Category: Alternate History

  • Our Shared Futures

    Our Shared Futures

    Cover image Our Shared Storm by Andrew Dana HudsonCan climate fiction help us see our way through the maze of possible futures we face? Can it help us move forward from our present moment? Andrew Dana Hudson’s slim novel, Our Shared Storm: A Novel of Five Climate Futures, engages these questions directly, by imagining how four characters’ lives would change in different climate scenarios.

    I kept thinking about this book as COP27 unfolded in Sharm el-Sheik, Egypt, ending with a promise of progress mixed with larger failures. (COP is short for Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.)

    The good news: a historic agreement to work on a structure  for “loss and damage,” offering aid to the countries most affected by climate change—countries that did the least to cause it, and are least equipped to combat it. On the other hand, the failure, yet again, to set firm commitments among countries for a path to decarbonization that could hold global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees C.

    Hudson, a futurist and fiction writer, based Our Shared Storm on five scenarios developed by climate scholars and used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). They describe broad pathways the world might take over the next decades, leading to differing levels of climate change, with related effects on politics, economic inequality, and more:

    • Scenario 1, “taking the green road,” with the world shifting to sustainable and equitable ways of living
    • Scenario 2, “middle of the road,” with a mix of initiatives and challenges
    • Scenario 3, the “rocky road,” where a failure to take significant action leads to rising nationalism and war
    • Scenario 4, “a road divided,” with poorer areas suffering more than nations that can use their resources to adapt
    • Scenario 5, “taking the highway,” where fossil-fuel use continues to power out-of-control corporate development, favoring giant geoengineering solutions over local ones

    This might seem like a too-tidy formula for generating a novel. But Hudson brings these probable futures to life through four main characters who cross paths at a future COP, held in Buenos Aires in the year 2054. In each story, a huge hurricane looms—they call it a “neverstorm”—and then crashes over the city. The characters come from all over: Noah from the US, Luis from Argentina, Diya from India, and Saga from Sweden. Their experiences are different each time, in ways that mirror the five scenarios.

    But it’s more than that: each person comes to the COP already changed as a result of the different paths they followed over the decades leading up to it. These changes deliver us straight into the different worlds they inhabit, maybe more than any larger events could.

    Luis, for instance, appears variously as a taxi driver, an aspiring entrepreneur, and a guerrilla leader trying to protect his poor Buenos Aires neighborhood. The charismatic Saga is a COP attendee who in one story leads a subversive street action, and in another, having grown up in a climate-refugee camp, is kidnapped. In other versions, she’s an installation artist, and a pop star who channels the grief and massive displacements of her world.

    The characters’ alternate selves gave me that sense of an eerie echoing multiplicity that can emerge from good multiverse stories. In films, we’ve seen this not only in Spiderman: Into the Multiverse, but in Sliding Doors on an individual level, and in manic-epic style, Everything Everywhere All At Once.

    In books, Joanna Russ’s 1975 novel, The Female Man, shows four connected yet different women on different planets in a twist on this approach which, like Our Shared Storm, tackles a massive issue—in that book, how misogyny distorts the self. In Our Shared Storm, the characters’ variations pull us through an emotional portal to help imagine things that are so scary and depressing, we might otherwise turn away from them.

    Hudson brings a sharp eye and satirical flair to the conference negotiations, particularly in the over-the-top, hyper-capitalist scenario in which everyone wants to be an influencer and everyone is their own brand. The scenarios are arranged in a dramatic arc that gets steadily worse, and finally arrives at Scenario 1, the most hopeful of them all.

    Here, the book aligns with Solarpunk, the emerging SFF genre that envisions people collaborating to cobble together a more community-based, environmentally sane future. I read this part with relief, feeling like the exhausted survivor of a shipwreck (or multiple shipwrecks!) finally washed ashore. But this possible future also felt fragile and tenuous, in need of protection.

    The painful truth is that different parts of the world are experiencing these scenarios already. While the scary, depressing ones feel all too familiar, we do see seedlings of a more hopeful future. And we’re facing not only different possible futures, but different possible versions of ourselves. This book reminds us that our choices now are constructing the world ahead.

  • Elephants and Radium Girls

    Elephants and Radium Girls

     

    The Only Harmless Great Thing coverIn The Only Harmless Great Thing, Brooke Bolander has taken on two strange and disturbing events from the early 20th century: the willfully negligent poisoning of young women painting radium-tinged watch dials for the United States Radium Company, and the public electrocution of Topsy the elephant at Coney Island in 1903. Bolander somehow burrowed into each story to find their shared DNA, and then performed some recombinant alchemy to merge them into one harrowing and resonant story, with a tragic and poetically just ending. 

    In its under 100 pages, the book brilliantly illuminates the dark side of our attraction to the shining, sparking effects brought by electricity and radioactivity. On top of that, it gives us fresh ways to think about how the DNA of our shared stories spirals through time and culture.

    The book’s central story pairs Regan, a fictionalized Radium Girl, with the elephant Topsy, in a fragile cross-species friendship. In Bolander’s topsy-turvy alternate timeline, Topsy is one of a number of elephants bought and trained by the company to paint watch dials after the Radium Girls’ health issues have come to light. In one of the book’s sublime inventions, the elephants have learned to communicate through an ASL-like sign language using their trunks, so Regan and Topsy are able to converse. (I wish that development could be imported to our timeline.)

    Regan’s ripe Appalachian twang brings the aspect of class into focus—she is a low-class rural outsider in the urban factory, able to get the elephants’ exploitation immediately. The slightly archaic idioms she uses make a strong vessel for her outrage as the story races forward.

    Two other stories frame this one, and they carry meta-questions about how stories are made, how they take root, are preserved, and shape us. In the first one, happening in a slightly skewed near-present time, Topsy’s execution has made an indelible impression on the American psyche, and cemented a pop-culture association between elephants and radioactivity—to the point that a Dumbo-like Topsy has starred in a beloved Disney movie. In this story, a young researcher urges the elephants to agree to have their genomes altered so their skin will glow when it’s near radioactive waste—a signal of danger to humans in the far future.

    The second story-layer gives full, mythic voice to the elephants. An elephant-mother recounts the legend of the revered long-ago ancestor who dove into a tar pit to retrieve the lost stories of her people. The storyteller, we realize, lives in that future time when she and her kind have agreed to be that glowing warning system for humanity. Their vast chain of memory, stretching eons backward and forward in time, shows humanity’s self-narrative to be pretty puny by comparison.

    For me, coming in with a long obsession with Nikola Tesla, Bolander’s Radium Girls-Topsy remix hits a nerve. The electrocution of the real Topsy has been associated with Thomas Edison, mainly because Edison was known to have arranged public electrocutions of smaller animals during the Current Wars of the early 1890s. (These spectacles aimed to show how dangerous Tesla’s AC current was; but Tesla’s AC won the current wars, being superior in numerous ways to Edison’s DC.) Edison most likely didn’t have a hand in Topsy’s death, but the electric-powered public spectacle at Coney Island was surely inspired by his venal stunts.

    Tesla, on the other hand, brought an almost utopian idealism to his electronic innovations. He even pioneered the medical use of electricity, believing that immersion in  electromagnetic fields was good for human health. (We’ve learned to be more careful about the effects of such constant bombardment.) Tesla’s idealism took part in his era’s belief that nature existed as a resource for humanity, in service of the progress of civilization. In Bolander’s vision, both Edison and Tesla are caught, found complicit in a system that blithely digs up radium and conscripts the weakest members of society to handle it.

    Yet the elephants’ understanding takes us beyond this stew of human, animal, and natural exploitation. Topsy recognizes electricity as a mutated form of lightning, and the far-future elephant mother shares that understanding. Even living with the poisonous aftereffects of the nuclear industry, she and her tribe persist, citizens of the natural world, protected  by their collective, long-lasting, storied understanding.

     

  • American Bardo

    American Bardo

    A 19th-century stone carved angel in a cemeteryAs I read George Saunders’ daring first novel Lincoln in the Bardo recently, I was struck by its strangely close parallels with another memorable and equally risk-taking debut novel, Chris Adrian’s Gob’s Grief (2000). Both novels use the Civil War as an entry point into crazed and original meditations on the reality of death.

    In Lincoln in the Bardo, Saunders reimagines the Buddhist concept of the Bardo, a threshold state of the soul that is thought to last a few days after death. His American Bardo is a cemetery in Washington, D.C., filled with a motley group of dead folks too short-sighted to realize they’re dead. At the heart of the book is a new arrival, eleven-year-old Willie Lincoln, who’s succumbed to typhoid fever, and his grieving father, the President, who is a year into the bloodiest war of the country’s history. History has left the tantalizing suggestion that Lincoln visited Willie’s crypt several times after the boy’s funeral.

    Gob’s Grief takes place during and after the Civil War. The story repurposes such real figures as Walt Whitman, who volunteered as a nurse to injured soldiers during the war, and the remarkable Victoria Woodhull, a feminist, a medium, and the first female candidate for president, in 1872. The emotional crux of this story is the relationship between Woodhull’s fictional twin sons, Gob and Tomo. Tomo runs off to be a bugler with the Union Army at the age of eleven, and is soon killed in battle.

    Gob is sickened by his mother’s insistence that his brother is alive and well in the Summerland, the Spiritualist equivalent of Heaven. Years later, a grown-up Gob builds a massive, Steampunk-like engine meant to bring back to life not only Tomo, but all the soldiers who died in the war. The engine combines “glass tubes and iron gears… bundles of copper wire,” human bones, and an array of glass negatives of fallen soldiers, floating above a set of cemetery gates.

    Both books are wildly non-formulaic and genre-busting. Lincoln in the Bardo is told in a multi-voiced chorus, shifting from the dead cemetery-dwellers to the living—the cemetery guard and the President—along with excerpted historical descriptions of Willie’s illness and death. Gob’s Grief leaps around in time and inside many points of view. But it also alternates between naturalistic depictions of events like the battle of Chickamauga, and otherworldly happenings and characters including the memorably creepy child Pickie Beecher, born out of Gob’s infernal machine. Angels appear in both books, hectoring the living and the dead.

    Both novels are heated into overdrive by the tension between denial and acceptance of death, two landmarks on the continuum of grief. The ghosts surrounding Willie Lincoln suffer from major cognitive dissonance as they struggle to explain their situation, clinging to sad euphemisms: “sick-box” for coffin, and “stone home” for their tombs. Their liberation, and Willie’s, hinges on recognizing the reality of their deaths in this false stage-set they’ve created. An unlikely communion with the dead helps Willie’s grieving father come through a similar emotional passage.

    Gob’s Grief is infused with the craziness of grief. Several main characters, including Walt Whitman, are each haunted by a brother or loved one lost in the war. Gob’s death-defying engine somehow feels like the believable response of someone who’s ready to change the rules of reality to bring back their loved one. Adrian’s later novels, The Children’s Hospital and The Great Night, show a similar willingness to dive headlong into the deepest waters where death and life, fantasy and reality mix.

    The idea of the Bardo came to the West from the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the 14th-century Tibetan Buddhist text written as a guide for the newly dead, to help them move through the illusions of the Bardo toward clarity and rebirth. In fact, Bardo can refer to any transitional state, even our waking experience. Is there something distinctly American in the intransigence of Saunders’ ghosts, and Gob’s obsessive quest to undo his brother’s death? Their stubbornness may reflect our cultural prejudice toward happiness, toward holding on to a more pleasant version of things, whether it’s one that existed in the past, or some promised future. In whatever Bardo we find ourselves, only doing the hard work of acknowledging what we’ve lost can liberate us to move ahead.

     

  • An Alternate History reading list for this moment

    An Alternate History reading list for this moment

    Are we living in an alternate branch of history? I’ve been asking myself that question since waking up the morning of November 9, with the feeling that reality had turned sideways. Since then, many of us have shared the stages of shock, denial, anger and sadness that come after a great loss. But when so many people share these feelings at the same time, that sense of things being profoundly wrenched out of place, of being exiled from the world you know, takes on a different weight.

    Elections can be turning points. Millions of people weighed in on the country’s direction—leaving aside the issues of how their opinions were influenced—and this time the joker came out on top, confounding the expectations of many. A shift happened, which we’re just beginning to live through, and which has the power to affect the world. Trying to make sense of this, I keep coming back to the imaginative precedents offered by alternate history.

    The impulse to imagine alternate histories has long roots. Two thousand years ago, the Roman historian Livy speculated on whether Alexander the Great could have defeated Rome. Modern alternate history emerged along with science fiction—in L. Sprague de Camp’s 1939 classic Lest Darkness Fall, an archeologist finds himself thrown back in time to a slightly different Rome in the sixth century CE, where he manages to insert enough technology and knowledge to prevent the coming of the Dark Ages.

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    The imagination of darker alternate timelines—with the Nazis and other Axis powers winning World War II, for example—has become an enduring strand in the genre. There’s Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, which takes place in a post-war America carved up into protectorates of the Nazis and the Japanese. Jo Walton’s Small Change trilogy plays out a timeline in which Britain has become a fascist dictatorship following a peace made with Nazi Germany, thanks to the influence of the appeasement faction and American isolationism. Simon Zelitch’s Judenstaat offers another possible World War II outcome, with a Jewish state arising not in Palestine but in the area that for us became part of East Germany, and falling inside the oppressive political orbit of the USSR.

    Then there are novels that give us a vision of a homegrown Fascism taking power in the United States. Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America traces an alternate historical path in the 1930s, following the election of Charles Lindbergh as President (in our time, he was a Nazi sympathizer). This leads to state-sponsored anti-Semitism that includes a Jewish relocation program. Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here follows a Huey Long-like demagogue who, soon after his election to the presidency, uses military force to establish a totalitarian state. Technically It Can’t Happen Here may not qualify as alternate history, since Lewis was writing in 1935 about an upcoming election, not about a divergent event in the past. [LINK] http://www.uchronia.net/intro.html

    I’ve seen many of these novels cited as parallels to the moment we find ourselves in now. But I haven’t heard anyone bring up a more obscure novel by Philip K. Dick, Radio Free Albemuth, which was posthumously published in 1985. Dick also adapted the plot as a story-within-a-story, appearing as a film watched by the characters in his great late work, VALIS.

    Set in the late 1960s, Radio Free Albemuth hinges on the election of Ferris F. Fremont, a corrupt politician associated with a right-wing populist movement. As it turns out, Fremont is also a covert Russian agent. Fremont was partly inspired by Richard Nixon, whose appeal to “Middle America” nominally qualified him as a populist. But as a parallel to our President Elect, Dick’s Fremont hits the trifecta: corrupt dealings, right-wing populism, and Russian influence.

    It was Dick’s swirling mix of paranoia and reality-confusion that I thought of the morning after the election. The Man in the High Castle, for example, sets up not just one alternate strand but several: there’s a book-within-a-book by an author who imagines a different ending to the war, with the U.S. and Britain becoming the postwar superpowers, and this serves to sabotage the novel’s dominant reality. (John Gray delves into this aspect of the novel in an insightful piece comparing it to the current TV adaptation.)LINK BELOW

    Philip K. Dick is not the author I would prefer to choose as the prophet of our coming political time. But the creeping ambiguity of his fictional multiverses feel like a match for the fear and uncertainty pervading the world we find ourselves in now.

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