brian> Ever read Norman Spinrad's _The Iron Dream_ (1972)? I picked up a
brian> book recently, _Hitler Victorious!_, not quite knowing what to
brian> expect. It's a compilation of short stories set in a "what if?"
brian> world where the Nazis won WW2. I admit I judged the book by its
brian> cover: a doctored photo of Hitler beaming proudly from his
brian> touring car, draped in US flags, before the US capitol
brian> building. Unofrtunately, the stories have so far proven to be
brian> mediocre. The intro by Spinrad, however, makes much reference to
brian> Philip K Dick's _The Man in the High Castle_, Saban's _The Sound
brian> of His Horn_, and his own 1972 work.
Hi Brian,
I've read Dick's Man in the High Castle. For me, when Dick is good, it's very very good; when bad, very very bad.
The whole "alternative history" genre, which is sorta a bastard child of scifi and the historical novel, is politically interesting. I haven't yet sorted out what kind of cultural impulse it expresses, other than a general malaise about the state of the world.
Compared to scifi (or, at least, one understanding of the genre laws of scifi), alternative histories are conceptually picayune, despite the often grandiose sweep of their explicit narrative. If scifi novels are about expressing some theory of history, projected onto the near or distant future, as Ken MacLeod argues, alternative histories are about ferreting out the changes which might follow from the contingent slippage of one or perhaps two historical facts. That is, alternative histories look at history in a way similar to the popular conception of the patient scientist in a lab, forever tinkering slightly with one variable at a time, then standing back to judge the often disproportionately different results.
At least one alternative history of recent vintage had some notable commercial success, a novel called Fatherland by Robert Harris, which was made into a pretty decent movie starring Rutger Hauer and Miranda Richardson -- pretty high level topical trash, imo. Fatherland supposes that Hitler was not defeated, built a sort of unified Europa (the demonic inversion of the EU?), and is sickly in the 1960s, as the US considers "normalizing relations" with his gov't, all of which is spoiled by the discovery of evidence of the Holocaust.
My favorite -- as far as I know, unwritten -- alternative history premise is that, rather than ending up exiled in London, Marx ends up in Brooklyn or Queens, and rather than filing dispatches for American papers, he files them for British ones. Rather than spending all that time in the British Library, he spends it in the NYC public library and analyzes American capitalism, not British. With that shift, the subsequent Marxist revolution does not occur in Russia but in Brazil. From that "small change", the 20th century would have looked different indeed. Call it "Marx in America".
Kendall Clark -- Once I built a railroad, I made it run Made it race against time Once I built a railroad, now it's done Brother, can you spare a dime?