By Alan Smale
Learn all about Alan Smale’s approach to historical fiction in this thoughtful essay, and find out why Alan believes that historical fiction falls perfectly under the umbrella of speculative fiction. In our July/August issue, Alan whisks readers back to Ancient Rome in “Roma Delenda Est,” his latest story!
Sometimes I think I love history way too much to be a science fiction writer.
Then I head off to a science fiction convention—which could be anything from a Comic Con-sized extravaganza, to a Worldcon or World Fantasy Convention, to one of my favorite regional cons like Balticon, Capclave, Philcon, or Ravencon—and see once again just how popular the history-related panels and presentations are. Even when the topics are purely historical, they still seem to find a welcome home in the SF community. (Although, if those panel topics happen to include some kind of speculative element, whether it’s alternate history, historical fantasy, time travel, or whatever else, so much the better.) Many of my SF-writer friends have written at least some SF or fantasy set in the past. In fact, I can think of only a couple who have never done so.
Though, turning this around, even straight-up historical fiction is speculative to some degree, isn’t it? Hist.fic authors tend to reimagine or recast known historical events in a different light, filling in the gaps in our knowledge, or providing a so-called “secret history” of what was really going on behind the scenes. It’s almost impossible to write hist-fic without projecting or inventing the thoughts and motivations of history’s heroes, villains, and supporting cast. There’ll be some interpolations or extrapolations, invented elements about historical personalities, fictional characters moving in that historical landscape, or other meditations on the hidden levers and stressors on history because, let’s face it, we all want to know What Was Really Going On back then. One of the joys of watching “The Crown” on TV was the feeling you were getting a glimpse into the real day-to-day lives of the royals; however accurate or otherwise the portrayals might have been, they certainly seemed all too believable. And, staying with TV, the “Rome” series helped people understand the non-Judeo-Christian mindset of the people who lived in that era, while providing compelling and believable characterizations of Julius Caesar, Mark Anthony, and many others. Along, of course, with those fictional rogues Titus Pullo and Lucius Vorenus, everyman Roman soldiers whose life trajectories just happened to intertwine with those of the rich and powerful.
Alternate history takes this one step—or, sometimes, ten steps—further and posits a different history altogether; the creation of a whole new timeline that begins somewhere along our own recorded history. Rigorous, hardcore alternate history will alter one single historical fact, and then work through the consequences of that change in the coming weeks, decades, or millennia. Such a divergence point “should be plausible, definite, small in itself, and massive in consequence” (Tom Shippey, medievalist and critic).
But, why do that? Why alter history? Isn’t the history we have just fine?
My answer: because alternate history holds up a mirror to our real, known history. When you’re writing or reading alternate history, you’re constantly getting echoes and reverberations from the real history. Our own historical timeline is always present in the back of your mind, however hazily, and gives the story added depth and resonance. I love that.
Or, as John Kessel puts it (far better than I just did): “‘To me the power of alternate history is its essential irony—the distance between what we know really happened and what we assume to have happened in our invented alternate world.” Also John: “I want a counterfactual to illuminate some element of real history. I want it to make a comment on history, or the real people it is about.”
Yup. Absolutely. What he said.
I find a lot of the better-written alternate histories very credible. Honestly, there are a billion places (probably more) where a rather small change in our real, recorded history could have rippled and echoed down through the centuries with major consequences for our current national boundaries, power structures, political systems, technological systems . . . all the systems.
I don’t think you can study history for long without realizing just how contingent it is. How breathtakingly random some events seem, or how strongly they depend on the decision of one person, at one particular time. How often then-current affairs shot off in a completely different direction than the people alive at the time thought they were going to. In your own lives, how often have chance meetings or minor decisions had mighty consequences for you? Most people’s lives are positively riddled with such events.
Sure, some key historical movements are more-or-less inevitable, or at least hard to butterfly away. Many social, economic, and technical revolutions have such a huge amount of momentum behind them that it’s tough to conceive of a single reasonable change that would head them off at the pass. Given the starting conditions, it’s hard to envision a nineteenth-century United States / North America that didn’t throw capital into railroads, leading to the subsequent opening up of the west. Not much can derail that development (sorry). But, whether a given military battle was won or lost—a surprising number of which have a sensitive dependence on the weather that day, or on relatively minor actions taken by one or another army commander, captain, or corporal; or exactly where national boundaries fell, can certainly feel somewhat arbitrary. Even among historically undistinguished or “invisible” characters, who is born and who dies has a significant knock-on effect to all their potential descendants and to everyone who knows those descendants. The consequences of those changes must surely magnify year by year to become immense.
When you’re writing or reading alternate history, you’re constantly getting echoes and reverberations from the real history. Our own historical timeline is always present in the back of your mind, however hazily, and gives the story added depth and resonance. I love that.
I don’t love the Great Man Theory, despite having depicted several rather prominent historical characters in my own alternate history stories (Benjamin Franklin, Julius Caesar, Katherine Wright, Genghis Khan, Charles Darwin, Guy Fawkes…). But it surely must be clear that the gain or loss of one individual, whether they’re a Hitler or a midwife, a Catherine the Great or the chauffeurs who happened to be driving Archduke Franz Ferdidnand’s, or Princess Diana’s, cars on their respective fateful days, might have had impressive effects on the march of history.
Which, after what seems like eons, brings us to “Roma Delenda Est,” my alt.hist tale in the July/August issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine.
Aficionados of classical history will straightaway recognize the similarity of this title to “Carthago Delenda Est!” (“Carthage must be destroyed!”), that infamous phrase that Cato the Elder would bellow out in Senate meetings of the Roman Republic in the second century BC. He was attempting—in a very repetitive and boring way—to convince his senatorial colleagues to commit to what we now know as the third Punic War, and finally crush the city-state of Carthage in the western Mediterranean, which (at least in Cato’s mind) was a continuing threat to Rome. (Honestly, I think Rome may have launched the Third Punic War just to shut him up.) Some readers will realize immediately that this is a story where matters between Rome and Carthage might go differently . . . which would undoubtedly have led to a twenty-first century world very different from the one we currently live in.
Why did this idea appeal to me? Well, a while back I wrote a half-million-word trilogy called Clash of Eagles (Penguin Random House/Del Rey 2015-2017) where the Roman Empire survives in its classical form until the thirteenth century and is moving into North America at just the time when the indigenous Haudenosaunee Confederation and Mississippian Cultures were both at their height. Even though I still think about the Roman Empire every day (don’t we all?), I figured it was time to reverse that karma, and write another set of books where the Roman Empire never comes into its power after all. A series that investigates the fourth-century AD Mediterranean world that might have developed if the Romans had been crushed in the Second Punic War, if Hannibal really had come to the gates of Rome around 210 BC. The books have Hypatia of Alexandria as their protagonist in an Egypt still under the control of the Ptolemaic Dynasty, with a militaristic and aggressive Carthage to the west and a strong Persia to the east, “barbarians” (not really, but a conglomerate of warring Germanic and Gothic cultures) to the North, and no Roman Empire anywhere to be seen.
Those books exist. As a collection they’re called A Million Burning Scrolls, and (full disclosure) they haven’t sold as yet. But, in the process of writing those, I got interested in how this world might have come about. What really happened six hundred years before the events of Scrolls? Who was the historical Hannibal, and how could he and his army have prevailed against the power of Rome? Many historical pundits believe that, for all Hannibal’s undoubted genius as a general and his epic crossing of the Alps (with elephants, for Ba’al’s sake), his military venture was always doomed to fail.
I happen to think otherwise. You’ll have noticed by now that I have distinctly mixed feelings about “historical inevitability.”
There’s a category of alt.hist stories that occur at the nexus point, meaning they follow the course of events through the actual point of divergence where everything changes. “Roma Delenda Est” is one such. And in writing it, I got all kinds of echoes and counterpoints and thought-provoking concepts mirroring in from our real history, which I hope deepen the impact for the reader. . . .
. . . Which is all very heavy and high concept and woo, but to tell the truth I was also looking to write something a little more lighthearted and comedic than some of my more recent stories.
Hence “Roma Delenda Est,” with its cranky and acerbic narrator, and somewhat quirky view of his world and his situation. I had a blast writing it, and in the process realized that it would be fun to incorporate more humor in my next tales, on top of what I fully hope are plausible political situations, realistic backgrounds, and interesting characters. So, I probably will.
Anyway, the TL;DR is that I love playing with historical situations and characters, I love twisting the timeline around in fun and interesting ways, and even though I absolutely consider myself a science fiction writer and reader, I don’t think I’ll ever stop loving speculative history, in all its weird and wonderful forms.
Alternate history enthusiast and two-time Sidewise Award-winner Alan Smale <www.alansmale.com, www.facebook.com/alan.smale, bsky.app/profile/alansmale.bsky.social, twitter.com/AlanSmale, www.linkedin.com/in/alansmale> is the author of the Clash of Eagles trilogy, featuring a Roman invasion of Mississippian America, and the Cold War alternate space race series Apollo Rising. His previous tales for Asimov’s have explored the wilds of Mongolia and deepest, darkest England, the windy dunes of Kitty Hawk, and the bloody Colosseum in Caracalla’s Rome. In his latest tale he kidnaps us into the great Carthaginian general Hannibal’s war camp in Italy in 212 BC.
From Earth to the Stars 