Speculative Fiction and the American Historian
Talk nerdy to me: The Historian's Craft Meets Art
Last week’s essay
Last week I looked at World War Two and its impact on alternative history fiction, and I thought I should follow up. Culturally, the Second World War contributed a lot to the speculative genre that includes science fiction and fantasy.
The war gave us the horrors of the atomic age, but also the wonders of what could be done with nuclear energy. Combined with the Vergeltungswaffen, or “Vengeance Weapons,” the V1 and V2 rockets of Wernher von Braun, the future was both bleak and hopeful depending on how you wanted to look at it. And this inspired the next generation of science fiction writers. Would science lead to strange new worlds, or end life as we know it on this one?
I enjoy science fiction, and how it sparks the imagination and combines art with intellectual prowess. Inventions we take for granted often first appeared in sci-fi shows and films. I am also curious about the analysis of the field. The genre is commonly split into two categories: hard science fiction and soft science fiction. A similar division of hard versus soft has been applied to fantasy as well. Although the hard/soft dichotomy is debated, I’ll use it in my discourse today.
Hard Science Fiction emphasizes what is known about contemporary scientific plausibility and logically extrapolates from that to imagined developments. This, of course, alters with each generation. Put another way, the works we call hard sci-fi are rooted in existing scientific principles, as they were known to the author when they wrote the story. The imagined tech is used as a basis to create stories that can explore how life and society could unfold given the changes the technical differences cause. Authors like Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, and Kim Stanley Robinson meticulously integrated scientific knowledge into their narratives, making the science itself a central element of the story; while the first two look at science triumphantly, Robinson tends to write works that make one ponder the social and political consequences of developments like climate change. But in all three cases, the extrapolations are plausible from the standpoint of when they were written.
With Soft Science Fiction, I prefer the definitions in Brave New Words: the Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction edited by Jeff Prucher. Essentially it defines soft science fiction as a genre that focuses mainly on imagined advances in the social and behavioral sciences or one that uses true scientific principles only loosely, with the scientific details playing a minor role compared with the characters, societies, and themes in the story. Some stories like Star Trek are considered soft science fiction, along with Star Wars, and there are critics and scholars who would also apply the term science-fantasy to both stories. And this has advantages, and I consider Star Trek to be among the best American tales ever imagined, capable of confronting serious political and social matters as exemplified by the complexity of the Deep Space Nine series.
As regards these definitions, as they say, your mileage may vary. Some find the designation of “soft” offensive. However, there is also the argument the hard/soft divide seems to work well for fantasy when you consider world-building. It is an aesthetic distinction. There is The Lord of the Rings and the other Middle-earth stories by J.R.R. Tolkien with his detailed invented languages, geography and rich history; clearly works of hard world-building. And then there is something like Conan the Barbarian where the fictional world is very thin and yet still provides the vibrant tableau for the story.
But what about alternative history? Should we look at speculative historical fiction the way we sometimes categorize science fiction? What would be the dividing line? I would put Churchill’s counterfactual history in the soft category, but let me explain why. I think that a Hard alternative history rigorously extrapolates from a plausible point of divergence (POD) while respecting historical constraints. Whereas Soft alternative history uses historical settings as backdrop, an evocative tableau, for other concerns—theme, character, allegory—without rigorous attention to causation, often bypassing it. And yet I think most works I have read fall somewhere in the middle of the spectrum between Hard and Soft. But not all works of fiction dealing with past events count as alt-history and so must be distinguished from Historical Fiction.
Works like George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman or Bernard Cornwell’s Sharpe’s Rifles utilize historical verisimilitude or “lifelikeness” to place fictional protagonists within the established timeline. You read them as though you are going through the real history alongside the protagonist, not that history is changing with their adventures.
Back to alt-history as I wrote last week, alt-history can be useful for exploring questions that are left unanswered by actual events. And then there is another reason, just as important: if you love history, alternative history can be great fun, the best authors are a pleasure for the reader of leisure. Harry Turtledove’s Videssos Cycle, however, is fantasy; it utilizes his professional training as a Byzantine historian to create a historical analog world, rather than reimagining our own timeline. Nevertheless, the alt-history genre contains elements of fantasy and wonder to explore.
The first season of the Amazon show was amazing in exploring the uncomfortable comfort of many Americans in a Nazi ruled world. And yet, Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle never really explains how the Axis powers actually won World War II or developed atomic weapons. They just did, and the omission is fine because the POD is the assassination of the new American president, FDR in 1933. Dick is interested in ideas about inner truth, and fascism’s psychological impact, not military plausibility or the mechanics of the war. It won the 1963 Hugo Award for Best Science Fiction Novel, so he did something right.
An example of a hard alt-history regarding plausibility and world building would be Harry Turtledove’s Agent of Byzantium, where the point of departure is a single event that changes global history: imagine if Muhammad had converted to Eastern Christianity, became a Christian saint and Islam never developed. Because Turtledove holds a doctorate in Byzantine history he is able to carefully trace how this change would affect technology, politics, and culture over centuries, especially how it would involve the survival of the Persian Empire as a rival to Rome.
One that fits what I think is the middle point on the continuum is Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series which —bear with me a moment— reinterprets the Napoleonic wars with dragons. Let’s just say that her idea gave me much less heartburn than Ridley Scott’s movie.1 Novik is a great writer who may be a bit soft on the historical implications of her world, but she is hard on nautical matters and dragon combat. But her story is really about how a society involving dragons would evolve to deal with the problems of the Napoleonic era from the British perspective. It is her strong characters—knocked around by historical events and systems—and their reactions that drive the story; they feel like flesh and blood individuals inhabiting a world where humanity’s ability to work with dragons determines the fate of empires. By comparison, Natasha Pulley’s The Kingdoms is a curious Napoleonic novel that is soft on historical causation while also subverting causation as a narrative driver. This works because her point is to examine interpersonal relationships within a world where the French Empire was victorious.
Science fiction and the great what ifs posed by the World Wars, have combined to give us intriguing literature that can be both escape and intellectual exercises. Both hard and soft alt-history can be done well, and, whichever method the author chooses, there is the chance to contribute to the historian’s imagination and provoke fruitful discussion and new questions to ask of the past and present. And hinge movements in world history, like Trafalgar, the 1862 campaign, and what if Japan followed up their attack on Pearl Harbor with an invasion and occupation of Hawai’i, will continue to inspire writers. Or, what if Britain and France were led by men with chests and they called Hitler out in 1938 over the Sudetenland?
