The Mammoth Book of Alternate Histories

Introduction

“There is an infinitude of Pasts, all equally valid,” wrote Andre Maurois, the French novelist and biographer. “At each and every instant of Time, however brief you suppose it, the line of events forks like the stem of a tree putting forth twin branches.” This is quoted in Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals, edited by historian and political commentator Niall Ferguson. These days alternative history is almost respectable amongst historians, leading to such other recent well-received volumes of essays as Robert Cowley’s What If? Military Historians Imagine What Might Have Been or Andrew Roberts’ What Might Have Been: Leading Historians on Twelve “What Ifs” of History. Some other historians frown at counterfactuality; although, if the “Many Worlds” interpretation of Quantum Physics is correct, all possible alternatives might indeed occur in a branching multiverse. What’s more, was our own world’s history in any sense inevitable, or even highly plausible, simply because it actually happened? Who, for instance, in 1975 might have imagined that a few years later a female British prime minister would be sending a nuclear-armed armada all the way to the South Atlantic in a quarrel about some remote islands full of sheep? Who could have supposed that British counter-terrorism laws, provoked by planes flying into the World Trade Center, would be used for the first time bizarrely to seize the assets of a mild-mannered Icelandic bank, on account of mortgages stupidly sold to poor house buyers in the United States?

Essays about What Might Have Been are already fascinating, but it has long been a delight of science fiction writers to put flesh upon the bones. Consequently, here you’ll find what might have happened if the Roman Empire had never declined and fallen; how Islam might have triumphed much more widely; how the Native American Indians might have repelled the European invasion; how the other Indians, of India, might have forged an empire in place of the British Empire; how the civilized Chinese might already have been ensconced in California when the uncouth Europeans first arrived there; how the Pope might really have offended King Alfred of the burnt cakes; and much much more that has surely happened elsewhere (or elsewhen) in alternity, even if it didn’t happen quite that way in our version of reality. You’ll find award-winning classics of the sub-genre nestling alongside equally worthy nuggets that might previously have escaped your notice and more recent gems, including three splendid, brand-new stories by special invitees James Morrow, Stephen Baxter and Ken MacLeod. These feature the alternative truth about the Titanic, the trial for heresy of Darwin’s bones along with one of his descendants, and a near-future Scotland that begins as far south as London.

Ian Watson and Ian Whates