Hi again, and welcome to Serbian Week's second post! After speaking about Nikola Tesla last Tuesday, I spent some time thinking on who could be the second character to speak about during this week, and then I remembered that the city I am staying in during the week, Niš, is famous, among other things, for being the place of birth of Justin I (uncle and antecessor of famous Byzantine Emperor Justinian I), and the better known Constantine the Great.
Born on February 27th 272, from Flavius Valerius Constantius and his consort Helena in the city of Naissos, Flavius Valerius Constantinus lived for most of his early life in the east of the Roman Empire, joining the army and fighting to defend the Empire from its external enemies, until conspiracies on the part of Galerius (who had replaced Diocletian as Emperor in the eastern half of the Empire) forced him to run away to the west, where his father Constantius was Emperor. During a campaign beyond Hadrian's Wall in Britain, Constantius fell ill and died, and Constantine was proclaimed Emperor by his troops; Galerius did not accept this, as Constantius' legal successor was Septimius Severus, and he suggested for Constantine to become the Caesar, the successor of the Emperor, and Constantine accepted in order to avoid a civil war. Constantine followed his father's tolerant politics towards Christians, distinguising himself from Diocletian and Galerius, who had been brutally persecuting the followers of Christ. Maxentius0 and Maximian's rebellions increased his popularity, which became important when Galerius died, and a civil war started.
It is during this civil war when, according to the legend, Constantine had a dream in which he was suggested to mark his soldiers with the Christian cross or the symbol ☧ (combination of the Greek letters Chi and Rho, the first two letters of the word Christos) next to the motto "In Hoc Signo Vinces" (With this sign, you shall win). The Battle of the Milvian Bridge that took place some time after that dream was a great victory for Constantine, who, with an army half of that of Maxentius, defeated the latter, becoming Emperor of the western half of the Empire. The later Battle of Adrianopolis against Licinius (who had become Emperor of the eastern half of the Empire), seen by the soldiers and the propaganda of the time as a fight between Licinius' paganism and Constantine's christianism ended in another victory for the latter.
Wishing to wash away all roughness between the two halves of the empire, Constantine decided to establish a new capital in the East, but one that could act as a bridge between West and East. In the end, after some time studying several possibilities, he chose the place where the ancient city of Byzantion (Βυζάντιον in Greek) stood, building there the city that would soon be called Constantinople (Κωνσταντινούπολη or Konstantinoúpoli), which would become the new capital of the Roman Empire. From there, Constantine worked tirelessly to push the Empire's borders outwards (conquering new lands in the Caucasus and in the lower Danube), as well as starting deep administrative and economic reforms. Constantine died on May 22nd 337, shortly after being baptized by Bishop Eusebius of Nicomedia in that same city (nowadays known as Ízmit, in Turkey), following the tradition of being baptized as late as possible in order to wash away as many sins as possible.
There is no doubt that Constantine played an important role in modern Western civilization, since, without his support, the Christian Church would not have become the great spiritual power it became after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Constantine was also attributed the donation of the lands that gave birth to the Papal States, which would last until 1870, but said donation was but a falsification created to give legitimacy to the Pope's temporal power. His construction of the city of Constantinople was also a large influence in later generations, as the Byzantine would manage to conserve several philosophical documents that would be later used in other situations. What would have happened to the world if Constantine's life had changed?
If, for whatever reason, Constantine had not become Emperor, Christianity would have not acquired as much influence as in real life, at least not until a lot of time later. As it is said in "The Da Vinci Code" (even if it is not very good, at least it is not all bad), Constantine knew to bet on the winning horse, and thanks to him Rome became the religious center of Christianity. Other potential candidates to the role might not have been that ready to raise the Christians to such high positions, even if tolerance had been part of the religious policies practiced by Rome. This difference would have prevented the Christian Church from gaining such great temporal influence (if not spiritual), and might have avoided many of the problems that would take place later in time (such as the Schism between the Orthodox and Catholic Churches, the Reform, or perhaps certain priests' support for many dictatorships around the world).
Between his religious reforms were the declaration of Arianism (the belief that the Son of God was not eternal, but that he was created by God, and, as such, he was a different entity) as an heretic doctrine, the exile of the Donatists (supporters of a bishop named Donatus, as opposed to another they stated was not a valid candidate) and the establishment of the Nicene Creed as a dogmatic declaration of the Christian religion. Without Constantine, something likely to happen would be the establishment of Arianism as an important doctrine for a good part of Christianity, which would have made many things very different to what they were for us. The victory of Donatism is unlikely to take place, and, since the Nicene Creed was a partial consequence of the fights between orthodox Christianity and Arianism, this might not have existed at all.
It is also possible that, even if he had become Emperor, he might not have accepted his mother Helena's influence over him. Constantine barely knew his father in his early life, and had he been more time with his father instead of his mather, he might have preferred to be more supportive of Paganism (perhaps a Sol Invictus worshipper) than a Christian, and would have not been as supportive of Christianity, even if he still practiced tolerance towards them. Had it happened this way, Mithra might have replaced Jesus as the main religion followed in the world, or instead it might have caused a war between Mithraism and Christianism, breaking the Roman Empire down from within, much sooner than when the northern barbarians did.
What if his army had been defeated in the Milvian Bridge, in spite of his troops' religious fervor as they had the cross engraved in their shields? Christianism's popularity would have fallen, probably. There would have been yet many followers, but maybe not as influential within society, as they would say "How would an all-powerful god that doesn't even protect those who fight for him exist?". The previous Christianism vs Paganism/Mithraism could have taken place as well.
The existence (or not) of Constantinople is another factor of great importance. Had Constantine picked another place for the Eastern capital, then there would have been many differences in the development of civilization in the region. Depending on where the capital was, the Eastern Roman Empire might have taken longer to fall, although, had it been in the Asiatic side, it might have lasted even less time. Without the strategical position kept by the Empire in the Bosphorus, the capital would have not suffered the brutal attack of the Fourth Crusade, which marked the end of the Byzantine Empire's splendor. Of course, with a different Eastern Roman Empire, the Crusades may not have happened at all.
And how can we forget the importance the city of Constantinople had for the Orthodox Church after the Schism between the Orthodox and Catholic Churches? Without the important religious neuralgic center that was the city, the Orthodox Church's strength would have been diminished, as it would have been led by a city that would be further from the center of power than others, perhaps Alexandria.
What else can be said about the effects any change in Constantine's life would have had in history? Much like with any other person of great importance, a small change would have made what came after it vary enormously.
Well, that's all for today. I hope you have liked this Serbian Week's two posts, and soon I will be back with more things to speak about. Enjoy!
2014/05/27
The misunderstood Serbian genius
When you read these lines, I will be attending the RAD 2014, a congress about radiation and dosimetry that takes place in the city of Niš, in Serbia. Given that I am here right now, I thought that it might be interesting to write about two people related with this country, but they will not be the ones that started the First World War, but other people that did or could have had a great impact in society. Next Friday's person is intimately related to this city (he was born here, in fact), while today I will speak about one of those geniuses that were not understood or praised as they should have been until much later than that. I am talking about Nikola Tesla.
Although of Serbian origin, actually Nikola Tesla was born on July 10th 1856 in Smiljan, then part of the Austrian Empire and nowadays part of Croatia. Gifted with eidetic memory and great capacity for mathematical calculus, he studied in the Austrian Polytechnic (nowadays Graz University of Technology or TU Graz) thanks to a scholarship, but he never graduated because he did not sit in an exam he was not prepared for. He would later work in several cities, such as Maribor or Budapest, before being hired by Thomas Alva Edison to work in New York, where he redesigned Edison's direct current electric motors. Allegedly, Edison had promised to pay him $50,000, but in the end he only gave him $18 dollars. Tesla then started to work on his own, inventing, among other things, the induction motor, that would be later bought by George Westinghouse (Edison's main adversary) to, among other things, illuminate the Chicago Universal Exposition of 1893. Tesla also experimented with X-rays before Wilhelm Röntgen officially announced his discovery of the new radiation, as well as working in ideas such as radio (he actually designed a ship that could be controlled through radio waves), wireless transmission of electricity, radar or VTOL planes (VTOL stands for Vertical Take-Off and Landing), tnad there are rumours that he could have even developed an Unified Field Theory that could explain all fundamental forces in terms of just one field. Sadly, Tesla died, alone and poor, on January 7th 1943.
There are many situations in which Tesla could have greatly changed history thanks to his inventions. For example, what would have happened if his wireless electricity transmission system had actually worked? Unfortunately, consequences, at least at the beginning, would have not been good at all: the possibility of an economic collapse because of the great changes this would cause would be great, but later things might improve, as this new system would allow for the transmission of electricity to places that are hard to reach in real life with wires. A sure thing would be that Chile would be a much poorer nation, as it is one of the main producers and exporters of the copper used in high voltage wiring.
It might also be possible that, after working for some time in the United States, he could have gone back to Europe and live there (not much of a chance that this might happen, particularly after 1891, when Tesla became a citizen of the United States). Depending on where he established his new home, it is possible that he may have been involved in the First World War, whether it is on the Entente's or the Central Powers' side, maybe developing new ideas for weaponry or the defence of trenches. These events may have changed the end of the war, making it last more or less, or even giving victory to the Central Powers.
It may be even possible that his efforts to develop alternate current ended up in failure, which might have given Edison the chance to market energy production using direct current motors, a fact that would have meant every city would have needed many power plants (probably even installing one for each block), as the power loss produced when transmitting direct current is much greater than the one caused with the use of alternate current (this is the reason why direct current is mainly used in small devices powered by batteries or using an AC-DC current conversor that is plugged in). Not only that, but also the production of electricity through eco-friendly means (hydroelectricity or wind power) would have been nearly impossible if it were about producing direct current (yes, OK, it could be done with solar panels, but who knows if it would be possible to make them work with an acceptable efficiency...). As a small extra, Edison's attempts to make alternate current look bad as an electricity production and transmission method directly led to the development of the electric chair as an execution method.
Nikola Tesla is not only a man to whom many things could have happened to, but he is also a peron of great influence in alternative history. Leaving apart the film The Prestige, there are many situations in which Tesla's life is the point of divergence, or Tesla himself is a main character.
In the tabletop role-playing game GURPS Infinite Worlds, one of the most important worlds is Gernsback, in which the point of divergence is Tesla marrying his friend Anne Morgan, daughter of the industrialist and millionaire J. P. Morgan, which helps him to stabilize his economical and emotional situation. He manages to carry out his plans for global radio transmission from his tower in Wardenclyffe, Long Island, and from there he concentrates in wireless electricity transmission, which he manages to make work shortly after the Great War. His inventions bring prosperity to the world (after a depression caused by the aforementioned problems), strengthening the United States and Germany (which never falls to Nazism), as well as the League of Nations, which unifies the world after a set of crisis, among them a war against the Soviet Union between 1951 and 1953 to stop the Soviet Union's development of the atomic bomb. However, in spite of the apparent utopia that has developed in this world, the discriminatory attitudes (such as racism and sexism) that, in our world, began to disappear after World War Two (and, which, sadly, have yet to fully do so) are still accepted, and colonialism remains an important issue.
Another, better known example, is the game series Command & Conquer: Red Alert. Although, actually, Tesla is not seen anywhere, undoubtedly he is a person with great influence in the story, as Tesla is kidnapped by the KGB and forced to wok for the Soviets, developing powerful weaponry like the Tesla Coil (an improved version of his coil), which can shoot artificial lightning bolts at any hostile attackers that approach it, or the Iron Curtain, which can make an unit completely invulnerable to any attacks for a short period of time. The Soviets in Red Alert 2 have soldiers armed with portable versions of the Tesla Coil, and a group of them manages to turn the Eiffel Tower into one gigantic Tesla Coil that devastates Paris and kills a high number of Allied troops.
Finally (although this is not, by any means, the only option of seeing Tesla change the world) there is the comic series Atomic Robo, written by Brian Clevinger (author of the hilarious webcomic 8-Bit Theater) and drawn by Scott Wegener. The main character, Robo, is a self-aware robot built by, yes, Nikola Tesla, in 1923, and which forms part of a team of soldiers and scientists that answers to any paranormal or supernatural emergencies. His first enemies are Nazis and mad scientists that are trying to take over the world, but later the threats become very different, such as an intelligent dinosaur that claims to have traveled in time from the dinosaurs' age (although Robo suspects it is just a genetic experiment gone wrong) or Thomas Edison's spirit.
If you are interested to learn more about Tesla, you can always try to go to his Wikipedia article, but I recommend you to go read what Matthew Inman, author of the comic webpage The Oatmeal, has written about him, as well as marveling about Inman's and many other people's efforts to save Tesla's laboratory in Wardenclyffe and build a Tesla museum in there.
See you later, and I hope that, before next Friday, someone might have guessed the second person's identity!
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| Nikola Tesla when he was 34 years old |
There are many situations in which Tesla could have greatly changed history thanks to his inventions. For example, what would have happened if his wireless electricity transmission system had actually worked? Unfortunately, consequences, at least at the beginning, would have not been good at all: the possibility of an economic collapse because of the great changes this would cause would be great, but later things might improve, as this new system would allow for the transmission of electricity to places that are hard to reach in real life with wires. A sure thing would be that Chile would be a much poorer nation, as it is one of the main producers and exporters of the copper used in high voltage wiring.
It might also be possible that, after working for some time in the United States, he could have gone back to Europe and live there (not much of a chance that this might happen, particularly after 1891, when Tesla became a citizen of the United States). Depending on where he established his new home, it is possible that he may have been involved in the First World War, whether it is on the Entente's or the Central Powers' side, maybe developing new ideas for weaponry or the defence of trenches. These events may have changed the end of the war, making it last more or less, or even giving victory to the Central Powers.
It may be even possible that his efforts to develop alternate current ended up in failure, which might have given Edison the chance to market energy production using direct current motors, a fact that would have meant every city would have needed many power plants (probably even installing one for each block), as the power loss produced when transmitting direct current is much greater than the one caused with the use of alternate current (this is the reason why direct current is mainly used in small devices powered by batteries or using an AC-DC current conversor that is plugged in). Not only that, but also the production of electricity through eco-friendly means (hydroelectricity or wind power) would have been nearly impossible if it were about producing direct current (yes, OK, it could be done with solar panels, but who knows if it would be possible to make them work with an acceptable efficiency...). As a small extra, Edison's attempts to make alternate current look bad as an electricity production and transmission method directly led to the development of the electric chair as an execution method.
Nikola Tesla is not only a man to whom many things could have happened to, but he is also a peron of great influence in alternative history. Leaving apart the film The Prestige, there are many situations in which Tesla's life is the point of divergence, or Tesla himself is a main character.
In the tabletop role-playing game GURPS Infinite Worlds, one of the most important worlds is Gernsback, in which the point of divergence is Tesla marrying his friend Anne Morgan, daughter of the industrialist and millionaire J. P. Morgan, which helps him to stabilize his economical and emotional situation. He manages to carry out his plans for global radio transmission from his tower in Wardenclyffe, Long Island, and from there he concentrates in wireless electricity transmission, which he manages to make work shortly after the Great War. His inventions bring prosperity to the world (after a depression caused by the aforementioned problems), strengthening the United States and Germany (which never falls to Nazism), as well as the League of Nations, which unifies the world after a set of crisis, among them a war against the Soviet Union between 1951 and 1953 to stop the Soviet Union's development of the atomic bomb. However, in spite of the apparent utopia that has developed in this world, the discriminatory attitudes (such as racism and sexism) that, in our world, began to disappear after World War Two (and, which, sadly, have yet to fully do so) are still accepted, and colonialism remains an important issue.
Another, better known example, is the game series Command & Conquer: Red Alert. Although, actually, Tesla is not seen anywhere, undoubtedly he is a person with great influence in the story, as Tesla is kidnapped by the KGB and forced to wok for the Soviets, developing powerful weaponry like the Tesla Coil (an improved version of his coil), which can shoot artificial lightning bolts at any hostile attackers that approach it, or the Iron Curtain, which can make an unit completely invulnerable to any attacks for a short period of time. The Soviets in Red Alert 2 have soldiers armed with portable versions of the Tesla Coil, and a group of them manages to turn the Eiffel Tower into one gigantic Tesla Coil that devastates Paris and kills a high number of Allied troops.
Finally (although this is not, by any means, the only option of seeing Tesla change the world) there is the comic series Atomic Robo, written by Brian Clevinger (author of the hilarious webcomic 8-Bit Theater) and drawn by Scott Wegener. The main character, Robo, is a self-aware robot built by, yes, Nikola Tesla, in 1923, and which forms part of a team of soldiers and scientists that answers to any paranormal or supernatural emergencies. His first enemies are Nazis and mad scientists that are trying to take over the world, but later the threats become very different, such as an intelligent dinosaur that claims to have traveled in time from the dinosaurs' age (although Robo suspects it is just a genetic experiment gone wrong) or Thomas Edison's spirit.
If you are interested to learn more about Tesla, you can always try to go to his Wikipedia article, but I recommend you to go read what Matthew Inman, author of the comic webpage The Oatmeal, has written about him, as well as marveling about Inman's and many other people's efforts to save Tesla's laboratory in Wardenclyffe and build a Tesla museum in there.
See you later, and I hope that, before next Friday, someone might have guessed the second person's identity!
2014/05/23
Where will the temporal currents take you?
Imagine that, one day, you go to bed, thinking about the typical things: work problems, what might the people you love be doing, what you are going to do the day after, if you should buy certain stock options whose prices are rising... and when you wake up, you discover that everything around you has changed completely: you might be surrounded by stone walls while a fire merrily burns in a chimney, or perhaps everything is super-futurist and an android has in the meantime approached you to ask you for your breakfast preferences.
If that has just happened, congratulations! You just have been ISOTed and now you are in a completely unknown place and time.
The term ISOT is an acronym of Island on the Sea Of Time, a novel trilogy written by French-Canadian-American writer Stephen Michael Stirling (better known in the alternative history community as S. M. Stirling). This trilogy begins with a strange Event (this is how it is called in-universe, with capitalized letter that affects the island of Nantucket and its near surroundings, including an United States Coast Guard ship, and it transports the island and its inhabitants back in time to the Bronze Age, approximately the year 1250 b.C. The entire island is then forced to organise in ways they would have never thought possible, but the real problems begin when Lieutenant William Walker, which was part of the Coast Guard ship's crew, realizes that, using modern technology, he could become a king among the technologically backwards societies in the rest of the world. From there, the inhabitants of Nantucket will have to not only establish ties with other cultures, but they will also have to start a great alliance against Walker and his accomplices, who seem to be ready to conquer the entire world unless they are faced and stopped (the events that take place in the world they leave behind are told in the novel series Emberverse).
Although a most specific term for this could be Mass Teleportation (or Mental Time Travel for certain individual cases), the uchronic community adopted the term ISoT to signify those stories in which a person, group of people or territory travel in time and space (and, sometimes, even between dimensions), ending up in strange situations that cannot be solved immediately.
It must not surprise you that Island on the Sea Of Time was not the first novel that deals with this kind of situation. Maybe, the first novel to make use of time travel as a starting point of great changes taking place in the past might be A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain. After a brief introduction of the narrator's visit to a certain castle, a man born in Hartford (Connecticut) called Hank Morgan meets the narrator and tells him his story: after suffering an attack while trying to stop a fight between two subordinates in the factory he works at, Hank woke up in the 6th century, in the mythological King Arthur's England. Arrested and condemned to death by burning, Hank only gets saved after he makes Arthur and the rest of his court (including Merlin) that a solar eclipse was actually him using his powers to block the sun. This "miracle" does not only free him, but makes Arthur decide to turn him into one of his main councilors. Hank, using his industrial knowledge, manages to make gunpowder (which he uses to reduce Merlin's influence in Camelot) and later begins an industrialization program, creating schools to teach children modern ideas, and factories that give work to the people and produce modern tools and weapons. His efforts (including a successful attempt to stop slavery, after Arthur sees first hand the reality of this institution), however, end up being in vain, because, during a period in which Hank and his wife Alisande are out of the country, Arthur discovers his wife Guinevere's infidelity with Lancelot, who rises in arms against Arthur: the latter dies at the hands of Sir Mordred, and the Church forces everyone to destroy any trace of the advances produced by Hank. Finally, Hank is gravely injured after a fight against an enormous knight army, and Merlin spells him to sleep for 1300 years, just enough to wake up, tell his story, and finally die with his wife's name on his lips.
Another famous novel of this kind is Lest Darkness Fall by L. Sprague de Camp, in which an American archaeologist called Martin Padway is transported back in time from 1938 to 535, appearing in Rome at the time Italiy is being controlled by the Ostrogodes, some time before it becomes invaded by the Eastern Roman Empire. However, Padway manages to introduce several technological improvements and political ideas that allow him to strengthen the Italo-Gothic Kingdom and reject the attacks from the Byzantines first, and later from the Lombards in the north, beginning to plan for later developments (such as the Discovery of America) to prevent the Darkness from falling.
We also have the novel series Sixteen Thirty-Two (1632), which begins with an Event that takes Grantville a (fictitious) West Virginia village to the center of Germany in the aforementioned year, right in the middle of the Thirty Years' War. Conscious of the great technological imbalance they are introducing, the townspeople decide to follow Mike Stearns' suggestions: to begin the American Revolution a hundred and fifty years ahead of schedule. Soon, Grantville becomes the neuralgic center of a new nation, thanks to the support of Swedish king Gustav Adolf II. The book is very well written, showing how all the advances introduced by the people of Grantville have their advantages (such as working heavy-than-air planes in 1634) and inconvenients, these being caused particularly as Grantville's schoolbooks and the inventions brought to the past begin to spread between Grantville's allies and enemies.
But, beware, that this is not only about appearing in historical, ancient periods: AlternateHistory.com, the main webpage where alternative history writers meet, has a great number of ISOT stories where real people or nations appear in the middle of the story in books or videogames, or even creating what is called a crossover (basically, fictitious characters of two different "worlds" directly interacting). I am currently helping to write an ISOT in which the United States, after voting for Obama for a second time, suddenly appears in the world of George Orwell's novel 1984, and becomes involved in the hard task of freeing the entire world from the tyranny of Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia. Another story that is currently gaining much interest is A Connecticut Yankee in King Robert's Court, in which two people from the beginning of the 21st century suddenly become two characters in the A Song of Ice and Fire books, which are Edmure Tully (Catelyn Tully-Stark's young brother) and Myranda Royce (a young noblewoman that lives in the Vale of Arryn).
I hope that you have liked this, and that it will incite you to read more about alternative history.
I hope to see you next week!
If that has just happened, congratulations! You just have been ISOTed and now you are in a completely unknown place and time.
The term ISOT is an acronym of Island on the Sea Of Time, a novel trilogy written by French-Canadian-American writer Stephen Michael Stirling (better known in the alternative history community as S. M. Stirling). This trilogy begins with a strange Event (this is how it is called in-universe, with capitalized letter that affects the island of Nantucket and its near surroundings, including an United States Coast Guard ship, and it transports the island and its inhabitants back in time to the Bronze Age, approximately the year 1250 b.C. The entire island is then forced to organise in ways they would have never thought possible, but the real problems begin when Lieutenant William Walker, which was part of the Coast Guard ship's crew, realizes that, using modern technology, he could become a king among the technologically backwards societies in the rest of the world. From there, the inhabitants of Nantucket will have to not only establish ties with other cultures, but they will also have to start a great alliance against Walker and his accomplices, who seem to be ready to conquer the entire world unless they are faced and stopped (the events that take place in the world they leave behind are told in the novel series Emberverse).
Although a most specific term for this could be Mass Teleportation (or Mental Time Travel for certain individual cases), the uchronic community adopted the term ISoT to signify those stories in which a person, group of people or territory travel in time and space (and, sometimes, even between dimensions), ending up in strange situations that cannot be solved immediately.
It must not surprise you that Island on the Sea Of Time was not the first novel that deals with this kind of situation. Maybe, the first novel to make use of time travel as a starting point of great changes taking place in the past might be A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain. After a brief introduction of the narrator's visit to a certain castle, a man born in Hartford (Connecticut) called Hank Morgan meets the narrator and tells him his story: after suffering an attack while trying to stop a fight between two subordinates in the factory he works at, Hank woke up in the 6th century, in the mythological King Arthur's England. Arrested and condemned to death by burning, Hank only gets saved after he makes Arthur and the rest of his court (including Merlin) that a solar eclipse was actually him using his powers to block the sun. This "miracle" does not only free him, but makes Arthur decide to turn him into one of his main councilors. Hank, using his industrial knowledge, manages to make gunpowder (which he uses to reduce Merlin's influence in Camelot) and later begins an industrialization program, creating schools to teach children modern ideas, and factories that give work to the people and produce modern tools and weapons. His efforts (including a successful attempt to stop slavery, after Arthur sees first hand the reality of this institution), however, end up being in vain, because, during a period in which Hank and his wife Alisande are out of the country, Arthur discovers his wife Guinevere's infidelity with Lancelot, who rises in arms against Arthur: the latter dies at the hands of Sir Mordred, and the Church forces everyone to destroy any trace of the advances produced by Hank. Finally, Hank is gravely injured after a fight against an enormous knight army, and Merlin spells him to sleep for 1300 years, just enough to wake up, tell his story, and finally die with his wife's name on his lips.
Another famous novel of this kind is Lest Darkness Fall by L. Sprague de Camp, in which an American archaeologist called Martin Padway is transported back in time from 1938 to 535, appearing in Rome at the time Italiy is being controlled by the Ostrogodes, some time before it becomes invaded by the Eastern Roman Empire. However, Padway manages to introduce several technological improvements and political ideas that allow him to strengthen the Italo-Gothic Kingdom and reject the attacks from the Byzantines first, and later from the Lombards in the north, beginning to plan for later developments (such as the Discovery of America) to prevent the Darkness from falling.
We also have the novel series Sixteen Thirty-Two (1632), which begins with an Event that takes Grantville a (fictitious) West Virginia village to the center of Germany in the aforementioned year, right in the middle of the Thirty Years' War. Conscious of the great technological imbalance they are introducing, the townspeople decide to follow Mike Stearns' suggestions: to begin the American Revolution a hundred and fifty years ahead of schedule. Soon, Grantville becomes the neuralgic center of a new nation, thanks to the support of Swedish king Gustav Adolf II. The book is very well written, showing how all the advances introduced by the people of Grantville have their advantages (such as working heavy-than-air planes in 1634) and inconvenients, these being caused particularly as Grantville's schoolbooks and the inventions brought to the past begin to spread between Grantville's allies and enemies.
But, beware, that this is not only about appearing in historical, ancient periods: AlternateHistory.com, the main webpage where alternative history writers meet, has a great number of ISOT stories where real people or nations appear in the middle of the story in books or videogames, or even creating what is called a crossover (basically, fictitious characters of two different "worlds" directly interacting). I am currently helping to write an ISOT in which the United States, after voting for Obama for a second time, suddenly appears in the world of George Orwell's novel 1984, and becomes involved in the hard task of freeing the entire world from the tyranny of Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia. Another story that is currently gaining much interest is A Connecticut Yankee in King Robert's Court, in which two people from the beginning of the 21st century suddenly become two characters in the A Song of Ice and Fire books, which are Edmure Tully (Catelyn Tully-Stark's young brother) and Myranda Royce (a young noblewoman that lives in the Vale of Arryn).
I hope that you have liked this, and that it will incite you to read more about alternative history.
I hope to see you next week!
2014/05/20
The artist that became a tyrant
Unfortunately, history is full of people that have made a horrible use of the confidence others have put in them, whether it was to attempt to force their will on them, or for their own enrichment, but in every case acting in ways that clearly went against what the people wanted or needed. Just a couple of weeks ago, the anniversary of the death of one of those people was celebrated, a person that, whether you like it or not, has been one of the most influential people in the 20th century: Adolf Hitler.
To begin, no, Hitler was not a devil, nor the personification of evil or anything that may be related to that: he was a human being, much like any of us. Yes, I agree that he would have deserved the worst punishments one could think about, had he not killed himself; yes, his abilities to show humanity and compassion for other peole were nearly zero, and he caused many acts of great evil, but he was still a person. This is one of the lessons about him that many forget: that anyone can be as horrible as him, or even worse (see Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and a great etcetera).
Born on April 20th 1889 in Braunau am Inn (then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, nowadays Austria), Adolf was a young man with that might have followed an artistic path (he sung in the church choir and wanted to be a painter) and with a marked tendency towards Germanic nationalism. Between 1905 and 1913, he lived in Vienna, city that, at the time, was a source of great religious and racial prejudice (particularly towards the Jewish people), where he tried twice (unsuccessfully) to be accepted in the Academy of Fine Arts, and where it is believed that his antisemitic feelings, that affected the world so much, started to grow. During the First World War, he fought as part of the Bavarian Army (part of the Imperial German Army) in order to not form part of the multinational Austro-Hungarian Imperial Army, and he received the Iron Cross, although for most of the war he was well away from the front.
After the war, he worked for a time as an intelligence agent of the Reichswehr (the post-war German Army) and he infiltrated the German Workers' Party (DAP, Deutsche Arbeiterpartei), but the ideology presented by its founder, Anton Drexler, attracted him so much that he joined the party, which would later become the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP, Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei), better known as the Nazi Party. The attempt of coup d'état of 1923 (the Munich Beer Hall Putsch) failed, but it allowed him to expand his message, and the Crash of 1929 gave his party wings. In 1933, he was named Chancellor by President Paul von Hindenburg at the suggestion of Franz von Papen and Alfred Hugenberg, and, although under his rule Germany showed economic growth, it was a a masquerade with which Hitler planned to take Germany into a war against its enemies (real or not), as well as killing those people Hitler considered "Enemies of the State": Jews, Roma, Slavs, Communists, homosexuals and many more.
The ending is well known by everyone: six years of brutal war that ended up killing more than 60 million people (approximately 2.5% of the world population at the time) and Hitler ended up killing himself by swallowing a cianure capsule and shooting himself on the head.
This post will speak about some potential points of divergence related to Hitler. We will ignore all those possibilities in which Nazi Germany wins in World War Two (an idea too depressing for my taste), so we will concentrate on other situations.
An easy example to begin with is his application to enter the Academy of Fine Arts of Vienna. Adolf was quite talented in painting watercolours of buildings, but painting people was something he was not so good at. The Academy director suggested him to study architecture, but he did not have the academic credential required for that. What if Adolf had been admitted, or if he had been able to study architecture? His studies would have surely kept him busy in the city, enough time that the war would begin while he was within the Austrian borders, so he might have been conscripted by the Austro-Hungarian Army, where he would be facing Russians, Serbians and Italians: perhaps he might have died in the invasion of Serbia, the attacks against the Russian Army, any of the twelve battles that took place in the shores of the Isonzo River or the Battle of Vittorio Veneto, which meant the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Or, if he had been lucky to not to have to join the army, he would have remained in Vienna, away from the war (at least directly) and would have never earned the military credentials that he would later use in his favour.
Possibility #2 is that he could have died during the First World War as part of the German Army, and he had many chances of forming part of the ten million that died then. For example, in October 1914, a British sharpshooter (Soldier Henry Tandey, who, at the end of the war, was given the Victoria Cross) could have shot him while he limped towards his lines after being injured in battle, but he did not pull the trigger (much like what it happened to Washington, as I told you in post #7). Hitler was present in the First Battle of Ypres of October 1914 (where his company was reduced from 250 soldiers to 42 in two months), the Battle of the Somme (where a bomb exploded in the messengers' refuge, injuring his leg) or the Battle of Passchendaele (where more than 270,000 German soldiers lost their life). Finally, in October 1918, a month before the end of the war, he suffered a mustard gas attack and was temporarily blinded, but a higher dose could have been mortal. Had he died then, his loss would have not been noted, but the later changes would have been: the DAP might not have gained that much influence, but the Great Depression (almost unavoidable, unless the economy had been built differently in the post-war period) would have probably taken Germany towards a dictatorship, maybe less horrible than the one imposed by the Nazi Party, but stil reprehensible.
Another "What If?" from this time is the Beer Hall Putsch. During a fight between NSDAP members and the Bavarian state police, Hitler and Göring (future chief of the Luftwaffe, the Nazi Air Force) were both shot and arrested. These shots could have killed them, or maybe the judge and popular jury that were part of the trial against Hitler for high treason could have been more severe: his time in prison could have been longer than the five years he was condemned to (and of which he only spent one in prison), or he could have even been condemned to death. The loss of their leaders in this way would have made the NSDAP suffer a great defeat at a political level, and it could have also disappeared.
Someone could have also killed him when he came out of prison in 1924. At least, this is how the videogame series Command and Conquer: Red Alert begins: Albert Einstein travels in time from 1946 to 1924 and shakes Hitler's hand, making him disappear and preventing the resurgement of the Nazi Party, but in exchange the Soviet Union becomes a Great Power, as, without the threat of Hitler to the west, Stalin would have had no checks against his attempts to expand his control over Eurasia (we'll talk about this in a future post.
After 1924... well, as Hitler's influence increased, also did his enemies. In total, there were more than forty murder attempts against him. Just in 1933, there were ten. Nearly every attempt was planned by Germans opposed to Hitler. Apart from the July 20th Plot (part of the well-knwon Operation Valkyrie), there were the Oster Conspiracy (led by Hans Oster, who planned to kill Hitler if he ended up declaring war on Czechoslovakia over the Sudetenland), and Operation Spark (in which several conservative militars expected to spark an internal coup aafter killing Hitler), as well as the efforts of the German Communist Party's leader, Beppo Römer, who tried to kill him between 1934 and 1942, when he was arrested. Curiously, during the war, neither English nor Americans tried to send assassins to kill Hitler: considering Hitler's general incompetence and his obsession with controlling every move carried out by the German army corps, particularly as the war advanced, the Allies considered that it would be more efficient to let Hitler remain in charge, shortening the war.
Wow, I'm feeling a little bloodthirsty today, with talking so much about death, death and more death. Is it possible that Hitler could have become a better person, if certain things in his past changed? Perhaps, but they would have to be very significant changes to avoid Hitler from going through the same problems that turned him into the individual he became in our reality.
Of course, many works exist in which changes in Hitler's life change the course of history. I have already mentioned Command and Conquer: Red Alert, but there are many other that bear studying.
British actor Stephen Fry (who recently played Sherlock Holmes' brother in Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows), wrote a novel called Making History in which a British young man and a Nazi doctor's son manage to send a permanent anticonceptive pill back into the past into Branau am Inn's well, in order to sterilize Adolf Hitler's father and prevent his birth. Although this procedure is successful, the world does not change for the better, because the Nazi Party becomes more successful thanks to another man that takes Hitler's place and leads Germany into becoming master of all of Europe (including the United Kingdom), defeating the Soviet Union after German scientists develop the atomic bomb, and are currently in the middle of a cold war with a more conservative United States. Only a procedure similar to the one used at the beginning manages to restore history to what it was, more or less.
There is also Quentin Tarantino's film Inglorious Basterds, in which a group of American Jews manages to infiltrate France shortly before Operation Overlord (which started with the Normandy Landings) and trace a plan to kill Hitler and his main collaborators (Reichsführer of the SS Heinrich Himmler, Minister of Propagand Joseph Goebbels and Hitler's private secretary, Martin Bormann). The plan is successful, but only thanks to the parallel plan developed by a Jew girl whose family was murdered by the film's main villain and the latter's collaboration in exchange of amnesty. Many film lovers believe that this film is the reason why the Tarantino Universe (Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill and others) is a lot more violent than the real world.
A very funny choice is Fiction: Missives from Possible Futures #1: Alternate History Search Results by John Scalzi, which shows several ways in which Hitler could have died, all of them in the same date (August 13th 1908), all of them hilarious, particularly the last one.
The novel The Iron Dream by Norman Spinrad has, as its nucleus, a sci-fi novel written by an alternative Adolf Hitler that left for the United States shortly after the First World War, where he works as an illustrator for pulp novels before starting to write himself. Without him, Germany falls to a Communist revolution, and by the year 1954, the Soviet Union controls all of Eurasia and Africa and is beginning to expand into South America. Ironically, Spinrad wrote the book as a satire of crypto-fascist fiction, but the American Nazi Party did not catch the "satire" part and put the book in his recommended reading list.
In The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick, after the Nazi victory in World War Three against the United States, the Nazis end up putting Hitler in an asylum, knowing that the world they have built is mad, but unable to recognize it aloud.
And, to end on a high note, what better way to do this than speaking about superheroes? One of the Justice League series has Superman, Wonderwoman, Green Lantern, J'onn J'onzz and Hawkgirl appear in a world in which the Nazis have won the war after the immortal villain Vandal Savage managed to send important information on advanced technology and the Allied troops movements to his past self, so the group has to travel to the past as well to defeat Savage and restore history, as one of the chapter's last images is some Nazi officers suggesting to revive a cryogenically freezed Hitler. However, there is the implication that Vandal Savage's meddling, while it did not stop the Axis' defeat, it prevented the Holocaust from taking place.
I hope that, in spite of the potentially unpleasant matter I worked with, this post was interesting.
I'll see you next Friday with a new post.
To begin, no, Hitler was not a devil, nor the personification of evil or anything that may be related to that: he was a human being, much like any of us. Yes, I agree that he would have deserved the worst punishments one could think about, had he not killed himself; yes, his abilities to show humanity and compassion for other peole were nearly zero, and he caused many acts of great evil, but he was still a person. This is one of the lessons about him that many forget: that anyone can be as horrible as him, or even worse (see Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and a great etcetera).
Born on April 20th 1889 in Braunau am Inn (then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, nowadays Austria), Adolf was a young man with that might have followed an artistic path (he sung in the church choir and wanted to be a painter) and with a marked tendency towards Germanic nationalism. Between 1905 and 1913, he lived in Vienna, city that, at the time, was a source of great religious and racial prejudice (particularly towards the Jewish people), where he tried twice (unsuccessfully) to be accepted in the Academy of Fine Arts, and where it is believed that his antisemitic feelings, that affected the world so much, started to grow. During the First World War, he fought as part of the Bavarian Army (part of the Imperial German Army) in order to not form part of the multinational Austro-Hungarian Imperial Army, and he received the Iron Cross, although for most of the war he was well away from the front.
After the war, he worked for a time as an intelligence agent of the Reichswehr (the post-war German Army) and he infiltrated the German Workers' Party (DAP, Deutsche Arbeiterpartei), but the ideology presented by its founder, Anton Drexler, attracted him so much that he joined the party, which would later become the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP, Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei), better known as the Nazi Party. The attempt of coup d'état of 1923 (the Munich Beer Hall Putsch) failed, but it allowed him to expand his message, and the Crash of 1929 gave his party wings. In 1933, he was named Chancellor by President Paul von Hindenburg at the suggestion of Franz von Papen and Alfred Hugenberg, and, although under his rule Germany showed economic growth, it was a a masquerade with which Hitler planned to take Germany into a war against its enemies (real or not), as well as killing those people Hitler considered "Enemies of the State": Jews, Roma, Slavs, Communists, homosexuals and many more.
The ending is well known by everyone: six years of brutal war that ended up killing more than 60 million people (approximately 2.5% of the world population at the time) and Hitler ended up killing himself by swallowing a cianure capsule and shooting himself on the head.
This post will speak about some potential points of divergence related to Hitler. We will ignore all those possibilities in which Nazi Germany wins in World War Two (an idea too depressing for my taste), so we will concentrate on other situations.
An easy example to begin with is his application to enter the Academy of Fine Arts of Vienna. Adolf was quite talented in painting watercolours of buildings, but painting people was something he was not so good at. The Academy director suggested him to study architecture, but he did not have the academic credential required for that. What if Adolf had been admitted, or if he had been able to study architecture? His studies would have surely kept him busy in the city, enough time that the war would begin while he was within the Austrian borders, so he might have been conscripted by the Austro-Hungarian Army, where he would be facing Russians, Serbians and Italians: perhaps he might have died in the invasion of Serbia, the attacks against the Russian Army, any of the twelve battles that took place in the shores of the Isonzo River or the Battle of Vittorio Veneto, which meant the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Or, if he had been lucky to not to have to join the army, he would have remained in Vienna, away from the war (at least directly) and would have never earned the military credentials that he would later use in his favour.
Possibility #2 is that he could have died during the First World War as part of the German Army, and he had many chances of forming part of the ten million that died then. For example, in October 1914, a British sharpshooter (Soldier Henry Tandey, who, at the end of the war, was given the Victoria Cross) could have shot him while he limped towards his lines after being injured in battle, but he did not pull the trigger (much like what it happened to Washington, as I told you in post #7). Hitler was present in the First Battle of Ypres of October 1914 (where his company was reduced from 250 soldiers to 42 in two months), the Battle of the Somme (where a bomb exploded in the messengers' refuge, injuring his leg) or the Battle of Passchendaele (where more than 270,000 German soldiers lost their life). Finally, in October 1918, a month before the end of the war, he suffered a mustard gas attack and was temporarily blinded, but a higher dose could have been mortal. Had he died then, his loss would have not been noted, but the later changes would have been: the DAP might not have gained that much influence, but the Great Depression (almost unavoidable, unless the economy had been built differently in the post-war period) would have probably taken Germany towards a dictatorship, maybe less horrible than the one imposed by the Nazi Party, but stil reprehensible.
Another "What If?" from this time is the Beer Hall Putsch. During a fight between NSDAP members and the Bavarian state police, Hitler and Göring (future chief of the Luftwaffe, the Nazi Air Force) were both shot and arrested. These shots could have killed them, or maybe the judge and popular jury that were part of the trial against Hitler for high treason could have been more severe: his time in prison could have been longer than the five years he was condemned to (and of which he only spent one in prison), or he could have even been condemned to death. The loss of their leaders in this way would have made the NSDAP suffer a great defeat at a political level, and it could have also disappeared.
Someone could have also killed him when he came out of prison in 1924. At least, this is how the videogame series Command and Conquer: Red Alert begins: Albert Einstein travels in time from 1946 to 1924 and shakes Hitler's hand, making him disappear and preventing the resurgement of the Nazi Party, but in exchange the Soviet Union becomes a Great Power, as, without the threat of Hitler to the west, Stalin would have had no checks against his attempts to expand his control over Eurasia (we'll talk about this in a future post.
After 1924... well, as Hitler's influence increased, also did his enemies. In total, there were more than forty murder attempts against him. Just in 1933, there were ten. Nearly every attempt was planned by Germans opposed to Hitler. Apart from the July 20th Plot (part of the well-knwon Operation Valkyrie), there were the Oster Conspiracy (led by Hans Oster, who planned to kill Hitler if he ended up declaring war on Czechoslovakia over the Sudetenland), and Operation Spark (in which several conservative militars expected to spark an internal coup aafter killing Hitler), as well as the efforts of the German Communist Party's leader, Beppo Römer, who tried to kill him between 1934 and 1942, when he was arrested. Curiously, during the war, neither English nor Americans tried to send assassins to kill Hitler: considering Hitler's general incompetence and his obsession with controlling every move carried out by the German army corps, particularly as the war advanced, the Allies considered that it would be more efficient to let Hitler remain in charge, shortening the war.
Wow, I'm feeling a little bloodthirsty today, with talking so much about death, death and more death. Is it possible that Hitler could have become a better person, if certain things in his past changed? Perhaps, but they would have to be very significant changes to avoid Hitler from going through the same problems that turned him into the individual he became in our reality.
Of course, many works exist in which changes in Hitler's life change the course of history. I have already mentioned Command and Conquer: Red Alert, but there are many other that bear studying.
British actor Stephen Fry (who recently played Sherlock Holmes' brother in Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows), wrote a novel called Making History in which a British young man and a Nazi doctor's son manage to send a permanent anticonceptive pill back into the past into Branau am Inn's well, in order to sterilize Adolf Hitler's father and prevent his birth. Although this procedure is successful, the world does not change for the better, because the Nazi Party becomes more successful thanks to another man that takes Hitler's place and leads Germany into becoming master of all of Europe (including the United Kingdom), defeating the Soviet Union after German scientists develop the atomic bomb, and are currently in the middle of a cold war with a more conservative United States. Only a procedure similar to the one used at the beginning manages to restore history to what it was, more or less.
There is also Quentin Tarantino's film Inglorious Basterds, in which a group of American Jews manages to infiltrate France shortly before Operation Overlord (which started with the Normandy Landings) and trace a plan to kill Hitler and his main collaborators (Reichsführer of the SS Heinrich Himmler, Minister of Propagand Joseph Goebbels and Hitler's private secretary, Martin Bormann). The plan is successful, but only thanks to the parallel plan developed by a Jew girl whose family was murdered by the film's main villain and the latter's collaboration in exchange of amnesty. Many film lovers believe that this film is the reason why the Tarantino Universe (Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill and others) is a lot more violent than the real world.
A very funny choice is Fiction: Missives from Possible Futures #1: Alternate History Search Results by John Scalzi, which shows several ways in which Hitler could have died, all of them in the same date (August 13th 1908), all of them hilarious, particularly the last one.
The novel The Iron Dream by Norman Spinrad has, as its nucleus, a sci-fi novel written by an alternative Adolf Hitler that left for the United States shortly after the First World War, where he works as an illustrator for pulp novels before starting to write himself. Without him, Germany falls to a Communist revolution, and by the year 1954, the Soviet Union controls all of Eurasia and Africa and is beginning to expand into South America. Ironically, Spinrad wrote the book as a satire of crypto-fascist fiction, but the American Nazi Party did not catch the "satire" part and put the book in his recommended reading list.
In The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick, after the Nazi victory in World War Three against the United States, the Nazis end up putting Hitler in an asylum, knowing that the world they have built is mad, but unable to recognize it aloud.
And, to end on a high note, what better way to do this than speaking about superheroes? One of the Justice League series has Superman, Wonderwoman, Green Lantern, J'onn J'onzz and Hawkgirl appear in a world in which the Nazis have won the war after the immortal villain Vandal Savage managed to send important information on advanced technology and the Allied troops movements to his past self, so the group has to travel to the past as well to defeat Savage and restore history, as one of the chapter's last images is some Nazi officers suggesting to revive a cryogenically freezed Hitler. However, there is the implication that Vandal Savage's meddling, while it did not stop the Axis' defeat, it prevented the Holocaust from taking place.
I hope that, in spite of the potentially unpleasant matter I worked with, this post was interesting.
I'll see you next Friday with a new post.
2014/05/16
History of Uchronia
It is strange, right? So much talking about history and uchronias, and, till now, I have yet to speak about the history of the uchronia. Which, by the way, is much older than what many people think. Older than utopias, at least.
The first written uchronia was found as part of Ab Urbe condita libri (History of Rome from its foundation) by Livy. In a fragment of this work - of which we only known a quarter - Livy asks himself what would have happened if Alexander the Great, instead of expanding his empire towards the east, had done so towards the west, meeting in conflict against the Roman Republic. Of course, what could the man say? That Rome would have won in such a challenge against Alexander.
To read more uchronias (at least, that we know of nowadays), about fifteen centuries, no less, must pass, until the publishing of the Spanish romance Tirant lo Blanch, written by the Valencian knight Joanot Martorell, in 1490. The fall of Constantinople in hands of the Ottomans was still fresh in the minds of the Christian world (it would have probably not happened if the Venetians had not forced the Fourth Crusade to attack the city) so it was natural that someone tried to think in how this catastrophe could have been avoided. In the romance, Tirant the White is a knight from Bretagne, who has many adventures and participates in tourneys, both in England and in France, until the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Emperor asks for his help to stop the Ottoman Turks' advance. After accepting, Tirant is named Megaduke (commander-in-chief of the Byzantine navy) and is given the control of an army, with which he not only defeats the Turks, but he als pushes them back, reconquering part of the Eastern Mediterranean and Northern Africa, but unfortunately he deis before he can marry the beautiful heiress of the Empire, which would have made him the actual Emperor.
Another three hundred years would have to pass until another novel saw the light, this one more uchronic that anything before: Histoire de la Monarchie universelle: Napoléon et la conquête du monde (1812–1832) (History of the Universal Monarchy: Napoelon and the conquest of the world (1812-1832)) by Frenchman Loius Geoffrey, who imagines a potential victory of Napoleon during the Invasion of Russia in 1811, and a later successful invasion of Britain in 1814, managing in the following years to join the entire world under his crown.
The first uchronic work written in English was the 1845 short story P.'s Correspondence, by Nathaniel Hawthorne (although there are some people who say that the previous Alroy by Benjamin Disraeli is the one that should have that honour, since it was written in 1833), which consists of a long letter written by a supposed friend of the author who has apparently gone mad, because he is constantly seeing two alternative realities at the same time: one would be ours, and the other would be one where many people (particularly writers) that died before 1845 in our reality are still alive, such as Lord Byron or Shelley. It wouldn't be until 1899 that the first English uchronic novel was published: Aristopia by Castello Holford, in which the first Virginian colonists find a pure gold reef, and take advantage of this to form an utopia similar to the one described by Thomas More in his work, and then they become the leaders of the American Revolution and take over all of North America north of Mexico.
Uchronia's fame would lift off in the 20th century. For example, the anthology If It Had Happened Otherwise from 1931 has, among other stories, an essay written by Winston Churchill called "If Lee Had Not Won The Battle Of Gettysburg", in which Churchill uses an element called double-blind-what-if, writing about what would have happened if Lee was defeated at Gettysburg from the point of view of a historian in an alternative reality where the American Civil War ended with a Confederate victory, but eventually the Union and the Confederacy join with the British Empire in an English-Speakers Association that prevents World War I from happening.
The short story "Sidewise in Time", written by Murray Leinster in 1934, gave name to an award that started to be given in 1995 to reward the best alternative history works. This award, both for novels and short stories, has been given to people such as actor Stephen Fry (for Making History in 1998), Harry Turtledove (for How Few Remain, first book of the Timeline-191 series, in 1997) or Philip Roth (for The Plot Against America in 2004).
Authors of other genres would also deal with the task of writing uchronias: for example, L. Sprague de Camp wrote one of the masterworks of the genre, Lest Darkness Fall, in which an American archaeologist called Martin Padway is transported in a strange accident to Rome in the year 535 AD, and his actions manage to strengthen the Italo-Gothic Kingdom that was formed in Italy after the fall of the Western Roman Empire by defending it from the Lombards at the north and the Eastern Roman Empire in the south, using several inventions and tricks to unify the Italian nobility, ensuring that darkness does not fall over the territory. And, of course, we cannot forget Philip K. Dick himself, who wrote The Man in the High Castle in 1963, a novel in which the murder of President-elect Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1933 prevents the United States from getting out of the Great Depression, and his successors kept the previous isolationist policies, allowing the Axis to win World War Two and later defeating the United States, which ends up divided in three parts, two of them as Japanese and German puppets and the third as a buffer state between the former two: the story itself is about a conspiracy by a German faction to eliminate Japan by using nuclear weapons, and the efforts by a group of Nazi leaders from stopping this in order to avoid World War Three by meeting with Japanese representatives in the United States.
Nowadays, there are many great alternative history novels. Apart from the already mentioned Harry Turtledove's Timeline-191, there is The Island in the Sea of Time by S. M. Stirling, in which the island of Nantucket is sent back in time to the Bronze Age; the 1632 series by Eric Flint, where a West Virginia town suddenly appears in Central Europe during the Thirty Years' War; or Synco by Chilean Jorge Baradit, in which Pinochet helps to stop the September 11th 1973 coup d'état against Salvador Allende, which allows the eventual transformation of Chile into the first cybernetic state in history thanks to Project Synco, which would have allowed instant communication between all of its citizens.
Do not think that we Spaniards are short on ideas, though. Already in 1885, Nilo María Fabra wrote Cuatro Siglos de Buen Gobierno (Four Centuries of Good Government), telling the survival of the Spanish Empire until very late into the 19th century because Miguel da Paz, the son of King Manuel I of Portugal and Isabella, Princess of Asturias, thus potential Heir to the crowns of Portugal, Castile, Leon and Aragon, survived the illness that killed him in the year 1500 some time before becoming two years old.
In Spain, the two main matters dealt with in uchronias are, of course, the two most shocking events in our recent history: the war with the United States and the Civil War. The result of the first is inverted in the novel Fuego sobre San Juan (Fire over San Juan) by Pedro García Bilbao and Javier Sánchez-Reyes, while the second changes in works like En el día de hoy (In the Day of Today) by Jesús Torbado, or Los rojos ganaron la guerra (The Reds Won the War) by Fernando Vizcaíno Casas. These are not the only themes, however: the early death of Philip II and the crowning of Don John of Austria is the Point of Divergence that gives the starting point to Danza de tinieblas by Eduardo Vaquerizo, and Javier Negrete speaks about a potential encounter between Alexander the Great and the Roman Republic (much like in Ab Urbe condita libri) in Alejandro Magno contra las águilas de Roma (Alexander the Great against the Roman Eagles).
I know that this might feel a bit boring and long, but I hope that, in spite of this, you will like knowing that uchronias are as old as ancient Rome..
Greetings, and I hope that you will comment my efforts and that you will come back next Tuesday!
The first written uchronia was found as part of Ab Urbe condita libri (History of Rome from its foundation) by Livy. In a fragment of this work - of which we only known a quarter - Livy asks himself what would have happened if Alexander the Great, instead of expanding his empire towards the east, had done so towards the west, meeting in conflict against the Roman Republic. Of course, what could the man say? That Rome would have won in such a challenge against Alexander.
To read more uchronias (at least, that we know of nowadays), about fifteen centuries, no less, must pass, until the publishing of the Spanish romance Tirant lo Blanch, written by the Valencian knight Joanot Martorell, in 1490. The fall of Constantinople in hands of the Ottomans was still fresh in the minds of the Christian world (it would have probably not happened if the Venetians had not forced the Fourth Crusade to attack the city) so it was natural that someone tried to think in how this catastrophe could have been avoided. In the romance, Tirant the White is a knight from Bretagne, who has many adventures and participates in tourneys, both in England and in France, until the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Emperor asks for his help to stop the Ottoman Turks' advance. After accepting, Tirant is named Megaduke (commander-in-chief of the Byzantine navy) and is given the control of an army, with which he not only defeats the Turks, but he als pushes them back, reconquering part of the Eastern Mediterranean and Northern Africa, but unfortunately he deis before he can marry the beautiful heiress of the Empire, which would have made him the actual Emperor.
Another three hundred years would have to pass until another novel saw the light, this one more uchronic that anything before: Histoire de la Monarchie universelle: Napoléon et la conquête du monde (1812–1832) (History of the Universal Monarchy: Napoelon and the conquest of the world (1812-1832)) by Frenchman Loius Geoffrey, who imagines a potential victory of Napoleon during the Invasion of Russia in 1811, and a later successful invasion of Britain in 1814, managing in the following years to join the entire world under his crown.
The first uchronic work written in English was the 1845 short story P.'s Correspondence, by Nathaniel Hawthorne (although there are some people who say that the previous Alroy by Benjamin Disraeli is the one that should have that honour, since it was written in 1833), which consists of a long letter written by a supposed friend of the author who has apparently gone mad, because he is constantly seeing two alternative realities at the same time: one would be ours, and the other would be one where many people (particularly writers) that died before 1845 in our reality are still alive, such as Lord Byron or Shelley. It wouldn't be until 1899 that the first English uchronic novel was published: Aristopia by Castello Holford, in which the first Virginian colonists find a pure gold reef, and take advantage of this to form an utopia similar to the one described by Thomas More in his work, and then they become the leaders of the American Revolution and take over all of North America north of Mexico.
Uchronia's fame would lift off in the 20th century. For example, the anthology If It Had Happened Otherwise from 1931 has, among other stories, an essay written by Winston Churchill called "If Lee Had Not Won The Battle Of Gettysburg", in which Churchill uses an element called double-blind-what-if, writing about what would have happened if Lee was defeated at Gettysburg from the point of view of a historian in an alternative reality where the American Civil War ended with a Confederate victory, but eventually the Union and the Confederacy join with the British Empire in an English-Speakers Association that prevents World War I from happening.
The short story "Sidewise in Time", written by Murray Leinster in 1934, gave name to an award that started to be given in 1995 to reward the best alternative history works. This award, both for novels and short stories, has been given to people such as actor Stephen Fry (for Making History in 1998), Harry Turtledove (for How Few Remain, first book of the Timeline-191 series, in 1997) or Philip Roth (for The Plot Against America in 2004).
Authors of other genres would also deal with the task of writing uchronias: for example, L. Sprague de Camp wrote one of the masterworks of the genre, Lest Darkness Fall, in which an American archaeologist called Martin Padway is transported in a strange accident to Rome in the year 535 AD, and his actions manage to strengthen the Italo-Gothic Kingdom that was formed in Italy after the fall of the Western Roman Empire by defending it from the Lombards at the north and the Eastern Roman Empire in the south, using several inventions and tricks to unify the Italian nobility, ensuring that darkness does not fall over the territory. And, of course, we cannot forget Philip K. Dick himself, who wrote The Man in the High Castle in 1963, a novel in which the murder of President-elect Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1933 prevents the United States from getting out of the Great Depression, and his successors kept the previous isolationist policies, allowing the Axis to win World War Two and later defeating the United States, which ends up divided in three parts, two of them as Japanese and German puppets and the third as a buffer state between the former two: the story itself is about a conspiracy by a German faction to eliminate Japan by using nuclear weapons, and the efforts by a group of Nazi leaders from stopping this in order to avoid World War Three by meeting with Japanese representatives in the United States.
Nowadays, there are many great alternative history novels. Apart from the already mentioned Harry Turtledove's Timeline-191, there is The Island in the Sea of Time by S. M. Stirling, in which the island of Nantucket is sent back in time to the Bronze Age; the 1632 series by Eric Flint, where a West Virginia town suddenly appears in Central Europe during the Thirty Years' War; or Synco by Chilean Jorge Baradit, in which Pinochet helps to stop the September 11th 1973 coup d'état against Salvador Allende, which allows the eventual transformation of Chile into the first cybernetic state in history thanks to Project Synco, which would have allowed instant communication between all of its citizens.
Do not think that we Spaniards are short on ideas, though. Already in 1885, Nilo María Fabra wrote Cuatro Siglos de Buen Gobierno (Four Centuries of Good Government), telling the survival of the Spanish Empire until very late into the 19th century because Miguel da Paz, the son of King Manuel I of Portugal and Isabella, Princess of Asturias, thus potential Heir to the crowns of Portugal, Castile, Leon and Aragon, survived the illness that killed him in the year 1500 some time before becoming two years old.
In Spain, the two main matters dealt with in uchronias are, of course, the two most shocking events in our recent history: the war with the United States and the Civil War. The result of the first is inverted in the novel Fuego sobre San Juan (Fire over San Juan) by Pedro García Bilbao and Javier Sánchez-Reyes, while the second changes in works like En el día de hoy (In the Day of Today) by Jesús Torbado, or Los rojos ganaron la guerra (The Reds Won the War) by Fernando Vizcaíno Casas. These are not the only themes, however: the early death of Philip II and the crowning of Don John of Austria is the Point of Divergence that gives the starting point to Danza de tinieblas by Eduardo Vaquerizo, and Javier Negrete speaks about a potential encounter between Alexander the Great and the Roman Republic (much like in Ab Urbe condita libri) in Alejandro Magno contra las águilas de Roma (Alexander the Great against the Roman Eagles).
I know that this might feel a bit boring and long, but I hope that, in spite of this, you will like knowing that uchronias are as old as ancient Rome..
Greetings, and I hope that you will comment my efforts and that you will come back next Tuesday!
2014/05/13
Sliding through the multiverse
Hi, everyone, and welcome to a new post of Uchronia Lallena. Today is the turn of talking about cultural works related with alternate history, and after thinking about it for a little time, I have decided to speak about a TV-series that is basically founded on this idea: Sliders
This series begins in the city of San Francisco, USA. Quinn Mallory is a Physics student specialized in the superstring theory (a theory that tries to explain the existence of particles and their interactions as vibrations of thin, supersymmetric strings), who, in an attempt to produce antigravity, manages to create a device capable of creating an Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky bridge (something that you may have heard of by its more common name, "wormhole"), which can connect two parallel dimensions by opening a hole in the space-time continuum. This hole has a limited duration, but the device has a timer that lets the user open the same wormhole after a certain period of time.
Using this device, and in company of his thesis professor Maximillian Arturo and his best friend Wade Wells, he decides to travel to another dimension (this is what gives the name to the series, as Quinn calls the ability of traveling between dimensions "sliding"). The vortex that opens also accidentally brings Rembrandt "Cryin' Man" Brown, a professional singer that was driving in front of Quinn's house when the device was activated. The vortex takes them to an Earth where the Ice Age has not finished, and the four of them have to get into Rembrandt's car to avoid freezing. However, when a horrible tornado threatens to kill them, Quinn decides to restart the timer, which allows them to escape the tornado, but at the same time they cannot return home: from there on, every time they appear in a new world, they must activate the time and hope that the vortex that opens will be the one that takes them back home.
Every chapter after then always has one or two new worlds that are a new alternative history. For example, the first world they visit (after the Ice Age one) is one where North Korea won in the KoreanWar, and the Soviet Union managed to win the Cold War, turning the entire world to Communism. In a later world, penicillin was never discovered, and Quinn's double ("local" person with the same identity as someone from another dimension) is Patient Zero of an epidemic that is ravaging California. And, in another episode, the Sliders appear in a world where the sexual stereotypes are inverted: women are the leaders of society, while men are restricted to office work, babysitting and modeling.
However, this is not the only problem the main characters have to face: the Kromaggs, a primate humanoid species that evolved in another Earth, also have sliding technology, but their violent and militaristic nature make them use sliding to travel to other Earths and conquer them with their advanced technology, to then kill or enslave all the local humans. Quinn also discovers at a later point that the Earth the main character come from (Earth Prime to them) is not the one he comes from: actually, he comes from the same world as the Kromaggs (Kromagg Prime), which was inhabited by humans and Kromaggs until a war started, and his parents decided to send him and his brother Colin to different worlds, using sliding technology, and promising to find them again when the war ended.
Sadly, this series only lasted from 1995 to 2000, leaving in the air the main characters' destiny: after sliding into a world where the Sliders' adventures are a wildly popular television program, Rembrandt Brown decides to inoculate himself with a biological weapon that only affects Kromaggs and use a timer that only lets one person through, with the hope of finding Earth Prime and defeat the Kromaggs that have invaded the planet, while the others are forced to remain behind and wait.
I hope you thought this was interesting, and that you will come back next Friday to read more about alternative history.
See you!
This series begins in the city of San Francisco, USA. Quinn Mallory is a Physics student specialized in the superstring theory (a theory that tries to explain the existence of particles and their interactions as vibrations of thin, supersymmetric strings), who, in an attempt to produce antigravity, manages to create a device capable of creating an Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky bridge (something that you may have heard of by its more common name, "wormhole"), which can connect two parallel dimensions by opening a hole in the space-time continuum. This hole has a limited duration, but the device has a timer that lets the user open the same wormhole after a certain period of time.
Using this device, and in company of his thesis professor Maximillian Arturo and his best friend Wade Wells, he decides to travel to another dimension (this is what gives the name to the series, as Quinn calls the ability of traveling between dimensions "sliding"). The vortex that opens also accidentally brings Rembrandt "Cryin' Man" Brown, a professional singer that was driving in front of Quinn's house when the device was activated. The vortex takes them to an Earth where the Ice Age has not finished, and the four of them have to get into Rembrandt's car to avoid freezing. However, when a horrible tornado threatens to kill them, Quinn decides to restart the timer, which allows them to escape the tornado, but at the same time they cannot return home: from there on, every time they appear in a new world, they must activate the time and hope that the vortex that opens will be the one that takes them back home.
Every chapter after then always has one or two new worlds that are a new alternative history. For example, the first world they visit (after the Ice Age one) is one where North Korea won in the KoreanWar, and the Soviet Union managed to win the Cold War, turning the entire world to Communism. In a later world, penicillin was never discovered, and Quinn's double ("local" person with the same identity as someone from another dimension) is Patient Zero of an epidemic that is ravaging California. And, in another episode, the Sliders appear in a world where the sexual stereotypes are inverted: women are the leaders of society, while men are restricted to office work, babysitting and modeling.
However, this is not the only problem the main characters have to face: the Kromaggs, a primate humanoid species that evolved in another Earth, also have sliding technology, but their violent and militaristic nature make them use sliding to travel to other Earths and conquer them with their advanced technology, to then kill or enslave all the local humans. Quinn also discovers at a later point that the Earth the main character come from (Earth Prime to them) is not the one he comes from: actually, he comes from the same world as the Kromaggs (Kromagg Prime), which was inhabited by humans and Kromaggs until a war started, and his parents decided to send him and his brother Colin to different worlds, using sliding technology, and promising to find them again when the war ended.
Sadly, this series only lasted from 1995 to 2000, leaving in the air the main characters' destiny: after sliding into a world where the Sliders' adventures are a wildly popular television program, Rembrandt Brown decides to inoculate himself with a biological weapon that only affects Kromaggs and use a timer that only lets one person through, with the hope of finding Earth Prime and defeat the Kromaggs that have invaded the planet, while the others are forced to remain behind and wait.
I hope you thought this was interesting, and that you will come back next Friday to read more about alternative history.
See you!
2014/05/09
These ETs meddling where we don't want them to...
Greetings, and welcome once more to Uchronia Lallena! It has been a couple of weeks since I last explained some concept or another related to alternative history, so, please, allow me to talk about one that, undoubtedly, is among the strangest things you will ever find around here: the ASB.
What is an ASB, you will probably ask yourselves. The answer is Alien Space Bat, a term that is used when the point of divergence for an alternative history is way too surreal to have happened normally, or a supernatural event.
The origin of this phrase can be found in soc.history.what-if, an Usenet group in which, as you can imagine, the possibilities of the changes that could have taken place in certain historical moments are discussed. One of its members, Alison Brooks, as she discussed how ridiculous some alternative history suggestions were, made this comment:
Returning to the matter in question, originally the ASB term was only used when talking about direct influence of extraterrestrial beings in the history of humanity, but at some point later, it began to be used to point out that a point of divergence would have never happened if the situation was normal, whether it was due to magic, aliens, or just because the author wanted it to happen that way.
We shall put apart the histories in which a person, a group of people, a city or even an entire country travels back or forward in time (or even towards other dimensions), all of which fit better as part of the ISOT group (which I will speak about some time soon), there are many stories that can be considered of the ASB kind.
One example can be found in Alan Moore's masterwork Watchmen (named by Time one of the best 100 novels written since 1923. Not graphic novels, actual novels). The history of Watchmen diverges in the 1930s, after the publishing of Superman's first comics, which inspire certain people to become masked vigilantes. One of them, Edward Blake, nicknamed "The Comedian", even becomes a war hero during World War II, although it becomes clear to anyone that meets him that he is a bit touched on the head (which appears in the form of flashbacks, as Watchmen begins with Blake's murder). The greatest changes, though, is brought when scientist Jon Osterman suffers a lab accident in the 1950s that turns him into Doctor Manhattan, a blue being with superpowers that disturbs the balance of power during the Cold War in favor of the United States, with the result that tensions between both sides are greater, and any spark can start World War III.
We also have the Wild Cards series by George R. R. Martin (he who has yet to finish writing the A Song of Ice and Fire novels), which begins when a strange virus appears in New York in 1946. 90% of the infected people die horribly, 9% suffer easy-to-see mutations, and the remaining 1% manages to acquire superpowers. This has great effects in history: the Arab-Israeli Conflict is avoided thanks to a treaty between Jews and Arabs, people like Mahatma Gandhi, Marilyn Monroe or Buddy Holly manage to survive beyond the moment they died in our history, Liz Taylor is the one that dies in a car accident instead of James Dean, and the Cuban Revolution becomes a failure, at least in part because Fidel Castro is a professional baseball player.
A third example is the video game trilogy Resistance, all of its games being for PS3 (save for two spin-offs for PSP). The point of divergence is that Spain declares war on the United States before the USS Maine explodes in the Havana Harbor, but the actual change happens when it turns out that the meteorite that fell in Tunguska in 1908 carries strange, horrible aliens called Chimeras, which invade Russia first, then an united Europe in 1949, to then do the same with the United Kingdom in 1951 and the United States in 1955, with the result that they end up controlling the whole world in the 1960s. The first two games' main character is an American soldier that turns out to be nearly immune to the virus the Chimeras use to turn human bodies in future soldiers, and who embarks in a mission to stop them before it becomes too late, although unfortunately he fails (humanity does end up winning the war thanks to the third game's main character, but only after enormous effort and the deaths of millions of people.
And these three examples are not the only possibilities I could have spoken about: there is also Draka, Shadowrun, Deadlands... any of these, and many more, could have been included in this list, but in the end it was not possible (not to mention that I might pick any of them for future posts!)
Right now, I just hope that you have liked this, and that you will come back to read this blog's next posts. See you!
What is an ASB, you will probably ask yourselves. The answer is Alien Space Bat, a term that is used when the point of divergence for an alternative history is way too surreal to have happened normally, or a supernatural event.
The origin of this phrase can be found in soc.history.what-if, an Usenet group in which, as you can imagine, the possibilities of the changes that could have taken place in certain historical moments are discussed. One of its members, Alison Brooks, as she discussed how ridiculous some alternative history suggestions were, made this comment:
1865 - Alien bats from outer space bring the fruits of their technology to their brothers, because they have heard Elvis Presley on the radio, and think that the south should indeed be free. It ranks slightly higher than a '63 CSA victory. Indeed, I think I will call it "Bats of the South" and make it into a four book trilogy.The "Bats of the South" comment is a take that against one of Harry Turtledove's books, "Guns of the South", which I will speak about at a later point.
Returning to the matter in question, originally the ASB term was only used when talking about direct influence of extraterrestrial beings in the history of humanity, but at some point later, it began to be used to point out that a point of divergence would have never happened if the situation was normal, whether it was due to magic, aliens, or just because the author wanted it to happen that way.
We shall put apart the histories in which a person, a group of people, a city or even an entire country travels back or forward in time (or even towards other dimensions), all of which fit better as part of the ISOT group (which I will speak about some time soon), there are many stories that can be considered of the ASB kind.
One example can be found in Alan Moore's masterwork Watchmen (named by Time one of the best 100 novels written since 1923. Not graphic novels, actual novels). The history of Watchmen diverges in the 1930s, after the publishing of Superman's first comics, which inspire certain people to become masked vigilantes. One of them, Edward Blake, nicknamed "The Comedian", even becomes a war hero during World War II, although it becomes clear to anyone that meets him that he is a bit touched on the head (which appears in the form of flashbacks, as Watchmen begins with Blake's murder). The greatest changes, though, is brought when scientist Jon Osterman suffers a lab accident in the 1950s that turns him into Doctor Manhattan, a blue being with superpowers that disturbs the balance of power during the Cold War in favor of the United States, with the result that tensions between both sides are greater, and any spark can start World War III.
We also have the Wild Cards series by George R. R. Martin (he who has yet to finish writing the A Song of Ice and Fire novels), which begins when a strange virus appears in New York in 1946. 90% of the infected people die horribly, 9% suffer easy-to-see mutations, and the remaining 1% manages to acquire superpowers. This has great effects in history: the Arab-Israeli Conflict is avoided thanks to a treaty between Jews and Arabs, people like Mahatma Gandhi, Marilyn Monroe or Buddy Holly manage to survive beyond the moment they died in our history, Liz Taylor is the one that dies in a car accident instead of James Dean, and the Cuban Revolution becomes a failure, at least in part because Fidel Castro is a professional baseball player.
A third example is the video game trilogy Resistance, all of its games being for PS3 (save for two spin-offs for PSP). The point of divergence is that Spain declares war on the United States before the USS Maine explodes in the Havana Harbor, but the actual change happens when it turns out that the meteorite that fell in Tunguska in 1908 carries strange, horrible aliens called Chimeras, which invade Russia first, then an united Europe in 1949, to then do the same with the United Kingdom in 1951 and the United States in 1955, with the result that they end up controlling the whole world in the 1960s. The first two games' main character is an American soldier that turns out to be nearly immune to the virus the Chimeras use to turn human bodies in future soldiers, and who embarks in a mission to stop them before it becomes too late, although unfortunately he fails (humanity does end up winning the war thanks to the third game's main character, but only after enormous effort and the deaths of millions of people.
And these three examples are not the only possibilities I could have spoken about: there is also Draka, Shadowrun, Deadlands... any of these, and many more, could have been included in this list, but in the end it was not possible (not to mention that I might pick any of them for future posts!)
Right now, I just hope that you have liked this, and that you will come back to read this blog's next posts. See you!
2014/05/06
Shot in the back: the Revolution becomes Rebellion
Today's post is about one of those little moments in which a simple choice could have changed the course of history (a For Want of a Nail, as I explained in this blog's post #2). I have already written about the 19th and 20th centuries, so now it is time to speak a little about something that took place before, in the 18th century.
This century's last quarter was, probably, one of the most tumultuous to the date. The American Revolutionary War, the French Revolution, the beginning of Napoleon's career, the Russian-Swedish War, the Second Partition of Poland, the first vaccine (against smallpox)... many things that took place in those twenty-five years were fundamental, with an influence that reaches to our days, particularly the first two events. Here, we will concentrate on the American Revolutionary War, in which the United States of America broke off from the British Empire.
The French-Indian War (the North American theatre of the Seven Years War) had greatly indebted the British Treasury, so the government tried force the North American colonists to give up money through taxes, but the Thirteen Colonies were opposed, as they lacked any legitimate representation in the British Parliament (as they said, "no taxation without representation"). The British tried to pass several laws, such as the Stamp Act of 1765 (which forced the colonists to use only stamped paper produced in London for official documents and newspapers, among other things) or the Townshend Acts (five laws that intended to raise money so that governors and judges could be pay, regulate trade, punish the Colony of New York for not obeying the Quartering Act of 1765 and establish the precedent by which Parliament would be allowed to tax the colonies), all of which were overwhelmingly rejected by the colonists. Only a law that raised taxes on tea was accepted, and an occupation of the city of Boston (capital of the colony of Massachussets) triggered the Boston Massacre of 1770. However, the spark that started it all did not appear until 1773, when the Government reduced the tea tax on the British Eastern India Company, which would have greatly damaged the local traders. This is when the Boston Tea Party took place (this is where the neoconservative wing of the Republican Party in the United States has taken its name, although it remains obvious that the irony of the name escapes their comprehension), in which several colonists, disguised as Native Americans, boarded the BEIC ships anchored in the Boston port and threw hundreds of boxes, full of tea, into the sea.
The British Parliament tried to punish the colony for the act, but this backfired, as most colonies stood behind Massachussetts and joined in the First Continental Congress (1774), which demanded the derogation of all laws that had been passed since 1763 that affected the colonists, and that the British Government accepted that unilaterally ordering the quartering of troops in colony territory was illegal. An eleventh-hour attempt (already in February 1775) by the British Government to negotiate had no success, and hostilities began in April that year.
We all now the final result: the North-Americans managed to kick out the British troops out of the Thirteen Colonies with the support of France, Netherlands and Spain (one of whose admirals, Bernardo de Gálvez, rode next to George Washington in the parade held to celebrate the end of the war), becoming independent de jure in 1783 with the signing of the Treaty of Paris. It had cost a lot, particularly at the beginning, when there were moments in which the Continental Army could have been wiped out or captured by the British Redcoats, which would have meant the colonists' defeat.
It is one of these moments I want to speak about: the Battle of the Brandywine River (yes, the same name as the of the river in The Lord of the Rings). The British had managed to land on the north bank of the Chesapeake Bay with the intention of marching into Philadelphia, the rebels' capital city. Washington led his army into battle in this river's bank, but he was forced to retreat, allowing the British to take over the city, which would remain in the latter's power until 1778.
Shortly before the battle, a group of British veteran sharpshooters lead by Captain Patrick Ferguson met with two enemy officers, one European, the other American, that were inspecting the place where the fight was going to take place. Ferguson ordered three of his sharpshooters to point towards the officers, who did not know the sharpshooters were there, but in the last moment, Ferguson decided to warn them to leave, thinking that there was no honor in shooting an officer in the back. It would not be until the next day that Ferguson discovered the American officer was George Washington himself.
What would have happened if Ferguson had ordered his soldiers to shoot?
Washington's death would have been, undoubtedly, a hard hit for the colonists, who would have lost one of their best leaders and icons. It is possible that this could have demoralized the rebels enough to get them to accept the Carlisle Peace Commission (or an equivalent to it), which had offered the colonies a peace treaty where the colonists' initial demands (self-government, representation in Parliament) would have been met, so the United States would have been a failed experiment. Florida would have remained in English hands, as well as Menorca (which had been given to the English in the Treaty of Utrecht along with Gibraltar, and returned to Spain when the Treaty of Paris was signed). France would have not indebted itself while it supported the rebels, so the French Revolution would have either not happened or take place later, changing Napoleon's career. The Spanish Empire might have managed to survive for longer, the Spanish Constitution of 1812 would have never been promulgated. The concept of Republic as a great power's government would have been reduced to the glory that was Rome and the Italian Merchant Republics of the Renaissance.
It is possible, too, that it would have not changed a lot. The rebels were not only Washington and his troops: the Continental Army also had many great leaders and generals, such as Benedict Arnold (victorious in Saratoga shortly after the Brandywine River Battle, but who would be later rendered as a traitor for trying to surrender West Point to the British) or Horatio Gates, both of whom could have easily led the rebels' army. The war could have ended sooner or later, with the victory of the rebels. France would have declared war to the United Kingdom, got ruined and the French Revolution would have brought us Napoleon the Emperor. Broken empires, changed history... and, in the end, we would be complaining because the President of the United States of America believes himself to be the world's master while he governs from the White House, in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in Arnoldstown D.C.
As you can see, this is a shot that could have changed everything, or nothing. But we will never know if it would have happened that way. At least, until a Paul Van Zandt appears and invents the parachronic projector, or the guys of Infinity Unlimited come here with their conveyors, but that's something I will explain in the future...
I hope you enjoyed this, and if you want me to speak about something, do not doubt in asking me!
This century's last quarter was, probably, one of the most tumultuous to the date. The American Revolutionary War, the French Revolution, the beginning of Napoleon's career, the Russian-Swedish War, the Second Partition of Poland, the first vaccine (against smallpox)... many things that took place in those twenty-five years were fundamental, with an influence that reaches to our days, particularly the first two events. Here, we will concentrate on the American Revolutionary War, in which the United States of America broke off from the British Empire.
The French-Indian War (the North American theatre of the Seven Years War) had greatly indebted the British Treasury, so the government tried force the North American colonists to give up money through taxes, but the Thirteen Colonies were opposed, as they lacked any legitimate representation in the British Parliament (as they said, "no taxation without representation"). The British tried to pass several laws, such as the Stamp Act of 1765 (which forced the colonists to use only stamped paper produced in London for official documents and newspapers, among other things) or the Townshend Acts (five laws that intended to raise money so that governors and judges could be pay, regulate trade, punish the Colony of New York for not obeying the Quartering Act of 1765 and establish the precedent by which Parliament would be allowed to tax the colonies), all of which were overwhelmingly rejected by the colonists. Only a law that raised taxes on tea was accepted, and an occupation of the city of Boston (capital of the colony of Massachussets) triggered the Boston Massacre of 1770. However, the spark that started it all did not appear until 1773, when the Government reduced the tea tax on the British Eastern India Company, which would have greatly damaged the local traders. This is when the Boston Tea Party took place (this is where the neoconservative wing of the Republican Party in the United States has taken its name, although it remains obvious that the irony of the name escapes their comprehension), in which several colonists, disguised as Native Americans, boarded the BEIC ships anchored in the Boston port and threw hundreds of boxes, full of tea, into the sea.
The British Parliament tried to punish the colony for the act, but this backfired, as most colonies stood behind Massachussetts and joined in the First Continental Congress (1774), which demanded the derogation of all laws that had been passed since 1763 that affected the colonists, and that the British Government accepted that unilaterally ordering the quartering of troops in colony territory was illegal. An eleventh-hour attempt (already in February 1775) by the British Government to negotiate had no success, and hostilities began in April that year.
We all now the final result: the North-Americans managed to kick out the British troops out of the Thirteen Colonies with the support of France, Netherlands and Spain (one of whose admirals, Bernardo de Gálvez, rode next to George Washington in the parade held to celebrate the end of the war), becoming independent de jure in 1783 with the signing of the Treaty of Paris. It had cost a lot, particularly at the beginning, when there were moments in which the Continental Army could have been wiped out or captured by the British Redcoats, which would have meant the colonists' defeat.
It is one of these moments I want to speak about: the Battle of the Brandywine River (yes, the same name as the of the river in The Lord of the Rings). The British had managed to land on the north bank of the Chesapeake Bay with the intention of marching into Philadelphia, the rebels' capital city. Washington led his army into battle in this river's bank, but he was forced to retreat, allowing the British to take over the city, which would remain in the latter's power until 1778.
Shortly before the battle, a group of British veteran sharpshooters lead by Captain Patrick Ferguson met with two enemy officers, one European, the other American, that were inspecting the place where the fight was going to take place. Ferguson ordered three of his sharpshooters to point towards the officers, who did not know the sharpshooters were there, but in the last moment, Ferguson decided to warn them to leave, thinking that there was no honor in shooting an officer in the back. It would not be until the next day that Ferguson discovered the American officer was George Washington himself.
What would have happened if Ferguson had ordered his soldiers to shoot?
Washington's death would have been, undoubtedly, a hard hit for the colonists, who would have lost one of their best leaders and icons. It is possible that this could have demoralized the rebels enough to get them to accept the Carlisle Peace Commission (or an equivalent to it), which had offered the colonies a peace treaty where the colonists' initial demands (self-government, representation in Parliament) would have been met, so the United States would have been a failed experiment. Florida would have remained in English hands, as well as Menorca (which had been given to the English in the Treaty of Utrecht along with Gibraltar, and returned to Spain when the Treaty of Paris was signed). France would have not indebted itself while it supported the rebels, so the French Revolution would have either not happened or take place later, changing Napoleon's career. The Spanish Empire might have managed to survive for longer, the Spanish Constitution of 1812 would have never been promulgated. The concept of Republic as a great power's government would have been reduced to the glory that was Rome and the Italian Merchant Republics of the Renaissance.
It is possible, too, that it would have not changed a lot. The rebels were not only Washington and his troops: the Continental Army also had many great leaders and generals, such as Benedict Arnold (victorious in Saratoga shortly after the Brandywine River Battle, but who would be later rendered as a traitor for trying to surrender West Point to the British) or Horatio Gates, both of whom could have easily led the rebels' army. The war could have ended sooner or later, with the victory of the rebels. France would have declared war to the United Kingdom, got ruined and the French Revolution would have brought us Napoleon the Emperor. Broken empires, changed history... and, in the end, we would be complaining because the President of the United States of America believes himself to be the world's master while he governs from the White House, in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in Arnoldstown D.C.
As you can see, this is a shot that could have changed everything, or nothing. But we will never know if it would have happened that way. At least, until a Paul Van Zandt appears and invents the parachronic projector, or the guys of Infinity Unlimited come here with their conveyors, but that's something I will explain in the future...
I hope you enjoyed this, and if you want me to speak about something, do not doubt in asking me!
2014/05/02
Little historical presence, great cultural influence
Once again, welcome to Uchronia Lallena, and the second Easter post (yes, a couple of weeks too late, sorry for that), in which I will speak about a person that, undoubtedly, greatly influenced in the future of millions of people with his actions, even though there is little to none real evidence that his actions had such great reach as many believe. This person is Jesus of Nazareth, whom Christians consider the Son of God. In order to be realistic, we will ignore his supposed divine condition to concentrate in the human person.
Unfortunately, beyond what is said in the New Testament (which was written many years after it is said Jesus died), there is little proof about Jesus' existence. It is true that there are certain testimonies that speak about him, but they are fragments of documents that have been dated at times later than when he was alive, and they mostly speak about his ideology, instead of his life. One of the Christians' most used sources to indicate that he existed, the Testimonium_Flavianum (by Flavius Josephus, a Jewish that wrote the history of his people in the times of Vespasianus and Titus, after the Diaspora), is suspected of being a forgery introduced at a later point by a Christian monk.
However, in spite of this great shortage of data, many writers have used their literary abilities to speak about him. For example, in the novel El asombroso viaje de Pomponio Flato, Eduardo Mendoza uses Pomponius Flatus, a Roman philosopher with eternal health problems that has traveled to Judea, to show a young Jesus that asks him to help save his father from a false accusation of murder, and Juan José Benitez shows Jesus through a 20th century time traveller's eyes in the novel series Caballo de Troya.
Of course, these are not the only ones, and the writers of alternative history have not had any problems in writing about him in different situations.
Michael Moorcock, with his novel Behold the Man, has, as its main character, Karl Glogauer, a young man with many neurosis and a Messiah complex that travels in time from the year 1970 to the year 28 without being able to return, so that he can meet Jesus. However, when he arrives, and after an encounter with a group of Essenes (a Jewish sect), he travels to Nazareth, where he discovers Mary is not the model of virginity he expected, and Joseph is a bitter old man that sneers at Mary's proclamations that it was an angel who left her pregnant. Even worse, Jesus turns out to be a retarded man that can only say his own name. The shock of discovering this unhinges him, and he begins to travel around, surrounding himself with disciples and using psychological tricks to simulate miracles. In the end, he is crucified, pretty much becoming the reason he had traveled back in time for. His last words? Instead of the biblical Eloi, eloi, lama sabachthani (God, God, why have you forsaken me?), he says It's a lie, it's a lie, let me back down.
In another work, the duology Seekers of the Sky (Искатели неба) by Russian writer Sergey Lukyanenko, Jesus dies during the Massacre of the Innocents, and God decides his son will not return to Earth: instead, the only survivor, whom Herod's soldiers missed, is given to Mary and Joseph to raise, and instead of the power of miracles, God gives him the power of the Word, with which he can put (and pull) objects in a pocked dimension called the Cold, an ability that can be taught. The child, called both the Redeemer and God's Stepson, eventually becomes Roman Emperor thanks to his power, but when he realises that human nature makes it impossible to turn humanity towards a message of peace, decides to send all the known iron in the world to the Cold, to then commit suicide by sending himself to the same place. Two thousand years later, the Roman Empire is still alive and controls all of Europe, but it is opposed by the Ottomans, iron has become the economic standard in every nation of the world instead of gold, and China is the most technologically advanced nation in a world which, in the equivalent to our 21st century, still has soldiers armed with swords (bronze words, of course) and the only way to fly is with wooden gliders that can only be propelled on long distances by using rockets. This story has small jokes and real people cameos, such as Antóine de Saint Exupéry, Arnold Schwarzenegger or Gérard Depardieu.
A third story, which unfortunately I do not remember the title of, changes Jesus, who decides to create the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth through strength instead of words, creating a theocratic empire that lasts until the 20th century.
And, to finish, a short story that, although it cannot be actually considered alternative history, it is quite juicy because of the small touch of black humour with which it ends: in a future time in which time travel is not only possible, but it is used by normal people to make tourism (you can visit Napoleonic Paris as if you would do with the current city!), a man decides to travel to the year 33 to see Jesus when Pilate offers the people to choose between Jesus and Barabbas as part of the Jewish Easter celebrations. The tourist is warned that he cannot change the course of history: when Pilate appears, he must shout Barabbas' name. The man goes, visits Roman Judea, and when he appears at the square and begins to shout the name, he discovers, horrified, that no one in there are "local" people: every person that is condemning Jesus to death by crucifixion are actually other temporal tourists that are just doing what they have been told to do so as to not change history, when it turns out that they have already changed it.
I do hope this week's two articls have been of your liking, and I wait for you here the next week with more new articles.
See you later!
Unfortunately, beyond what is said in the New Testament (which was written many years after it is said Jesus died), there is little proof about Jesus' existence. It is true that there are certain testimonies that speak about him, but they are fragments of documents that have been dated at times later than when he was alive, and they mostly speak about his ideology, instead of his life. One of the Christians' most used sources to indicate that he existed, the Testimonium_Flavianum (by Flavius Josephus, a Jewish that wrote the history of his people in the times of Vespasianus and Titus, after the Diaspora), is suspected of being a forgery introduced at a later point by a Christian monk.
However, in spite of this great shortage of data, many writers have used their literary abilities to speak about him. For example, in the novel El asombroso viaje de Pomponio Flato, Eduardo Mendoza uses Pomponius Flatus, a Roman philosopher with eternal health problems that has traveled to Judea, to show a young Jesus that asks him to help save his father from a false accusation of murder, and Juan José Benitez shows Jesus through a 20th century time traveller's eyes in the novel series Caballo de Troya.
Of course, these are not the only ones, and the writers of alternative history have not had any problems in writing about him in different situations.
Michael Moorcock, with his novel Behold the Man, has, as its main character, Karl Glogauer, a young man with many neurosis and a Messiah complex that travels in time from the year 1970 to the year 28 without being able to return, so that he can meet Jesus. However, when he arrives, and after an encounter with a group of Essenes (a Jewish sect), he travels to Nazareth, where he discovers Mary is not the model of virginity he expected, and Joseph is a bitter old man that sneers at Mary's proclamations that it was an angel who left her pregnant. Even worse, Jesus turns out to be a retarded man that can only say his own name. The shock of discovering this unhinges him, and he begins to travel around, surrounding himself with disciples and using psychological tricks to simulate miracles. In the end, he is crucified, pretty much becoming the reason he had traveled back in time for. His last words? Instead of the biblical Eloi, eloi, lama sabachthani (God, God, why have you forsaken me?), he says It's a lie, it's a lie, let me back down.
In another work, the duology Seekers of the Sky (Искатели неба) by Russian writer Sergey Lukyanenko, Jesus dies during the Massacre of the Innocents, and God decides his son will not return to Earth: instead, the only survivor, whom Herod's soldiers missed, is given to Mary and Joseph to raise, and instead of the power of miracles, God gives him the power of the Word, with which he can put (and pull) objects in a pocked dimension called the Cold, an ability that can be taught. The child, called both the Redeemer and God's Stepson, eventually becomes Roman Emperor thanks to his power, but when he realises that human nature makes it impossible to turn humanity towards a message of peace, decides to send all the known iron in the world to the Cold, to then commit suicide by sending himself to the same place. Two thousand years later, the Roman Empire is still alive and controls all of Europe, but it is opposed by the Ottomans, iron has become the economic standard in every nation of the world instead of gold, and China is the most technologically advanced nation in a world which, in the equivalent to our 21st century, still has soldiers armed with swords (bronze words, of course) and the only way to fly is with wooden gliders that can only be propelled on long distances by using rockets. This story has small jokes and real people cameos, such as Antóine de Saint Exupéry, Arnold Schwarzenegger or Gérard Depardieu.
A third story, which unfortunately I do not remember the title of, changes Jesus, who decides to create the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth through strength instead of words, creating a theocratic empire that lasts until the 20th century.
And, to finish, a short story that, although it cannot be actually considered alternative history, it is quite juicy because of the small touch of black humour with which it ends: in a future time in which time travel is not only possible, but it is used by normal people to make tourism (you can visit Napoleonic Paris as if you would do with the current city!), a man decides to travel to the year 33 to see Jesus when Pilate offers the people to choose between Jesus and Barabbas as part of the Jewish Easter celebrations. The tourist is warned that he cannot change the course of history: when Pilate appears, he must shout Barabbas' name. The man goes, visits Roman Judea, and when he appears at the square and begins to shout the name, he discovers, horrified, that no one in there are "local" people: every person that is condemning Jesus to death by crucifixion are actually other temporal tourists that are just doing what they have been told to do so as to not change history, when it turns out that they have already changed it.
I do hope this week's two articls have been of your liking, and I wait for you here the next week with more new articles.
See you later!
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