alternate history Archives - Martin's Booklog

Farthing – Jo Walton

Published on September 5, 2010

Cover of Farthing

Farthing
Jo Walton
319 pages
published in 2006

At first glance Farthing seems to be a classic English cozy country house mystery, if set in an alternate England. There’s the locked room murder taking place during a weekend party at the Farthing country estate. There are the clues pointing all too neatly at one of the guests. There’s the doughty detective refusing to believe them and there’s the slow deduction of the real killer’s identity and motivations. It all feels like something Agatha Christie or Josephine Tey could’ve written — the latter’s unconscious class snobbery being consciously used here — but in the end Farthing turns out to be something very different from the cozy mystery or even alternate history tale it masquerades as. This is in fact a horror story, with the horror provided not by the plot or the characters, but through the setting. As Ursula Le Guin puts it in her front cover blurb: “If Le Carré scares you, try Jo Walton”.

Farthing grabbed me by the throat from the first page and didn’t let go; one of the very few books to have ever done that. As with any other alternate WWII story, part of that is due to what you know is going on in the background that the characters themselves do not know yet or only suspect. Every such Hitler wins story depends on the tension between what the reader knows happened historically and what the characters in the story know or do not know: sometimes this is done explicit, as in Fatherland, where the whole point of the book is to get the protagonist up to speed on what we as readers already know. In Farthing‘s case though things are kept implicit. What Walton does is let the essential horror of the setting speak for itself, keeping the swastikas and Gestapo goons offstage. What she does in fact is showing that England did not need these props to become a fascist state.

Worlds of the Imperium – Keith Laumer

Published on April 28, 2008

Cover of Worlds of the Imperium

Worlds of the Imperium
Keith Laumer
124 pages
published in 1962

As I’ve said before, Keith Laumer was one of my favourites when I first started reading science fiction. I would never accuse him of being a particularly brilliant writer, but he has a knack for writing gripping, fast-paced adventure science fiction. Laumer writes in a sort of polished pulp style, with loner heros relying on their native brawn and brain to solve the predicaments their superscience weapons cannot help them with. There’s a hint of sex, though nothing beyond noticing the graceful curves of a passing female. The best mainstream author I could compare Laumer to would be John D. MacDonald.

Worlds of the Imperium is a good example of Laumer’s style. It’s the first in a series of three novels starring Brion Bayard, secret agent of an British-German-Swedish empire that spans several dozen parallel earths, a much more benign empire than that imagined by H. Beam Piper. The other two novels are The Other Side of Time and Assignment in Eternity and all three of them have been published in a omnibus edition by Baen Books. A fourth novel, Zone Yellow was written long after Laumer had had the stroke that robbed him of his writing abilities and by all reports is … not good.

The Big Time – Fritz Leiber

Published on January 28, 2008

Cover of The Big Time

The Big Time
Fritz Leiber
127 pages
published in 1961

Rereading Asimov’s The End of Eternity remonded me of another time wars novel, a far more cynical and modern one: Fritz Leiber’s The Big Time. And since I had never read a Leiber novel during all the time I’ve kept my booklog, I thought it was time to start. I had read this novel before, first in Dutch, then in English and been impressed by it. Nor was I the only one: in its original, magazine publication in 1958 it so impressed the fans that it won a Hugo Award, which is high praise indeed.

The Big Time is a somewhat unconventional science fiction novel, in that it’s staged as a one room play, with the stage fixed while characters move on and off it. Which means that all the action that doesn’t happen in the room has to be described in dialogue between the characters, which of course has a distancing effect. For a genre which often takes pride in creating awe inspiring, inventive and strange settings and then making them believable to the reader, this is an audacious trick. Leiber takes this huge idea of a time war, in which history is in constant flux and which spans billions and billions of years throughout the universe and only shows us glimpses of it. You wouldn’t think it would work, but it did.

The End of Eternity – Isaac Asimov

Published on January 20, 2008

Cover of The End of Eternity

The End of Eternity
Isaac Asimov
192 pages
published in 1955

So it turns out that in the more than seven years now that I’ve kept this booklog, I had not read any Asimov novel at all. Which is somewhat strange, as it was for a large part due to discovering Asimov in my local library’s youth section that I became a science fiction fan. I, Robot for example may very well have been the first proper science fiction book I ever read. For a long time Asimov was
in fact the gold standard against which I measured every new science fiction writer I came across. If they weren’t at least half as entertaining or interesting I wouldn’t bother with them. Of his many novels and stories it was this, The End of Eternity that was my favourite, one of the first science fiction books I bought for myself and the first to introduce me to the idea of time travel as more than an excuse to visit scenic parts of the past. Rereading it, the question was whether it would be as good as I remembered it to be. So many novels first read as a child disappoint when you reread them; fortunately this didn’t. In fact, it read almost exactly as I expected it to be.

The central idea in The End of Eternity is the existence of Eternity, an organisation that monitors and safeguards all of humanity’s history from the first invention of the secret of time travel. Most people outside of Eternity think the organisation only exists to facilitate trade between various centuries and perhaps in some vague way protect them from the unspecified dangers of time travel. What they don’t realise is that Eternity in fact exists outside of time, from which realm it can not just study and monitor time, but alter reality to make sure that humanity is kept on an ever increasing path to perfection. A whole organisation of Computers, the people who calculate these reality changes, Technicians, who execute them and various other specialists all work together to this goal, over a span of time that is literally millions of years long. Power is provided by tapping into Nova Sol, the Sun as it goes nova at the end of its lifecycle. An incredibly neat idea, not quite original to Asimov, but as I said the first time I encountered it was here.