Any anthology which claims to include the “best”
of any subject is likely to raise controversy.
Harry Turtledove and Martin H. Greenberg’s selection of The
Best Alternate History Stories of the Twentieth Century is a case in
point. While some of his
choices clearly rank among the top tier of alternate history, several of
the best are just as clearly left out and one of his choices is extremely
questionable.
The stories which
inarguably belong in this anthology include Ward Moore’s “Bring the
Jubilee,” Larry Niven’s “All the Myriad Ways,” Brad Linaweaver’s
“Moon of Ice” and William Sanders’s “The Undiscovered.”
While all of these are alternate history, Moore’s story
incorporates time travel and “All the Myriad Ways” is a multiple world
story which is primarily concerned with the reaction to the discovery of
more than one reality on the population of the universe.
Sanders explores a straight alternate history in which Shakespeare
finds himself in the New World among the Indians while Linaweaver
postulates an alternate World War II and a Nazi victory.
Turtledove also
includes a number of stories whose right to inclusion can (and perhaps,
should) be argued. Nicholas
DiChario’s “The Winterberry” may technically be an alternate
history, but it has more of the feel of a secret history.
Nothing necessarily would have changed if the events as depicted
actually occurred. The story,
however, is a well-written question about the aftermath of the John F.
Kennedy assassination.
Turtledove, himself,
has written numerous alternate histories.
Based on this collection, he considers “Islands in the Sea,” a
reworking of the historical Khazar polemic, to be his best story.
It is also possible that Turtledove feels that his best alternate
histories have been reprinted enough and it is time to give one of his
other stories another glimpse of the light of publication.
In point of fact, while “Islands in the Sea” may not have the
reputation of Turtledove’s Basil Argyros series, his Sims tales or
“The Last Article,” it is a wonderful, if underrated, story which
deserves to be more widely read.
Gregory Benford is
represented by “Manassas, Again.”
Although set in North America, this war story is placed in a world
in which the Romans developed a steam-power machine gun and managed to
maintain their empire. Despite
the early change in history, it seems that Benford’s world managed to
mirror the history of the real world quite well, resulting in a Civil War
between former Roman colonies.
Five of the stories
included in The Best Alternate History Stories of the Twentieth Century
were also included in the anthology The Way It Wasn’t (1996).
These stories include the aforementioned “The Winterberry” and
“All the Myriad Ways” as well as Kim Stanley Robinson’s “The Lucky
Strike,” about the prospects of dropping the atomic bomb, “Suppose
They Gave a Peace” in which Susan Shwartz postulates an America in which
George McGovern becomes President in 1972, and Greg Bear’s “Through
Road No Whither,” in which a German victory in World War II takes a
strange turn after an insult to a Gypsy woman.
Bruce Sterling and
Lewis Shiner combine alternate history and timeline travel with cyberpunk
in “Mozart in Mirrorshades,” a story of environmental piracy. Another story which employs cross time-line travel is Poul
Anderson’s “Eutopia,” which turns its attention to a Norse-Magyar
North America, examining cultures which run through many of Anderson’s
fantasy writings. Jack
L. Chalker examines cross time-line travel in “Dance Band on the
Titanic,” providing a tour of multiple realities as seen from the deck
of a ferry between the worlds.
The one true enigma
of Turtledove’s selections is the inclusion of Allen Steele’s
Hugo-winning “The Death of Captain Future,” which, while an enjoyable
story, does not include alternate historical content.
Steele has written alternate histories, both at short story and
novel length, but this is not one of them.
Turtledove offers neither an explanation nor an excuse for its
inclusion in this book.
Throughout his career, Turtledove has paid tribute to
the writings of L. Sprague de Camp for inspiring him to study Byzantine
history. It is strange,
therefore, to discover than none of de Camp’s alternate histories have
been included in this volume. Surely
Steele’s novella could have been bumped to make space for “The Wheels
of If,” “Aristotle and the Gun,” or “Lest Darkness Fall,” all
reasonably short works which still rank among the first tier of alternate
historical writing. H. Beam
Piper, Randall Garrett or Robert Silverberg are other authors whose
contributions to the field deserve to be recognized, not just due to
quantity, but also (and more importantly) because of quality.
Turtledove’s introductions to the stories are
reasonably short, providing biographical and bibliographical information
about the author and leaving the reader to discover the joys of the
following stories through reading them.
While arguments may be made about the inclusion of
several of these stories in an anthology which purports to contain the
best alternate history stories of the twentieth century, only one story is
clearly not alternate history and all of the stories are well written and
entertaining. Furthermore,
the breadth of styles and subgenres this anthology contains demonstrates
the vitality of alternate history throughout the twentieth century, with
the earliest story (“Bring the Jubilee”) originally appearing in 1952
and the most recent (“The Undiscovered”) published in 1997.
For all that these stories were all published in the second half of
the century, the field, as Turtledove introduction points out, extends
much earlier than Ward Moore’s story.
Quibbles about selection aside, The Best Alternate History of
the Twentieth Century provides a solid introduction to a popular
subgenre.
