Speculative History....

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what would have happened if x had happened? I love indulging in this, tho someone I know who studied history told me that it is frowned upon amongst serious historians.

What do you think about it?

― MarkH (MarkH), Monday, 16 February 2004 00:32 (twenty-two years ago)

and can anyone recommend any books on the subject, be they discussing it in general or novels where the premise is that a particular historical event either didn't happen or happened differently.

― MarkH (MarkH), Monday, 16 February 2004 00:34 (twenty-two years ago)

haha - what was the onion thing on philip k dick in our dumb century?

― cinniblount (James Blount), Monday, 16 February 2004 00:34 (twenty-two years ago)

I remember some novel about some time traveler giving the SOUTH M-16s during the Civil War!

― Jon Williams (ex machina), Monday, 16 February 2004 00:35 (twenty-two years ago)

there is a book (serious historical) packed with essays of the kind 'what if jfk hadn't been shot' etc. but i don't know name or author! it's what you want though. i think it came out in 95, someone i know was reading it at the time.

― pete s, Monday, 16 February 2004 00:37 (twenty-two years ago)

I heard there was a novel, called 'fatherland', about what could have happened if the nazis hadn't won the war and stuff.

― RJG (RJG), Monday, 16 February 2004 00:38 (twenty-two years ago)

one occurred to me earlier today actually - what would have happened if Queen Mary I wasn't childless? If she had had a son who survived into adulthood, wouldn't he have become king of both England and Spain, seeing as Mary was married to the King of Spain?

― MarkH (MarkH), Monday, 16 February 2004 00:38 (twenty-two years ago)

hadn't won the war and stuff.

*had* won, shurely????

― MarkH (MarkH), Monday, 16 February 2004 00:39 (twenty-two years ago)

Was that the Niall Ferguson edition? That was funny how it tended to be hoary old bugbears of the right (ie key moments where we came off the rails and allowed the pinkos to gain ground). Anyways, can'r remember, but an Amazon search for him will bring up that one; got a feeling its called 'Counterfactuals' or something like that.

― Dave B (daveb), Monday, 16 February 2004 00:40 (twenty-two years ago)

i've read fatherland (i thought most ppl had?). yeah it's very good
by robert harris.

― pete s, Monday, 16 February 2004 00:41 (twenty-two years ago)

...if the US had taken the right side in WWI?

― D Aziz (esquire1983), Monday, 16 February 2004 00:43 (twenty-two years ago)

hester, you are so naive.

― RJG (RJG), Monday, 16 February 2004 00:44 (twenty-two years ago)

actually the book i'm referring to i think all the essays were by different historians

― pete s, Monday, 16 February 2004 00:44 (twenty-two years ago)

Harry Turtledove has written a series of speculative histories. One series deals with the south winning the civil war, another I think deals with aliens landing.

― Prude (Prude), Monday, 16 February 2004 00:45 (twenty-two years ago)

stephen fry's "making history" does something like this. it's also the only novel of his that doesn't irritate the fuck out of me, so i guess that's a recommendation.

― the surface noise (electricsound), Monday, 16 February 2004 00:49 (twenty-two years ago)

What if the industrial revolution would have happened in ancient greece? How could it have started and by who?

― Sébastien Chikara (Sébastien Chikara), Monday, 16 February 2004 01:28 (twenty-two years ago)

it was the only thing that didn't start in ancient greece
and anyway it did birth of physics = made spinning jenny possible

― pete s, Monday, 16 February 2004 01:30 (twenty-two years ago)

Greek science was mostly confined to philosophical realms, so, realistically, a major revolution based on practical science could not have existed at that time.

― Curt1s St3ph3ns, Monday, 16 February 2004 01:34 (twenty-two years ago)

Alt.history tends to be terrible, the occasional Philip K. Dick story to the contrary. The M-16 one is "Guns of the South" by Harry Turtledove. (Which is really funny because he makes the South's victory palatable by having them immediately abolish slavery.)

― miloauckerman (miloauckerman), Monday, 16 February 2004 01:41 (twenty-two years ago)

Yeah, Turtledove has sorta become a one-man alternate history industry -- I've always liked the conceptual approach (and like many The Man in the High Castle was my first literary introduction to the idea), but he's almost taken it to a Tom Clancy-like churn.

I actually like his earliest efforts in the field -- a couple of short stories and a novel where Mohammed became a Christian and converted Arabia to Orthodoxy and where Byzantium became a lasting world power for many centuries.

― Ned Raggett (Ned), Monday, 16 February 2004 06:52 (twenty-two years ago)

Gotham By Gaslight pits Batman against Jack the Ripper!!!

― huck, Monday, 16 February 2004 06:56 (twenty-two years ago)

Turtledove's realistic series focusing on the Civil War (then it goes to the plains wars, Custer lives, on into WW I) started off promising (in concept, the execution was never great), but I quit reading halfway through as he just took real events/history and changed names and locations. Gee, the CSA loses WW I and becomes Nazi Germany, I didn't see that coming three books ahead!

My favorite bit was about a dejected, hated Lincoln who became a socialist after losing the Civil War.

― miloauckerman (miloauckerman), Monday, 16 February 2004 07:00 (twenty-two years ago)

What if the industrial revolution would have happened in ancient greece? How could it have started and by who?

-- Sébastien Chikara (sebastie...), February 16th, 2004.

Hiero of Alexandria constructed a steam engine,. he just never did anything practical with it.

― Geoff Probst, Monday, 16 February 2004 07:04 (twenty-two years ago)

NAZI DINOBOTS!

― KARL SMUMFY, Monday, 16 February 2004 07:39 (twenty-two years ago)

'Years of Rice & Salt' by Kim Stanley Robinson. Plague kills of entirety of Europe in Dark Ages, China & Arabic states take over from there and the history is extrapolated until 2100 or so. Beautiful writing as can be expected from Mr Robinson, coupled with interesting speculations on re-incarnation (which I know sounds cheesy but isn't), as the problem of such a large timescale is partially overcome by the main characters going through the Buddhist bardo each time they die, but maintaining a kind of cohesiveness as a group through each series of lives. It's fabulous.

― Liz :x (Liz :x), Monday, 16 February 2004 11:38 (twenty-two years ago)

'kills off entirely'. Jesus, Monday morning incoherence extends to my typing 'skills'.

― Liz :x (Liz :x), Monday, 16 February 2004 11:39 (twenty-two years ago)

I will definitely check out the Kim Stanley Robinson book, cheers Liz.

― MarkH (MarkH), Monday, 16 February 2004 12:28 (twenty-two years ago)

three weeks pass...

Jon Courtenay Grimwood's recent 'Arabesk' series, of which an Amazon reviewer says:
an Arab world that remained Turkish after a 1914 war that never quite became important, and into which some slick cybertechnology and genetic gadgetry have slotted without changing anything fundamental

His other line of books is more overtly cyberpunk, and I don't think set in the same alternate setup, but is also worth a shot. Interesting stuff based around a powerful Germanic empire (stemming from an assumed overturn of the result of the 1st World War, rather than the 2nd, as is a staple of this genre), combined with all kinds of nanotechnology fun.

― Liz :x (Liz :x), Thursday, 11 March 2004 15:07 (twenty-two years ago)

"Man in the high castle" by Dick, "Fatherland" and Len Deighton's "SSGB" all look at the world if the Nazis had won WWII.

The history book you're talking about might be Robert Cowley "More what if". This is the amazon precis:

In this volume, leading historians, including Geoffrey Parker, Theodore K. Rabb, Cecilia Holland and Caleb Carr, postulate on what might so easily have been. Concentrating on the crucial and the seemingly insignificant, this is a provocative look at the way our world could easily have been. What if William hadn't conquered? What if the Enigma code remained uncracked? And would this even matter if Lord Halifax had become prime minister rather than Churchill?

― winterland, Thursday, 11 March 2004 15:19 (twenty-two years ago)

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