World War One Alternative Histories

Above: A snapshot from "Arrowsmith", by Kurt Busiek and Carlos Pacheco.

By Péter MARTON

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If you have not heard of the Corvinus Journal of International Affairs so far, that is perhaps because it is no magazine of science-fiction. It is a scholarly publication, with a focus on International Relations. I am bringing it up here, because the next issue, a thematic issue on the 100th anniversary of the Versailles Treaty, features my article on WWI alternative history fiction, along the following lines — as outlined in the article's summary:

This article offers a brief overview of the challenges of assessing counterfactual statements in terms of plausibility, to then consider the reasons for the comparative scarcity of WWI alternative histories in published alternative history (AH) speculative fiction. The relative rarity of such fiction may be striking, given the popularity of the notion that the event of the nearly-botched assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir presumptive to the throne of Austria-Hungary, in 1914, in Sarajevo — in a sense a small, improbable event — was the decisive trigger of the conflict. Explaining the comparative lack of AH in the light of a systematic understanding of the difficulties of counterfactual analysis may be as interesting for literary theory as to political analysis. The article closes with a discussion of the few relevant pieces of genre literature that have been identified during the course of the research for this piece.

As an advance publication, you may read a part of this article below — strictly the part that reflects on the relevant genre literature identified for the study. Bonne lecture! 

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(An excerpt from: Péter Marton (2019): Reflections on the analysis of counterfactual propositions and alternative history speculative fiction about WWI. Corvinus Journal of International Affairs, Vol. 4, No. 2-4, pp. 121-135.)

"Based on a reasonable (and partly crowd-sourced) effort to compile an initial list of relevant works for exploration, the following items have been identified which could be obtained or regarding which sufficient information was found, for the overview below:

• Kurt Busiek and Carlos Pacheco: Arrowsmith (series of comics published as a book by Wildstorm, 2004, ISBN-13: 978-1401202996)
• Jon Courtenay Grimwood: Arabesk (“Pashazade”, “Effendi”, “Felaheen”; a trilogy of novels published from 2001 to 2003, available in a single volume from Gollancz)
• William Sanders: The Wild Blue and the Gray (Grand Central, 1991, ISBN-13: 978-0446361422; novel)
• Robert Egerton Swartwout: It Might Have Happeed (W Heffer & Sons, 1934)
• Harry Turtledove: Uncle Alf (in: Alternate Generals II, anthology, Baen, 2002; short story)
• Harry Turtledove: The Great War (“American Front”; “Walk in Hell”, “Breakthroughs”; a trilogy of novels re-published by Del Ray, 2006)
• Scott Westerfield: Leviathan (Simon Pulse, 2010, ISBN-13: 9781416971740; an illustrated novel)

It may be important to note that there are other relevant works that are based on a point of divergence before (in some cases, long before) WWI, causing an alteration of the character and causal chain of WWI (if and to the extent that it happens at all). Such is, for example, Kim Stanley Robinsons’ The Years of Rice and Salt (Bantam Books, 2002). There are also non-English works of this kind, such as A szivarhajó utolsó útja: Fejezetek a Duna-menti Köztársaság történetéből by Bence Pintér and Máté Pintér (Agave, Budapest, 2012, ISBN: 9786155049941). Such works are, however, not considered here in detail, with a view to WWI being outside their central focus. A further issue of delineation is that only pieces of fiction that have a clear point of divergence, i.e., a turn of events leading to alternative outcomes (along with open-ended alternative historical event horizons), may count as alternative history fiction, at least for our purposes here: otherwise any piece of fiction taking place in WWI (if its causal chain is bracketed by actual events) could be of relevance. Time-machine and parallel-reality-traveling stories have also been excluded from the inquiry.

            Of the above-listed, Scott Westerfield’s Leviathan and Kurt Busiek’s Arrowsmith (an illustrated novel and a comic book, respectively) use a lot of fantasy elements, moving (far) away from a down-to-earth narrative’s generally greater interest in plausibility, even as they capture certain societal, economic and political dynamics rather well. One features the mechanized forces of the “Clankers” (the Central Powers in our universe) against the “Darwinist” forces (the Entente Powers) that have mastered biological warfare as a result of a massive revolution in biotechnology and are thus relying on the power of engineered organisms. The other depicts a world of magic and spells, where the Allies face off with the Prussians, and dragons, ogres, vampires and other monsters add to the ranks of the combatant parties. The protagonist, Fletcher Arrowsmith (notably, carrying a nom de guerre by birth), joins the war in a world in the process of being reshaped by commercial wizardry, thus reflecting by analogy the spread of technology (as Arthur Clarke famously observed: advanced technology is practically indistinguishable from magic) and the expansion of capitalism.

            Robert Egerton Swartwout’s It Might Have Happened: A sketch of the later career of Rupert Lister Audenard, First Earl of Slype, etc. (from 1934) is built on a complex antecedent scenario, where Lord Randolph Churchill (1849-1895), Winston Churchill’s father, does not die an untimely death but fulfils his potential (attributed to him by many of his contemporaries, a key piece of information in terms of plausibility) to become a central figure in British politics. Swartwout uses a pseudonym for Lord Randolph Churchill, but the similarities speak for themselves. Beyond these similarities, the story leads to a very different universe, with WWI cut short, peace and stability resulting, and Hitler, consequently, not coming to power in Germany.

            The U.S. Civil War is a source of points of divergence with direct relevance for WWI, both for William Sanders in the novel The Wild Blue and the Gray and for Harry Turtledove in his The Great War trilogy. The former presents a universe where the lands of what we know as the United States of America are divided between three different parties, the Union States, the Confederate States of America (CSA) and the Five Civilized Tribes – the latter two are allies, with a Cherokee protagonist joining the CSA’s ranks on the French front in the story. Turtledove’s series pits the United States of America, the losing party in the Civil War, against the CSA on the side of the European powers, whose conflict pulls them into the war, with the USA allied to Germany and Austria-Hungary, and the CSA as an ally of the United Kingdom and France.

            In the meantime, featuring intra-WWI points of divergence, Maltese-born British writer Jon Courtenay Grimwood’s Arabesk trilogy sees WWI cut short by a peace agreement brokered by President Wilson, with the combat limited mostly to the Balkans. Even more interestingly, the scene for the story is a liberal Ottoman North Africa, addressing the counterfactual of what would have been the fate of the Ottoman Empire in the absence of a drawn-out WWI.

Last but not least, Harry Turtledove’s brilliant short story, Uncle Alf, builds on the premise of a better-constructed German offensive in the West, resulting in the long-lasting occupation of France, where the German occupiers are gradually but surely undergoing acculturation to French norms, resisted only by die-hard purists such as the rather scary anti-hero of the story.

            As these examples may demonstrate, authors of speculative fiction are creative and inventive enough to be able to come up with various scenarios for diverse points of divergence, including antecedent as well as intra-WWI points of divergence. The socially and historically critical character of some of these works is visible in how they choose premises for their stories that are moderately to highly uncomfortable for readers accustomed to the universe we currently live in.

            Naturally, what is available in the English language may later in time be complemented with the translations of non-English works, such as Christian Kracht’s Alternativweltgeschichte Ich werde hier sein im Sonnenschein und im Schatten (I will be here, in the sunlight and the shade, 2008), where the Swiss Soviet Republic (SSR) comes into being after Lenin remains in exile there – that is, because Russia suffers devastation from a much more drastic version of the 1908 Tungushka event (the book is available, as of 2019, in Russian, Bulgarian, Dutch, Polish, Swedish, Korean, Norwegian and Croatian, but not in English)."