Sidewise, Side Foolish II:

Having talked about my most and least favorite alternate history novels in the original "Sidewise, Side Foolish", this time around I’m going to focus on short stories(as you may have already guessed by the title, LOL). By my own admittedly very rough estimate, I figure I’ve read at least 350 AH short stories in the last five years and I’d like to take a moment or two to comment on the ones that, for good or ill, have particularly stood out in my mind. Just as I did in the original "Sidewise", I’m going to start with the ten best writings I’ve come across and work my way down(FAR down in some cases) to the ten worst And on that note, here we go; in no particular order....

1)Batboy(Harry Turtledove)

Turtledove has so well established himself as a specialist in multi-volume AH epics that a lot of readers-- including me --sometimes forget he also happens to be mighty good at shorter works too. State’s Exhibit A: this funny, and simultaneously spooky, supernatural yarn about an old-time baseball player whose teammates are literally having the life sucked out of them. Done in the style of Ring Lardner, it reads like a collaboration between Lardner, Bram Stoker, and Stephen King.

2)The October Crisis(Edo van Belkom)

As bad as the 1970 Quebec crisis was for Canada, it could easily have been a lot worse...and in this gripping cautionary tale(which is included in Mike Resnick’s anthology Alternate Tyrants), you’ll see exactly how much worse. Let’s just say that you won’t look at Pierre Trudeau the same way again after you read how van Belkom portrays him in this story.

3)Tarnished Glory: Custer and the Waffen-SS(Chris Bunch)

This story takes the reckless tendencies that kept getting George Armstrong Custer in hot water during the American Civil War and would eventually lead to his death at Little Big Horn and places them in the context of the Battle of the Bulge. Casting him in the role played by George Patton in OTL-- i.e., a swashbuckling blood & guts commander guided more by intuition than by facts in planning his operations--  Bunch puts Custer’s fatal flaws in a new and sharper light. As a nice bonus, the story throws in an interesting twist about the post-World War II political careers of Dwight Eisenhower and Harry S. Truman.

4)Southern Strategy(Michael F. Flynn)

Here we have three great AH stories blended into one: in an America where German troops acting under the auspices of the League of Nations try to keep a lid on racial tensions while at the same time hunting down a notorious guerrilla leader, Adlai Stevenson is visiting Alabama trying to find a suitable Democratic presidential candidate for the 1956 presidential elections. What happens to Stevenson during that trip, and the truth about the guerrilla kingpin the Germans are trying to catch, will keep you glued to the story right to the very last sentence.

5)Counting Potsherds(Harry Turtledove)

In OTL we usually know the name Mithredath in association with kings of Pontus or with the much-detested treasurer of Cyrus the Great. In the altered world of this tale, where the Persian Empire prevailed in its long wars with Greece, Mithredath is a name which belongs to...well, let’s just say the protagonist has had surgery on a sensitive part of his anatomy and let it go at that. Turtledove does a first-rate job of depicting a Persian-dominated ancient world.

6)Custer’s Last Jump(Howard Waldrop and Steven Uttley)

I just read this story a few days after I started working on this article, and I have to say I was hooked on it immediately. How could you not like a story that features (A)Mark Twain, (B)an ATL based on Benjamin Franklin inventing the internal combustion engine, and (C) a Battle of the Little Big Horn in which airplanes play a major role?

7)Standing Firm(Barbara Delaplace)

You’ll never look at the 1938 Munich crisis the same way again after checking out this offering from the Mike Resnick AH anthology Alternate Warriors. Delaplace takes the traditional perceptions of Neville Chamberlain and stands them right on their head in this jaw- dropping reimagining of Chamberlain’s posture on Hitler’s territorial claims in the Sudetenland. One can only hope that Ms. Delaplace has a sequel on tap or is planning to expand this story into a full-length novel.

8)Hell’s Door Opened(David Atwell)

At the risk of being accused of apple-polishing, I want to go on record as saying that our esteemed CTT editor has turned out a honest-to-God attention-grabber about how Pakistan’s entry into the nuclear club could have triggered a fourth Indo-Pakistani war at the start of the current decade. I dare you to try and sleep, or ignore the nagging chill of dread in your spine, after reading this one.

9)Riders In The Sky(Allen Steele)

Here’s another great AH short piece involving aircraft and a well-known American historic figure-- in this case outlaw Jesse James. In "Riders", the infamous train and bank robber is transformed into an airship hijacker; Steele’s depiction of the hijackings, and his account of how airships were invented in his altered timeline, make for some terrific storytelling. (PS: If you’re interested in seeing an example of Steele ATLs in more contemporary settings, I recommend "Goddard’s People", his short story about a US-Nazi space race in 1944.)

10)We Are Not Amused(Laura Resnick)

Literary talent and a fondness for alternate history seem to run in the Resnick family, if Laura’s humor-oriented offering from her dad Mike’s anthology Alternate Presidents is any indication. While some of the works I reviewed in my first "Sidewise" commentary symbolize great ideas ruined by lousy execution, here we have a case of the opposite phenomenon-- a potentially awful concept saved by a brilliant follow- through. By means I don’t pretend to begin to understand, Ms. Resnick is able to sell readers on the notion of controversial feminist free- thinker Victoria Woodhull becoming President of the United States in 1872 and engaging in correspondence by mail with Great Britain’s Queen Victoria. In the hands of a less gifted writer, this premise could all too easily degenerate into either (A)a bitter radical feminist screed or (B)an insanely overblown farce; Laura Resnick, nimbly sidesteps all the potential landmines to turn out a genuinely entertaining satire of the famed British monarch.

As you can imagine, the staunchly conservative Victoria does not take kindly to Woodhull’s sweeping social and political reform agenda; at one point, in fact, she goes so far as to blame President Woodhull for the chaos which sweeps Britain once Woodhull’s radical philosophy crosses the Atlantic. Judging by Ms. Resnick’s characterization of the queen, it’s safe to say the author did her homework in researching the historical background for this story. For that-- and for the punchline at the end of this story-- she should be commended.

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That takes care of the peaks of AH short story writing; now it’s time to brave the valleys. So gather up your courage as we stare into the abyss of...

The 10 Worst AH Short Stories I’ve Read

1)An Old Man’s Summer(Esther Friesner)

This jumbled mishmash having something to do with Dwight Eisenhower being at the Battle of Gettysburg made absolutely zero sense to me the first time that I read it in the original Alternate Generals anthology. It makes even less sense to me now that I’ve gone back over it multiple times. If you only read one Eisenhower AH story this year, PLEASE pick something other than Summer for the sake of your sanity.

2)Ready For The Fatherland(Harry Turtledove)

Even the best authors can lay an egg once in a while-- and in this short fic set in a 1970s fascist Croatia, Turtledove lays one the size of the Golden Gate Bridge. His characters’ dialogue is uncharacteristically dull, and the way the plot unfolds from his point of divergence(Hitler gets assassinated in 1943 while on a visit to one of his generals at the Russian front) isn’t nearly as credible as it could have been. If you want a better example of a Turtledove AH short story with Barbarossa as its main theme, try The Phantom Tolbulkhin in the first Alternate Generals.

3)Bible Stories For Adults No. 31: The Covenant(James Morrow)

Remember that scene in the movie "Spinal Tap" where Marty DiBergi quotes a two-word negative review of one of the band’s albums? Well, for this idiotic bungling of a potentially thought- provoking AH storyline about the Ten Commandments, I have a one- word review:

OK, now that that’s out of my system...

4)Manassas, Again(Gregory Benford)

....let’s talk about-- or better still, let’s NOT talk about --this blatant case of false advertising which pulls a transparent bait-and-switch by promising a POD related to the American Civil War, then turns around and inflicts on unprepared readers a pathetic Robotech ripoff having something to do with giant robots and virtual warfare.

5)Faith(Kristine Kathryn Rusch)

I sincerely hope this doesn’t represent the author’s real feelings about Christianity, because if it does she’s a bigot as well as a lousy writer. This vicious portrayal of God-as-abusive- husband reads like something Richard Dawkins would crank out on a bar bet. And even if you don’t object to its less-than-flattering attitude toward the mainstream Christian Church, you certainly will object to its dull-as-ditchwater characters and sub-Harlequin Romance level dialogue.

6)Bring The Jubilee(Ward Moore)

I realize that what I’m about to say will constitute full-fledged blasphemy in the minds of most AH readers, since this story is considered by a majority of readers and critics to be one of the classics of the AH genre. Nevertheless, it needs to be said anyway: Jubilee is awful. The problem isn’t so much the premise--a time-traveler from a dystopic America changes the course of history --but the way Moore so hopelessly botches it. In the hands of, say, Harry Turtledove or Martin H. Greenberg this would be a masterpiece; as rendered by Moore, however, it’s just an exercise in ridiculous flights of fancy. Try as he might to merge the themes of time travel and Confederate victory in the American Civil War, Moore just isn’t up to the job.

7)Thermometers Falling(Gleen Grant)

I went into this story, which focuses on the idea of Leon Trotsky being in Nova Scotia at the time of the 1917 Halifax Harbor explosion, prepared to like it as much as I did any of the selections in my 10 Best Stories list. I came out of it wishing Gleen Grant had never put pen to paper, or finger to keyboard. He makes most one of the most intriguing and controversial political figures of the 20^th century sound little more than a garden-variety waterfront hood and needlessly distracts readers from his main plotline with an "is it real or a dream" subplot involving Ernest Hemingway. This story is overblown and underfocused.

8)Game Night At The Fox & Goose(Karen Joy Fowler)

This is one game that should have been called on account of rain. You wouldn’t think it would be possible to make the battle of the sexes sound boring, but Fowler does with this incomprehensible train wreck of a story about a single woman from OTL winding up in a bar in a timeline where a certain feminist radical was shot to death and her murder triggered a wave of gender-related violence. You almost need a CIA cryptographer to make any sense of this work. And frankly, even then you might find yourself feeling a bit at sea.

9)Dukakis & the Aliens(Robert Sheckley)

Take the most clueless, least charismatic Democratic presidential candidate in American political history. Add a premise ripped off from two-thirds of the X-Files episodes ever made. Throw in utterly stilted dialogue and characterizations that would embarrass a third-rate comic book editor. Stir until you’ve got a barely readable mess. For extra seasoning, include a pinch of gratuitous gore. And...voila! A perfect example of how NOT to do AH stories about presidential candidates. If  there’s a worse story on this theme, I hope to God that I never come across it.

10)That’ll Be The Day(Jack C. Haldeman & Barbara Delapace)

Buddy Holly a dictator? Sorry, not buying that idea-- especially not the way it’s handled in this story. Just about the only thing that saved "Day" from being ranked higher on this list was a cameo near the end by the Beatles in which the authors made some quite enjoyable puns on the Fab Four’s most famous song titles.

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And on that note, we bring down the curtain on "Sidewise, Side Foolish II". If you want to comment on any of these reviews, feel free to e-mail me at ChrisO_01801@yahoo.com or beacon92@hotmail.com. Which reminds me: a tip of the hat to readers Alan Burnham for reminding me  about Len Deighton’s "SS-GB" and Tim and Vanessa Koszyk for giving me their recommendations about the Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen series and Randall Garrett’s Lord Darcy stories after my first "Sidewise" article about my most and least favorite AH novels.

The End