“Worlds That Never Were - Wall Street Journal” plus 1 more

Worlds That Never Were - Wall Street Journal

Posted: 10 Dec 2010 03:00 PM PST

By PAUL DI FILIPPO

Alternate history is a staple of popular culture, providing premises for countless films, novels and comic books. Such counterfactual worlds are known as uchronias—a variant of the word utopia (Greek for "no land"), substituting chronos ("time") for topos ("land"). Despite their super ficial similarity to the thought- exercises occasionally conducted by professional historians, uchronias are really a species of science fiction: Like stories set on other worlds or in the future, those placed in skewed versions of the past allow authors to assemble realities similar to ours but telling in their differences.

In the right hands, alternate history can be an agile and entertaining tool for examining our assumptions. Recent months have brought us intriguing works from two authors known for their endeavors in this area: Harry Turtledove and Connie Willis. They take different tacks in their conjectures, with Mr. Turtledove radically remaking our world and Ms. Willis opting for more subtle tinkering.

A historian of Byzantium by training, Mr. Turtledove is the contemporary master of uchronias, having written more than 100 novels imagining everything from an alien invasion during World War II to a North America populated by both homo sapiens and our older cousins, homo erectus. In "The Guns of the South" (1992), time- travelers deliver modern weaponry to the Confederacy, allowing racism to descend to twisted new depths. In "The Two Georges" (1996), the United States never gains its independence, Los Angeles is "New Liverpool," and Sarah Palin's Alaska is indeed Russian property.

With his short-story collection, "Atlantis and Other Places" (Roc, $24.95, 448 pages), Mr. Turtledove adds a dozen new scenarios to his vast canon. Some are mere japes. Others are elaborate—full of gravitas and speculative heft. In the opening story, "Audubon in Atlantis," a mid-ocean realm, separated from North America in ancient times and consequently empty of hominids, has been colonized by humans and invasive critters. To its shores in their peculiar 19th century comes an elderly John James Audubon, determined to paint a species of giant bird before it becomes extinct. The naturalist's late-career struggles echo Atlantis's own experience of change and loss.

Many of Mr. Turtledove's fictions deal with war. "News from the Front" is a cynical depiction of the disastrous effect that 21st-century media tactics and ethics might have had on the course of World War II. A 1940s Fourth Estate, imbued with a dangerous, WikiLeaks-type attitude, ends up causing victory for the Nazis and the impeachment of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Connie Willis's career roughly parallels Mr. Turtledove's in terms of longevity and recognition, if not output. Yet as if to rival Mr. Turtledove's prolificness, Ms. Willis has released, back-to-back, two large volumes linked to World War II. "All Clear" (Spectra, 656 pages, $26) and "Blackout" (Spectra, 512 pages, $16) essentially constitute a single novel, contemplating how time travelers might produce alternate histories by their actions.

These books are part of a saga that Ms. Willis began with "Fire Watch" (1982), which introduced student chrono-historians of Oxford from the year 2060, who lingered as undercover observers during World War II. Their exploits continued in "The Doomsday Book" (1992) and "To Say Nothing of the Dog" (1997), the latter of which skipped back to the Victorian era. Now Ms. Willis returns her youthful crew to London's Blitz.

Ms. Willis orchestrates two simultaneous narratives—one set in 2060, the other in the 1940s. While her future is barely sketched out (we never learn much about the politics or technology of the later 21st century), her re- creation of wartime England is meticulous, energetic and exhaustive. The author provides countless little grace notes of verisimilitude—popular songs, distinctive London vocabulary, day-by-day accuracy to events. Often, "All Clear" reads almost like a simon-pure historical novel: "It took her over an hour to find the post in Croydon, and then the FANY on duty couldn't find the supplies," Ms. Willis writes at one point. "She finally had to box up more lint and bandages and make Mary fill up a different requisition form."

Early on in "Blackout," Ms. Willis mentions Agatha Christie as a literary role model, and this gives a sense of the restrained thrills she favors. Unlike the bold and wild-eyed Mr. Turtledove, Ms. Willis is cautious in her tampering with reality, declining to elaborate upon the bifurcating series of decisive moments that is the lifeblood of most alternate-history fiction. Although the individual fates of the time travelers are surprising—some are stranded irretrievably in the past—the familiar weave of history remains intact.

Oddly, for an author who often makes alternate history her chosen form, Ms. Willis's fiction suggests a universe with a self-correcting mechanism that both prevents and mitigates deviations from what-has-been. Little things may still be altered, but with no great consequence—a limitation that undercuts this novel's suspense and sense of estrangement. Ms. Willis thereby turns her back on the most alluring aspect of counterfactual thought experiments.

—Mr. Di Filippo is the author of "Roadside Bodhisattva."

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Posted: 09 Dec 2010 01:14 PM PST

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Jumat, 10 Desember 2010