A Body Without a Soul

This collection of alternate history stories is of pretty variable quality.  Actually, it’s of pretty variable alternate-history-ness. By my count only 4 of the 12 stories are definitively alternate history. Two are fantasy stories set in Earth-like settings; 2 are parallel universe stories (one of those also with fantasy elements); one is just odd, one is unreadable, and one is althist-related but not really a ’story’.

Below are comments on the various stories, there are spoilers for some of them.  Those will be protected in spoiler blocks if I think they would decrease enjoyment of the stories for althist fans. If the story isn’t interesting, it doesn’t need protection.

This Peacable Land; Or, the Unbearable Vision of Harriet Beecher Stowe

Robert Charles Wilson

This is a good story with interesting characters and world development; the point of departure is made clear without annoying infodumps.  The real-life people mentioned fit well into the story.

A series of compromises in the late 1850s and early 1860s, especially those led by Senator and then President Stephen Douglas, led to no civil war, and slavery faded away rather than ending cleanly, or semi-cleanly. But what happened to the 3 million slaves?

The Goat Variations

Jeff VanderMeer

The newly-crowned president of North America and the Britains is introduced to a project his predecessor set up (in possible contravention to the constitution’s prohibition on witchcraft and warlockhood) to use adepts-in-pods to spy on the religious insurrectionists in the Heartland.  Skip ahead a few months and he’s in a school reading kids a book about goats when his aide approaches… and he’s given visions of other presidents in similar situations.

The story is barely there and the world isn’t fleshed out enough to be interesting.  The main world and some of the vision-worlds could be starting points for interesting althist stories, but this isn’t one.

The Unblinking Eye

Stephen Baxter

This is a frustrating story; the story itself is interesting, the branch point and developed world is interesting, the characters are interesting, but it has the “let’s drop names the readers will recognize even though there’s no reason at all these characters would do so” problem so much althist suffers from.

The younger son of Emperor Charlemagne XXXII is being sent to spend a few years in the Incan court, transported on an Incan boat made all of metal, which somehow doesn’t need coal or have steamstacks.

We eventually discover that the branch point is truly ancient: the solar system was expelled from the Milky Way, leaving the nighttime sky in the northern hemisphere with no useful navigation points; Europe never managed to cross the oceans.  There’s apparently a religious prohibition against crossing the equator, but the reason was never made clear (or I missed it).

But then there’s the name dropping…Charles Darwin was a theologian who rose to the exalted level of Dean of a cathedral; Isaac Newton calculated the age of the Earth by Bishop Usher’s method; Aristotle tried to prove the heliocentric theory but failed; and most annoyingly, Christopher Columbus tried to sail around Africa but turned back at the equator, returning to his family’s pants-making business.  Can you name an explorer who didn’t actually explore, 500 years ago?  And if so, do you know what job he returned to?  Oh, and did I mention, Columbus was namedropped by an Australian Aborigine subject of the Incas?  So can you not only name a failed 500 year old explorer, can you name a failed 500 year old explorer from a culture you’ve only been in contact with for a few years?  Yeah, me either.

Csilla’s Story

Theodora Goss

This isn’t really an althist story any more than any SF story (or really, any fiction at all) is.  It’s a passable sketch for a possibly interesting modern fantasy novel.  There are these people, Tündér, who are descended from the moon and have green hair and green blood and are allergic to metal; they’ve been persecuted like Jews and now some are escaping from Hungary to the US and blah blah blah, who cares?

Winterborn

Liz Williams

Another fantasy world — I don’t recall ever having read an althist anthology with this much fantasy in it. In this one, the Queen of Albion is half fairy and fighting against her sister, the Queen of Wales, or under-ground, or somesuch.

Donovan Sent Us

Gene Wolfe

Another what-if-Germany-won-WWII story, but well done. A group of OSS officers are looking for the captured Winston Churchill to try to affect the politics back in the US. A longer work set in the late-30s/early-40s US would be interesting.

I have a hard time seeing the German-American Bund not only becoming a real political party but winning the 1940 Presidential election, even if the US admitted 1.5m European Jews and that led to incresaed ant-semitism. But maybe I’m missing something.

The Holy City and Em’s Reptile Farm

Greg van Eekhout

This is a decidedly odd story; it’s hard to imagine a branch point that would end up with a world with a recognizable Route 66, Navajos and Hawaiians, while making Los Vegas the Holy City where Jesus was crucified, make the Navajos Muslim and possibly make Hawaiians Jewish. The characters are interesting though and the story is fun.

The Receivers

Alistair Reynolds

What would Europe be like if it was time for WWII and WWI hadn’t ended yet? Well, here we get to find out, through the eyes of would-be great composer Ralph Vaughan Williams. An interesting story that doesn’t really need the althist setting except to provide researchable characters.

A Family History

Paul Park

I didn’t care enough about the characters or setting in this story to work past the “What if X? Y would not have Z; Alpha would not have Beta” phrasing. Don’t talk to me about what would not have happened, tell me what did.

The “About the Authors” section explains the incoherence of the story:

“A Family History” came out of a fundraiser for the Clarion West workshops, during which [Paul Park] auctioned off on eBay certain elements of an as yet unwritten story — the theme, the title, the various locations, the characters, the genre, etc. The winners would provide these things, and he would write a story that incorporated them. “A Family History” is the result.

Dog-Eared Paperback of my Life

Lucius Shepard

A parallel-universe story rather than an althist story, but a very interesting story nevertheless. An author discovers a book he supposedly wrote, but he didn’t. As he tries to figure out how that happened, his life starts to parallel the novel (and the style of the story we’re reading starts to resemble the style the novel is described to have). Mix in a boat trip through Vietnam and Cambodia, sex, drugs, sex&drugs, and more than a few Heart of Darkness / Apocolypse Now references, and you get this. This, together with the Wolfe WWII story, made the book worthwhile.

Nine Alternate Alternate Histories

Benjamin Rosenbaum

Not a story at all, but nine sketches for different types of stories which might also qualify as “alternate histories”; for example, stories where history converges to a point rather than diverges from one. An so on, increasingly alternate.