Columbia &
Britannia, edited by Adam Chamberlain and Brian A. Dixon, is an
interesting and well thought out addition to the subgenre of alternate
history as well as a the shared-world anthology. Positing a world in which
the British colonies in North America did not secede in the eighteenth
century, the editors created a world and invited four other authors to play
in their universe, resulting in a total of nine stories by six authors, as
well as a lengthy and informative series of appendices.
The first appendix provides a timeline from September
14, 1766, when William Pitt proposed representation for the colonies in
Parliament and runs through August 7, 2001.
The stories in the book run in chronological order from February 14,
1776 through the same end date. This
is important because not all of the events mentioned in the timeline are
covered, or even referred to, in the stories and the stories aren’t
entirely about the momentous events which would be covered in the timeline.
This allows the authors to tell their own tales on a human level, from the
opening story of Simeon Trask’s unhappy love affair with Susanna Aguirre
to the story of a secessionist rock band two-hundred years later in the
1980s.
Some of the stories do touch on momentous events, from
the start of the Great Quuens Fire of 1924 or assassination attempts.
And here, the authors and editors have been careful not to hew too
closely to the history of our own world.
Occasionally individuals remain identifiable, but history has
followed a different course and events do not match up between the two
time-lines. This is also clearly
evident in the various maps provided in Appendix F, showing very different
political entities throughout both North America and the world.
Not all the stories work well.
Editor Chamberlain’s second story, “The Twelfth Man” relies on
an understanding, and interest, in cricket which is probably lacking for
North American readers and gets in the way of the momentous event that
conclude the volume, stripping it of some of its emotional value. However,
this very weakness is important in the background of the world as it shows
the thought which went into the construction of a very different history.
Despite the different histories, many of the stories do
touch on issues important in both timelines, such as slavery and manumission
(“Total Emancipation”) to self-rule (“All the Jungle Is Thine” and
others). At the same time, with only nine stories spread over 230 years, the
world created by Chamberlain and Dixon offers plenty of other stories, large
and small, to be told. The short story format, however, especially when
supplemented by the appendices, gives the volume a sense of completeness
should the editors turn their attention elsewhere.
There is no sense that Columbia
& Britannia is meant to represent a utopian society, or even a world
that is better than ours. The
anthology is merely a look at a world which took a different turn and
developed a complexity all its own with problems to match. The stories cover
not only a wide range of topics and places, but also offer a variety of
points of view in their story of the world in which Great Britain’s empire
was larger and more cohesive.
