil and corrupt? When resistance or even the smallest acts of non-compliance – even the private, internal choice to doubt the system – almost inevitably means his own death and the destruction of the lives of all those he cares for?

This is the final, infernal subtlety of the Stalinist system; the victims themselves are co-opted as perpetrators, everyone becomes implicated and there are no innocents. But, lest we become too thankful for the fact that we do not have to live within such structures, perhaps we should ask ourselves if we would rather not know where the wonderfully cheap jeans, pair of shoes or laptop we bought recently were made and how much human suffering, misery and exploitation were involved in their manufacture? How much are we implicated in, perverted by the many-layered, complexly woven, corrupt systems in which we daily find ourselves? Is it possible for us to free ourselves from these structures at all, without becoming ascetic monks? And how much of the cogent criticism non-dogmatic Marxist-inspired thinking and critique might bring to such questions has been irrevocably sullied by by its deadly Stalinist parody?

Stalin's legacy lives on. Others learned from him, his use of terror, propaganda and the cult of personality; Mao, for example, Enver Hoxha in Albania, or the still-ruling Kim dynasty in North Korea. And even today in Russia, Stalin still enjoys considerable popularity, the darker basic truth airbrushed away in favour of the man whose indomitable will pushed through industrialisation and modernisation in the Soviet Union and whose stubborn refusal to surrender led the Red Army and the Soviet people to victory against Hitler's Germany in the Great Patriotic War (never mind that the USSR was a passive ally of the Third Reich up to 1941 - passive, that is, with the exception of Poland). But then, Vladimir Putin sometimes seems to have learned a thing or two from his predecessor (looking at the way the independent press has been treated in Russia in the past years, for example) and he did, after all, begin his career in the KGB …

http://www.amazon.com/Child-44-Tom-Rob-Smith/dp/B0029LHX1W/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1284670215&sr=1-1

It wasn't easy to find a musical accompaniment for this post. Pink Floyd's “Waiting for the Worms” somehow seems to suit.