Fantastic Metropolis

Author’s note: This article has a tangled history. It was originally written for January Magazine, but the editor suppressed the piece for political reasons. The ensuing debacle ended my relationship with January Magazine. I then offered the review to David Hartwell for The New York Review of Science Fiction, and it ran in the February 2002 issue.

The Best Alternate History Stories of the 20^th Century affiliate link
Edited by Harry Turtledove and Martin H. Greenberg
Ballantine/Del Rey, 2001; 415 pages

In these days of shameless and bullying American imperialism, The Best Alternate History Stories of the 20^th Century is certainly a book that captures the zeitgeist of mainstream American ethnocentrism. Not that there aren’t some good stories here (there are — and there are also some horribly bad ones), but the book so vividly exemplifies the ideology being shoved down our collective throats by the American propaganda machine that it’s hard not to dislike it intensely.

First and foremost, there’s the problem of the title. Please note that the word “American” appears nowhere in the title. Nevertheless, all fifteen contributors are from the United States (the book’s one nod to cultural diversity is the Native American William Sanders). Almost all the stories deal with US history or with events tangential to it. But, hey, why sully a book collecting the best of the twentieth century with all that foreign stuff? No one cares about the rest of the world, right? Besides, if they bug us, we can always drop bombs on them. They’re not Americans, so who cares?

Certainly not Susan Shwartz, whose contribution, “Suppose They Gave a Peace,” is one of the most vile and manipulative pieces of hatemongering justifications for international American military intervention I’ve read. It’s a pro-Vietnam War tract that, with no irony whatsoever, paints pacifists as heartless ideologues and pro-military right-wing conservatives as kind, loving, tolerant human beings. “A kinder, gentler fascism” is the phrase that comes all too easily to mind.

Speaking of “kinder, gentler fascism”: successfully more ambiguous is Brad Linaweaver’s “Moon of Ice,” about a world in which, as a result of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s impeachment, Nazi Germany won the war in Europe. Set in the mid-1960s, “Moon of Ice” paints a picture of Nazi Europe that is either daring and subtle or insidiously offensive — but I’m not sure which. It is, no question, an engrossing read.

On the other side of the political spectrum, we find Kim Stanley Robinson’s “The Lucky Strike,” an anti-nuclear bomb tale that speculates on a different ending to the war between the USA and Japan. Robinson’s story has a heart of gold, but, sadly, is told rather ploddingly. Robinson is an author whose narrative skills unfold best in longer works.

As is probably obvious by now, this book uses war as the basis for its alternate histories to an abusive degree. War is the most clichéd of tropes in alternate history fiction, and the best of such fiction should rise above the obvious. Not that war-based alternate histories are necessarily boring (Ward Moore’s classic novel, Bring the Jubilee, reprinted here, is a fine example of that subgenre), but one yearns for diversity and originality, qualities not at the forefront of this anthology.

And I mean “forefront” rather literally. Because, ultimately, the book does include a small number of stories that rise above the tired tropes of war, American presidents, and the like, but they’re all bunched up at the back of the book. Among these, William Sanders’s hilarious Shakespearean farce “The Undiscovered” is perhaps the finest alternate history tale in the book.

There are other stories that are as good as the Sanders, but here lies yet another problem with this book: A considerable portion of its contents are, in fact, not alternate history stories. A few concern themselves with the existence of alternate timelines (Larry Niven’s gimmicky and all too obvious “All the Myriad Ways” and Jack Chalker’s gripping and haunting “Dance Band on the Titanic,” to name two), without actually taking place in an alternate history. One story, Allen Steele’s wry deconstruction of juvenile pulp SF, “The Death of Captain Future,” fails to incorporate even the slightest notion of alternate history (or, if it did, that aspect went right over my head).

Although Ward Moore’s Bring the Jubilee is, as I stated above, an exemplary alternate history tale, it is a novel. This anthology (ostensibly of short stories), already sadly lacking in diversity in the area of its subject matter, is ill-served by reprinting such a lengthy tale. It is hard to justify the absence of, say, British alternate history virtuoso Kim Newman, not to mention prolific American “alternate historians” such as Robert Silverberg and Paul Di Filippo, save perhaps for the fact that their take on the genre is much more nuanced than editors Martin Greenberg and Harry Turtledove’s superficial approach, which is replete with the overworn and dated view that history is the story of wars.

Turtledove’s own contribution, “Islands in the Sea,” to give it some credit, is, at least, not about American history, concerning itself instead with the political struggle between Christianity and Islam in the eighth century. Unfortunately, it is a bland tale, peopled with equally bland characters, that utterly fails to capture the atmosphere of another time or of another land. The thing reads like its characters were wooden actors reciting their lines in front of cardboard cutouts of ancient times.

So, to recap what we have here: a handful of good stories, most of which don’t fulfill the anthology’s stated premise; one noteworthy classic novel, whose inclusion overwhelms the book; an overabundance of clichéd stories with overused tropes; an arrogant ethnocentric worldview, at a time when ethnocentrism is both more callous and more dangerous than ever; and an obsolete confusion of the history of warfare with history per se. In short: a thoroughly ill-conceived mess.

Copyright © 2002 by Claude Lalumière.