WHAT IF (OSFS STATEMENT 152, February 1990)

Among the many thrills of the reader of Science Fiction is the
pleasure of the alternate world story. What if the Roman Empire
never fell or the Plantagenet Dynasty were still in power? What if
the Confederates had won the American Civil War or the Moors had
been victors at the Battle of Tours? A good writer, as, for example,
L. Sprague de Camp, can give us an enjoyable story, such as THE
WHEELS OF IF, even if you have never heard of the controversy
concerning the dating of Easter or the deep penetration of Muslim
forces into what is now France. Randal Garrett's Lord D'arcy stories
are wonderful whether or not one knows much history.

If you do know some of the background there can be an added delight.
It is more than the exoticism of seeing modern Romans and televised
gladiators, as on one episode of the old Star Trek (though they less
plausibly stuck the story on another planet and spoke of parallel
evolution). It is more than the dark horror of stumbling on the
survivors of New York bombed by the Nazis after the fall of Britain.
It is more than the scholarly tickle of say coming across in AGENT
OF BYZANTIUM something from Maurice's STRATEGICON (a military manual
from close to A.D. 600) which you recognize.

There is the joy of following the author's speculations along his
line of alternate history. And these can differ from author to
author even when the same point is chosen as the divergence of our
two worlds. Thus, Kirk Mitchell in THE NEW BARBARIANS shows a modern
Rome not quite up to our level of technology battling the Aztecs,
while Frederick Pohl in his short story, "Waiting For the Olympians"
has a global Pax Romana whith a science superior to ours. This last
one by the way has a "sci-rom" writer, whom I view as a sort of
replica of Isaac Asimov, come up with this very concept of alternate
worlds, leaving it to his buddy (a replica of Pohl himself?) to
describe the first actual alternate world for sci-rom readers there.
This, of course, from the divergence points and speculations in the
story as to the differences, suggests to us it may be our world.

There is the mental stimulation of plunging into a story like Poul
Anderson's "In the House of Sorrow" and trying to solve the mystery;
what is the point of divergence? Where do our two worlds separate?
Even if you are wrong (as I was in this case. I thought it was the
failure of Christianity. It was several centuries earlier when
Sennacherib destroyed Jerusalem.) there is as much fun as there is
for the reader of a mystery story trying to puzzle out (right or
wrong) the identity of the murderer in a whodunit.

Some of the most interesting of these stories involve travel between
alternate earths, voyage "cross time" to use Andre Norton's phrase.
Here we have not just one well thought out stream of a different
past leading up to the alternate present. We have explorers of a
whole multitude of other earths. Well done, as I think Andre Norton
does in her QUEST CROSSTIME and its prequel CROSSROADS OF TIME,
these stimulate the imagination of the lover of history
tremendously. There is a great tapestry of worlds we glimpse in
varying detail. And we can imagine far more than is actually
presented by even an author as giften as Andre Norton.

Not all alternate worlds need an historical link with ours. Some
people even use the word "alternate" as a distinction from the
"parallel" worlds which have branched from ours at a point of
common history. Our own Sansoucy has devoted much creativity to a
vast magnum opus involving voyaging through alternate earths which
do not necessarily share some common history with this one.

Michael McKenny