A little thing that drives me nuts

So I just finished Jane Yolen and Adam Semple’s The Last Tsar’s Dragons. It’s a story of events leading up to the Russian Revolution, seen through the eyes of Tsar Nicholas, his wife Alexandria, Rasputin, Trotsky, and several others. Except that in this story, the Tsar has a personal flock of dragons which, in the opening scene he’s sending out to destroy a Jewish village. When Nicholas gets mad, the Jews pay the price. But as we learn later in the book, Trotsky has found some dragon eggs — the revolution will soon be able to fight back.

And none of those dragons make a damn bit of difference.

The events of the Russian Revolution play out almost exactly as they did in our world, except where the authors get it wrong (Edward Radzinsky’s The Rasputin File shows the “mad monk” survived multiple assassination attempts through luck and the killers’ ineptitude, not some superhuman vitality). Strip the dragons out, you’d have a shorter novel but the plot and the history wouldn’t change.

Like this post’s title says, this kind of thing drives me nuts, even though I enjoyed the book. Throwing in a major element like dragons and letting history proceed unchanged, except for details, feels both pointless and implausible. One reason I love Naomi Novik’s Temeraire books is that having dragons fighting on both sides in the Napoleonic Wars changes history a lot. As we eventually learn, the changes are even bigger than that: most indigenous people have dragon allies too, so European colonialism has made little inroads in the rest of the world.

The Last Tsar’s Dragons isn’t unique. Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell has Strange, one of the world’s most powerful magicians, taking a hand in the Napoleonic Wars. Unlike Novik’s books, there’s no comparable magic on the French side; nevertheless the war apparently proceeds unchanged, right down to Napoleon escaping from exile on Elba and resuming the throne until Waterloo. In Clarke’s world I think the French reaction would be more “No, go back to Elba. We can’t win against Strange. Don’t even try.”

Then there’s Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, in which Charles Lindbergh runs for the White House on an anti-war platform in 1940 and wins. This keeps us out of WW II and also triggers a wave of homegrown anti-Semitism, seen from the worried POV of the young narrator. After President Lindbergh’s plane vanishes, however, there’s an emergency election in 1942; FDR wins, the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor and history gets back on track. By the 1960s, based on the narrator’s comments, everything looks like our world, right down to Robert Kennedy getting shot (IIRC at least — it’s been a few years).

Again, no. A President Lindbergh, major pogroms in the United States, a delay in the United States supporting the Allies — history is not going to get back on track so neatly. There’s no reason it should: it’s not like Destiny demands that the “real” history reassert itself.

In my own work, such as my alt.1950s SF book Atoms for Peace, I try to avoid that trap (I think I succeed). The 1950s are very different due to multiple alien invasions, from the big stuff — there’s a joint Russian/US moon colony by 1959 — to the trivial (instead of dying young, James Dean wins an Oscar for his fourth film, The Lonely Crowd).

I also make it a point to avoid another problem with alternate histories, having someone figure out exactly how things turned out in the real world. In Poul Anderson’s Operation Luna, for example, the narrator muses at one point on how if the Great War had turned out differently, maybe the winners would have imposed a humiliating treaty on Germany. Maybe some ambitious politician would have sought to blame it on a minority group — the Jews, say — and used that as a tool to gain power.

I presume Anderson wanted to spell out how history diverged, but that’s a clunky way to do it. I much prefer Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, where speculation about “What if the Allies had won WW II?” gets wildly wrong results. Similarly, in Atoms for Peace, everyone “knows” that if not for the aliens, General MacArthur would have taken the Korean War nuclear.

In case you were wondering, I give comics a pass on this. As Kurt Busiek says, part of superhero comics’ appeal is the idea that Superman and Brainiac are having a clash of titans in our world, or one just like it; creating an alternate history would kill that. Plus it would be hard to keep up when writing characters whose adventures now span decades.

Otherwise, no pass.

#SFWApro. Covers by Anabelle Gerardy (top) and Zakaria Nada.