In alternative histories, particularly when it is about those that take place in alternate modern times (the 19th and 20th centuries), commonly the writer will make small jokes that make reference to events or people of our reality, sometimes including details of the real, referenced people, showing how they can change when showed on a different context.
This is an idea that can be very funny if well done, particularly when it is about famous people. On the Internet, this is a phenomenon known as "Richard Nixon, The Used Car Salesman", a reference to the Harry Turtledove novel The Two Georges, where Richard Nixon is the owner of a chain of used steamcar stores (an idea based in the fact that, in our reality, Nixon's parents owned a gas station), whose murder is the starting point of the novel.
Another typical objective of this treatment is Adolf Hitler, with many stories turning him into an artist of one kind or another (some of which I already mentioned when I spoke about him a couple of months ago), although there are other possibilities, such as his remaining in the army for whatever reason, so he cannot become the Führer later. Sometimes, they even manage to find ways for the man to suffer, even if he is not the same Hitler as ours and that, indeed, he would not have committed the same sins.
Works in which this phenomenon takes place? There are boatloads of them, the only problem is to find them carefully, to ensure we get good ones...
- The graphic novel Watchmen. Apart from still having Richard Nixon as President of the United States in the year 1985 (as the 22nd Amendment to the US Constitution was repealed), there is "RR", who some characters and newspapers mention as possibly planning to become a candidate to the presidency. But, surprisingly, it is not Ronald Reagan, but... Robert Redford. There are also some references to the Comedian preventing the investigation into the Watergate scandal to go forward by murdering the two Washington Post journalist that were doing so, Woodward and Bernstein.
- The book (and movie) Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, has Abraham Lincoln as a vampire hunter (he hates vampires because they killed his mother when he was a child) who is fighting to prevent a group of them to turn humanity into their cattle to feed on.
- The film Shanghai Knights. Two of the characters that the main ones (played by Jackie Chan and Owen Wilson) meet are a police detective called Artie Doyle (who is named knight at the end of the film and turns out to be Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes) and a young pickpocked called Charlie (Charlie Chaplin, who takes advantage of the main characters' travel back to the USA to go there as a stowaway).
- The above mentioned The Two Georges, apart from Nixon, has Martin Luther King Jr as Governor-General of the North American Union (the combination of the United States and Canada, since the USA never became independent) and John Fitzgerald Kennedy as the editor of a pro-independence newspaper. There is also mention of Andrew Jackson (to us, seventh President of the United States) as the Governor-General when slavery was declared illegal.
- Two short stories by Kim Newman, The Germans Won and Slow News Day, both of which have John Major as the main character. In the former, Major, instead of Prime Minister, is a bus driver (which he applied to in reality, but failed as he could not do the mental arithmetic required for the job), while, in the latter, the author suggests that Major would have become Prime Minister (following Margaret Thatcher) even if the Nazis had won World War II.
- In the book series Lord Darcy, Enzo Ferrari is a firearm maker.
- In the Internet alternative history No Spanish Civil War In 1936, Francisco Franco is a hero of the Spanish Republic, Manuel Fraga is the leader of the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE) in the 1960s, Ernesto Guevara (Che Guevara) writes books about political systems, and famed anarchist Buenaventura Durruti becomes President of the Spanish Republic during World War II, in which Spain is part of the Allies and becomes invaded.
- In one of Sliders' chapters, vampires exist, and Nixon is the worst vampire to ever exist. And, in another chapter J. Edgar Hoover is the tyrannical President of the United States.
- To the already mentioned, pro-democracy Otto Skorzeny, leader of the Special Forces of the Infinity Patrol, we can add the Vicepresident of the United States Malcolm Little (better known as Malcolm X) in a world where the Confederate States managed to secede, Jabir ibn Hayyan (the most famous alchemist in the Arab world) as the inventor of mustard gas in a world dominated by Rome, and Ibn-Sina inventing calculus in a world where the printing press was invented in Baghdad.
- Finally, we have the complex world of Ill Bethisad, where many people end up changing, or not. Frederic Chopin is still a great musician, but Ho Chi Minh (the leader, in our reality, of North Vietnam during the Vietnam War) is the Vietnamese Emperor; Adolf Hitler is a well-known author whose magnum opus is "The Iron Dream", where the villain is an empire quite similar to what was Nazi Germany; ; Stalin is an Orthodox priest and socialist leader; Nikola Tesla managed to invent a very cheap energy generator (so cheap, that the only actual costs are due to maintenance issues; Juan de la Cierva (Xierva here, as Aragon and Castile never unified) manages to commercialize his autogiros and make them as ubiquitous as helicopters are for us; y Eugene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek, is a writer whose books inspire the "local" equivalent to the series.
I hope that, next Friday, you will be ready for a new post in this blog, and that you will enjoy it. See you!
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