"There is no God but the Lord, and Christ is His Son"

In first place, I must say that I am very much in favour of freedom of religion. I respect the right of people to believe whatever they want (save for some specific cases *cough$cientologycough*), as long as they respect the same right in me. For example, I know that the best football team in the world is Real Madrid, but I respect that others believe that title corresponds to Barça, Bayern Munich, Manchester United or any other of the thousands of football teams in the world.

Jokes apart, considering that Easter was a couple of weeks ago, I thought that maybe I should make this weeks' posts about things with some more religious connotations, and this post you are reading now will be about a novel where the point of divergence is religious.

Right now, I have in my hands a novel written by the man that many call "The Master of Alternative History": Harry Norman Turtledove, probably the most prolific alternative history writer nowadays (he has written more than eighty novels, no less). Considering that the thesis with which he earned his PhD is about the history of the Byzantine Empire (its official name is Eastern Roman Empire), I can just say that he knows quite well about what he is writing, at least when it comes to this novel.

Its name is Agent of Byzantium, which speaks about a Roman Empire reborn from its ashes thanks to the hard work of the Emperors that lead it from the city of Constantinople, and its people. The main character is Basilios Argyros, the secret agent the title refers to, and which readers, writers and critics talk about as a kind of Byzantine Agent 007.

The Point of Divergence that separates the story of this book from ours is Muhammad. When he was young, Muhammad made many commercial travels to Syria, where he undoubtedly made contact with Christian people: the Islamic tradition is that, when he was between 9 and 12 years old, he met a Christian monk or hermit called Bahira, who predicted Muhammad would be a Prophet of God.

In our history, Muhammad had his first revelations, that led him to write the Qur'an, when he was approximately 40 years old. Eventually, this would become the Holy Book (or one of them, depending of whether you are Sunni, Chii, or part of another branch) of the Islamic religion, which, unified in a great empire centered first in Arabia and then in Damascus, would end up controlling a great part of the known world, and other nations that professed Islam would end up defeating many kingdoms, including the Byzantine Empire, which disappeared in 1453 when Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks, who made it the capital of their empire and renamed it Istanbul.

In Basilios Argyros' past, it does not happen this way: Muhammad converts to Christianism, becoming a celebrated prelate and saint by spreading the Word of God through all of the Mediterranean Sea's coasts, and at the end of his life he is buried in the Iberian Peninsula. This post's title is, precisely, one of Saint Muhammad's most famous sentences, and the book's main character's favourite prayer (you'll see it many times if you read the book, and it can be a bit repetitive, but there are reasons for this).

World of Agent of Byzantium when the novel takes place (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Basilios Argyros' career begins as an army explorer, and the first time we see him is in a punishment expedition against the Jurchen tribes of the north, but this expedition is suffering problems, as the Jurchen shamans seem to have the power to discover the Romans' movements before they should be able to. However, Basilios, in a risky mission, finds out that it is just a primitive telescope, that has been accidentally invented by the shamans, and he manages to steal it for the Empire.

His action's audacity opens him the way to the Byzantine secret service: Basilios becomes a magistrianos, and from then he has many adventures against the enemies of the Empire, whether they may be internal or external, mostly against his main rival, Mirrane, a shrewd and seductive agent of the Persian Empire, where Zoroastrianism remains alive (see? Islam's non-existence not only affects Christianism), with whom Basilios has many encounters along several years.

One of the book's main hook's is that all stories have several inventions and ideas that are well known in our present (I will not be telling which they are, so that I cannot spoil the surprise for whoever decides to get this book and read it), but which for the book's main character are completely new, so it becomes very entertaining to see Basilios trying to understand these new concepts and try to either overcome the problems that stand in front of him, or try to gain something that may serve to expand the Empire's power.

It must be said, though, that this book is not a typical novel. At the beginning, it was a series of stories published in Amazing Science Fiction Stories and Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine between July 1985 and December 1989 (this is the reason why the prayer is repeated so much), which would later be edited and published in a book (I am lucky to have a translation of the 2nd Edition, which has all the stories published with Basilios Argyros, as the first edition is missing the first story). If you have ever read I, Robot by Isaac Asimov, you'll know how exactly this works (by the way, the edition I have has a prologue written by Isaac Asimov), so there are no other surprises in regards to that.

Maybe the book will be hard to find, but if you manage, I can assure you that you will really have fun with Basilios Argyros' adventures, and will wish that Turtledove had written more about him.

Good magnet, bad stone: the point where history changes.

Hi, everyone! I hope that you are ready for the next installment of Uchronia Lallena. Today, I will speak about one of the most important ingredients that any uchronia writer that prides oneself on that must understand for its correct use in his works: the Point of Divergence, also known as Jonbar Hinge or POD.

As you can suppose, the POD is the exact moment in which an uchronia separates from real history, causing, as a consequence, the change of many events derived from that moment. Many novels and other uchronic works normally begin their story speaking about that point, that moment in which everything changes, to show why the world is now different. I already demonstrated this idea in post #3, when I spoke about The Legacy of the Glorious: in our reality, the telegram that warned of the arrival of the Spanish agent that carried the official confirmation of Leopold zu Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen's candidacy to the Spanish throne was badly transcribed, stating it would arrive on June 26^th, while in The Legacy of the Glorious the telegram warns that said arrival will take place on June 6^th, a difference of twenty days that make the Congress of Deputies decide "King Leopold I of Spain" on June 8^th instead of "King Amedeo I of Spain" on November 16^th.

The first of the alternative names, Jonbar Hinge, comes from the novel The Legion of Time by Jack Williamson. In one of its short stories, called John Barr, the eponymous character is about to pick up an object on the floor, without knowing that from his choice depends the course of history and the future: if he picks up the magnet, his later actions will lead to the development of an utopic civilization called Jonbar, but if he picks the stone with his hands, the end will be the brutal tyranny of the state of Gyronchi.

The points of divergence, as described in all works, can be very subtle or very stunning. For example, it can be as subtle as a soldier of one side finding an important cigar box before the enemy does (which is the beginning of the TimeLine-191 saga written by Harry Turtledove) or as stunning as the Black Death becoming even more deadly and killing nearly all of the European civilization in the 14^th century (as it happens in The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson).

Naturally, there are some PODs that are very favored by the uchronic writers. One of the most well known is the Axis victory in World War Two: for one reason or another, Germany, Italy, Japan and their minor allies manage to win against the four great powers they were facing (France, Great Britain, the Soviet Union and the United States) even though the numbers tell that the victory of the latter was more probable. The D-Day Landings in Normandy is one of the potential triggers of such a victory, as well as a German success in the development of the atomic bomb or a Soviet defeat in the Siege of Stalingrad. Unfortunately, many of these uchronias, particularly those with a POD later than 1943, are developed as if the Western Front (France, Italy, North Africa and the North Sea) were the only places where there was fighting, when most of it was concentrated in the Eastern Front (Soviet Union and rest of Eastern Europe), where it has been calculated that between 75% and 80% of the German army was fighting, while being methodically smashed by the force led by generals like Georgy Zhukov or Semyon Timoshenko.

Another popular POD is that a certain person is not born or dies at a young age (or the opposite, that someone that died young survived the event that caused his o her death), making the influence of their presence and actions to vanish. A small scale example is the film It's A Wonderful Life, directed by Frank Capra and with James Stewart as the main character, George Bailey. After several situations in which George sacrifices his happiness to help others, and finding himself in the troubling place of being arrested for a crime he has not committed, George tries to kill himself so that his family may collect his life insurance, but his guardian angel stops him, showing him what would have happend if he had not existed: his hometown would have fallen in the hands of the film's villain, and all of the good actions he made in his life would have never happened, turning the lives of all of his family and friends to become much worse than it was in reality (a curious event: the popularity of this film is owed to the fact that someone in the National Telefilm Association forgot to renew the rights to the film, allowing all TV networks to show this film only having to pay the writer's rights to the novel in which the film was based, at least until 1993, when the NTA's successor argued that the film was still under copyright as a work derived from said novel.

So, as you can see, any action you take or choice you make may change many things in the future. Who knows? Maybe, by the mere fact that I am writing this, or that you are reading it, will make the world become very different to what it could have been...

I await for you on next Tuesday so that you can keep learning about uchronias!

The Legacy of the Glorious: A Prussian on the Spanish Throne

This is post #3 of Uchronia Lallena, and I am going to dedicate it to speaking about the uchronia I am working on, called The Legacy of the Glorious (chack it at AlternateHistory.com if you have the time). To speak about this work, and about its content, we must travel back in time to the year 1868. To be more exact, September of that year.

Queen Isabel II of Spain has already been for thirty-five years on the throne, and currently the government is under control of the Conservative Party, the heirs of the politics developed by Ramón María Narváez, the Espadón de Loja (Greatsword of Loja), deceased just a few months earlier. Even though Spain is, in theory, a constitutional democratic monarchy, the country is not a real democracy yet, in which the rights of the people are respected and freedoms are expanded to the whole population. It is in this set of circumstances that the Pact of Ostende, formed by the Progressive, Democratic and Unionist parties, decides to start a rebellion against the throne, in order to help Spain to modernize and expel the last remains of the Ancién Régime that remain in the government.

This rebelion (henceforth known as La Gloriosa) begins on September 18th 1868, when Admiral Juan Bautista Topete rises against Luis González Bravo's government and Queen Isabel II from Cádiz, the birthplace of Spanish constitutionalism. Very soon, the military leaders of the pronunciamiento, Juan Prim and Francisco Serrano, arrive to the city, taking the helm of two different armies: Prim marches with Topete along the Mediterranean coast, while Serrano goes towards Madrid. Serrano's victory against the Marquis of Novaliches in the Battle of Alcolea of September 28th opens the way towards the capital, which falls a few days later, and sparks the self-exile of the Spanish Royal Family to Napoleon III's France.

The following yea and a half, the Provisional Government works in the difficult task of rebuilding the nation, start the reforms and, among other things, find a new King for the Spanish throne. After a long search, and many cases of foreign interference in the process (particularly France) Amadeo di Savoia, second son of the King of Italy, is chosen so that he may become the new King of Spain. Everyone knows that Amadeo ended up abdicating the crown and abandoning Spain on February 1873, arguing that he felt unable of governing such an ungovernable people as the Spanish. This then brought us to the short First Spanish Republic, and then the Bourbonic Restoration of 1876.

However, what not many people know is that Amadeo was not the Provisional Government members' preferred candidate: a Prussian prince called Leopoldo zu Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, was Prim's favorite, and his candidacy was supported by then Minister-President of Prussia Otto von Bismarck. However, a telegram that warned of the swift arrival of a Spanish diplomatic agent with the document that confirmed Prince Leopold's official candidacy was badly transcribed, which delayed the voting (that took place in November 1870 for us) and the accidental leaking of the news. French Emperor Napoleon III vetoed the Prussian candidacy, and the political storm that surged from there led to the French-Prussian War and the formation of the German Empire.

What would have happened if the Spanish Congress and Government had been able to make Prince Leopold's accesion to the throne official? If the telegram had been written correctly? This is the point in which the history of The Legacy of the Glorious diverges from real history.

One of the first events that takes place is that the French-Prussian War (which is called The Hohenzollerns' War or King Leopold's War in this history) also involves Spain, which allies itself with the German states against France. Carlism breaks up in two because Carlos, Duke of Madrid (and claimant of the Spanish throne as "Carlos VII") asks Napoleon III to place him on the throne when he invades Spain. The victory in the war becomes even greater than in real life, and Spain recovers Rousillon and the Oranesado, and an alliance with the German Empire helps to modernize the country while the leaders of The Glorious ensure the establishment of a proper constitutional monarchy. The Cuban Rebellion that started in 1868 is defeated after great effort, giving autonomy to the Caribbean islands, and the potential rebellion in the Philippines is stopped before it can begin as the political and social reforms are finally expanded to the archipelago.

The end of the internal wars, the politic stability and the establishment of commercial links with other nations allows Spain to prosper and recover part of its previous power. Peru and Bolivia manage to earn victory against Chile during the Second Pacific War thanks to Spain's support, which helps to establish strong friendship links with Spain. The division of the African continent in influence spheres after the Berlin Conference of 1885 puts all of Morocco under Spanish influence, and a short war with the Dominican Republic also puts the nation that once was the old colony of Santo Domingo under Spain's diplomatic control, with the possibility that it may end up joining Spain once again.

However, the most important event does not take place until 1890: the death of the Portuguese King then ends up sparking the Portuguese Civil War between Royalists and Republicans, and then the disappearance of the entire male line with rights to the Portuguese crown, with the result that the Queen of Spain and her sons Wilhelm, Ferdinand and Karl Anton (Guillermo, Fernando and Carlos Antonio in Spanish) become the main heirs. A decision shared between the Spanish and Portuguese governments, and a referendum in which both Spanish and Portuguese people vote, ends up in the unification of the Iberian Peninsula as the United Empire of the Spains, in spite of the opposition of France and the United Kingdom, the latter being the one that caused the war to happen (due to the fact that, just like in our history, they presented an ultimatum in 1890 over a fragment of Africa that joined the Portuguese colonies of Angola and Mozambique, and which the British wanted to build their Cape-to-Cairo Railway).

As the century ends, Spain is a solid German ally, and Europe seems to be going towards a cruel war, while the United States see, from the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, how Spain's control over Cuba and Puerto Rico remains strong, putting the Monroe Doctrine in question, and maybe facilitating a possible war between Spain and the United States, a war that the latter are not so assured to win in...

For Want of a Nail: the nail that changes everything

Hi again! Today's post will be about a concept that is quite well known in the uchronic community: the For Want of a Nail.

There is a short poem in English, with an origin that can be traced back to the 14th Century, that shows very well how the most tiny details can end up having great consequences:

For want of a nail, the shoe was lost;
For want of a shoe, the horse was lost;
For want of a horse, the rider was lost;
For want of a rider, the message was lost;
For want of a message, the battle was lost;
For want of a battle, the kingdom was lost;
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

Yes, the most small of details and end up causing one thing to happen in one or the other way. As if it were a domino effect, a simple throwing of a coing can end up causing a multiple car accident (in the TV series Alphas, episode "Cause and Effect") o a small explosion in space ends up destroying all satellites and space stations in certain orbits (something called Kessler Syndrome, which appears in the film Gravity).

Maybe, you have also heard about the Butterfly Effect (no, not the film). Suggested by Edward Lorenz in the 1960s, the small joke that gives name to this effect is the idea that a butterfly's wingbeats can end up causing hurricanes in Japan. The idea started when Lorenz was testing a weather prediction model, and, having a result and wishing to see if it worked correctly, he decided to round one of the numbers, with the conclusion that the results were radically different.

However, the idea of the influence of a butterfly in the course of history had already appeared in the short story The Sound of Thunder by Ray Bradbury, in which a time travel where someone accidentally steps on a butterfly ends up changing the result of an election. This idea was parodied by The Simpsons in "Time and Punishment", a segment of the chapter "The Treehouse of Horror V", where Homer accidentally travels back in time to the age of dinosaurs and ends up causing all kind of changes due to his classical blunders.

To see how this can happen in real life, one of the best examples is the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, the spark that started the First World War (although, it must be taken into account that it would have happened in one or another way due to the tension and arguments that existed between the main European powers, particularly France and Germany).

This story begins on June 28^th 1914. Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Duchess Sophie of Hohenberg, were visiting the city of Sarajevo, a fact that a group of Serbian and Serbo-Bosnian nationalists (The Black Hand and Young Bosnia, respectively) tood advantage of to attent against him, in order to claim for the unificatio of Bosnia-Herzegovina (recently annexed by the Austro-Hungarian Empire) with the Kingdom of Serbia. Several members were armed and placed along the path the group of vehicles escorting the Archduke would follow. For seom reason, the first two men did not act, and the third, Nedeljko Cabrinovic, threw a bomb that rebounded on the Archduke's car and exploded right under the car immediately behind that of the Archduke, injuring several people. The Archduke's vehicle accelerated and left the place, passing near the other would-be killers, who were unable to act.

After learning that the attack had been unsuccessful, Gavrilo Princip decided to stop at a delicatessen to buy something to eat. By chance, right then a car where Franz Ferdinand, his wife and the military governor of Austria were riding was passing near, as the Archduke wanted to visit the people injured in the previous attack. The driver, however, took a wrong turn and stopped the car... right in front of the shop Princip had entered, at the same moment he was coming out. Princip took his gun out of the pocket and shot several times, with the bullets hitting the Archduke and Duchess Sophie. The second was a complete accident, as Princip had planned to kill the military governor, but the first could have been saved if the bullet had gone for his chest, as he had clothes thick enough to stop the bullets coming out of Princip's gun. Unfortunately, the bullet hit him in the neck.

So, you can see how something that simple can end up causing more than fifty million dead people (this is counting the many people that died during the Second World War).

See you around, and I hope you read the next post on Tuesday!

Introduction to Uchronias

Hi, everyone! After the small success of my blog Ucronía Lallena, I considered that, maybe, I could make an English version so that more people could read about one of the things I like the most, uchronias.

Those of you that know Greek, have read certain books or have been around certain web forums or sites, will already know what an uchronia is, but for everyone, whether you know or not, there goes an explanation that I am sure will interest you.

In 1516, Thomas More wrote a book called Utopia (complete title in the original Latin: De optimo rei publicae statu deque nova insula Utopia), in which he described a fictitious idyllic society that lived in the island of Utopia. The word Utopia is a latinization, and play on the Greek words eu (ευ), ou (οὐ), "not", and topos (τόπος), "place", adding the -ia suffix (-ία) common to place names. The combination would be Outopia (Οὐτοπία), which can mean both "good place-land" and "no-place land", particularly considering that the pronunciation (in English) for Utopia (stressing the second syllable) is identical to that of the word Eutopia.

We can then build the neologism Uchronia, replacing topos (place) with chronos (time), so we could say that uchronia would mean "no-time land" or, better expressed, "non-existant time". This word is not mine, of course (I wish it was, though): it was coined by French writer Charles Renouvier for his novel Uchronie (L'Utopie dans l'histoire), esquisse historique apocryphe du développement de la civilisation européenne qu'il aurait pu être. For those that don't understand it, Uchronia (The Utopia in history), an apocryphal sketch of the development of European civilization not as it was, but as it could have been.

If we are very, very picky, this concept may only be applied to hypothetical or fictitious time periods in our world (that is, which would supposedly be in our past, but they would actually be only myths). The best examples for this idea are the Middle Earth (Arda) created by John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, in which his famous novels The Silmarillion, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings (along with other less known, but not of lesser quality, works) take place; and the Hyborian Age in which The Adventures of Conan the Barbarian by Robert E. Howard take place. However, the most used definition nowadays is as a synonym to what is also known as alternative history.

The uchronia, or alternative history, spreads from the idea that things could have happened differently to how they did in reality (at least, the reality we live in). For example, Alexander the Great could have not suffered the illness that ended up killing him, the Roman Empire could have survived, the Reconquista could have ended in failure o maybe Napoleon could have won in his fight against Great Britain. And these are but a minimal part of the millions of possibilities where history could have changed.

With this blog, I hope to show you the great world (or worlds) that exist out there, and entertain you, both for your pleasure and mine own.

This blog's entries will form part of three potential groups of ideas:
a) Existing alternative history works. They may be books, films or TV series, among other general culture fields.
b) The important concepts that exist in the world of alternative history, those that mark the difference (well put) between other "histories" and ours.
c) Small moments in history that could have had great consequences.

I'll try to regularly update at least twice a week, on Tuesdays and Fridays, and I hope you will enjoy and comment on them.

See you later!

Miguel Lallena