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!
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