A Mug's Game
Jul. 27th, 2005 08:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mtvessel25 Jun 2005
More What If? - ed.Robert Cowley - Pan 2003
* *
As its name suggests, this is a book of counterfactual history, in which "eminent historians imagine what might have been". Regular readers of SF and other imaginative fiction are quite used to this concept due to the "alternate world" sub-genre of novels churned out by Harry Turtledove and his ilk. Most of these are not great works of literature (excepting, of course, such masterpieces as Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle), but are mildly interesting for the way that recognisable characters appear in completely different contexts. I thought that this might be a superior version of the same thing, with properly knowledgeable people coming up with plausible scenarios. And indeed it is. There's only one small problem - the whole thing is a completely wasted exercise.
The scenarios covered vary widely, from the premature death of Socrates at the Battle of Delium to the ascendancy of Henry Wallace to the US presidency in place of Harry S. Truman, with a somewhat excessive preponderance of US- and World War 2-based themes. As is to be expected from a multi-author book, the quality of the writing and the speculation is variable. Many writers largely ignore the purpose of the exercise and spend the majority of their essay explicating some obscure historical situation that interests them, with a brief section tacked on the end which investigates what might have happened had said situation not come to pass. The what-if sections tend to be disappointingly vague and general - for example, the essay on Socrates concludes that if he had died at Delium, "our present ideas about Christianity and democracy would be radically different". Well gee whizz, who'd have thought it? Other writers answer the wrong what-if - the essay on the atomic bomb, for example, asks what would have happened if it hadn't been used at all, rather than the much more interesting question (to which I would very much like to know the answer) "what if the bomb had been dropped on uninhabited regions, rather than major population centres?".
I am not surprised that the quality of the what-ifs is not that good, because for historians counterfactual history is fundamentally a mug's game. Like The Hinge Factor, many of the scenarios described here are based on trivial historical events - what if Franklin D. Roosevelt had ended up marrying a dazzling but conventional heiress rather than Eleanor, what if Charles I had not left Whitehall in August 1641 - and illustrate just how contingent historical events are on the circumstances that create them. But if so, then the counterfactual scenarios proposed would most likely themselves have been knocked off course by other trivial events. In fact, the game of what-if is more dangerous than that - if history is so contingent, then there are no trends, tendencies or general lessons that can be learnt from it. All the historian can do is unearth the precise circumstances that caused a particular historical event, which is the academic equivalent of stamp collecting.
So perhaps it's best that counterfactual history be left safely in the fictional mode of SF, lest the whole subject of traditional history is shown to be a mug's game. I'm sure that this wasn't the intention of Robert Cowley's opus, but it is the effect, and it's clear from the quality of their essays that a number of his contributors have realised it.
More What If? - ed.Robert Cowley - Pan 2003
* *
As its name suggests, this is a book of counterfactual history, in which "eminent historians imagine what might have been". Regular readers of SF and other imaginative fiction are quite used to this concept due to the "alternate world" sub-genre of novels churned out by Harry Turtledove and his ilk. Most of these are not great works of literature (excepting, of course, such masterpieces as Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle), but are mildly interesting for the way that recognisable characters appear in completely different contexts. I thought that this might be a superior version of the same thing, with properly knowledgeable people coming up with plausible scenarios. And indeed it is. There's only one small problem - the whole thing is a completely wasted exercise.
The scenarios covered vary widely, from the premature death of Socrates at the Battle of Delium to the ascendancy of Henry Wallace to the US presidency in place of Harry S. Truman, with a somewhat excessive preponderance of US- and World War 2-based themes. As is to be expected from a multi-author book, the quality of the writing and the speculation is variable. Many writers largely ignore the purpose of the exercise and spend the majority of their essay explicating some obscure historical situation that interests them, with a brief section tacked on the end which investigates what might have happened had said situation not come to pass. The what-if sections tend to be disappointingly vague and general - for example, the essay on Socrates concludes that if he had died at Delium, "our present ideas about Christianity and democracy would be radically different". Well gee whizz, who'd have thought it? Other writers answer the wrong what-if - the essay on the atomic bomb, for example, asks what would have happened if it hadn't been used at all, rather than the much more interesting question (to which I would very much like to know the answer) "what if the bomb had been dropped on uninhabited regions, rather than major population centres?".
I am not surprised that the quality of the what-ifs is not that good, because for historians counterfactual history is fundamentally a mug's game. Like The Hinge Factor, many of the scenarios described here are based on trivial historical events - what if Franklin D. Roosevelt had ended up marrying a dazzling but conventional heiress rather than Eleanor, what if Charles I had not left Whitehall in August 1641 - and illustrate just how contingent historical events are on the circumstances that create them. But if so, then the counterfactual scenarios proposed would most likely themselves have been knocked off course by other trivial events. In fact, the game of what-if is more dangerous than that - if history is so contingent, then there are no trends, tendencies or general lessons that can be learnt from it. All the historian can do is unearth the precise circumstances that caused a particular historical event, which is the academic equivalent of stamp collecting.
So perhaps it's best that counterfactual history be left safely in the fictional mode of SF, lest the whole subject of traditional history is shown to be a mug's game. I'm sure that this wasn't the intention of Robert Cowley's opus, but it is the effect, and it's clear from the quality of their essays that a number of his contributors have realised it.