Sidewise, Side Foolish III:

The 5 Best and 5 Worst AH Premises I’ve Ever Read

In my two previous "Sidewise" commentaries I focused on specific AH works; this time around, I’m going to delve into a somewhat more general topic-- namely the premises on which AH writings are based. It’s a bit trickier to make judgments on the quality of broad ideas than on the particular stories or books which grow from those ideas. But I’ll make the effort just the same, partly because it gives me the opportunity to further explore some of the literary ground I covered before in "Sidewise" and "Sidewise II". So now then, in no particular order, permit me to present....

1)The Cuban Missile Crisis escalates into full-scale nuclear war (Resurrection Day, Laura Resnick’s "A Fleeting Wisp of Glory")

A historical era doesn’t necessarily have to be very long in order to provide rich material for counterfactual stories; some, in fact, span just the blink of an eye in chronological terms. Case in point: the Cuban Missile Crisis, which lasted just thirteen days yet has proven fertile ground for AH writers. (Speaking of which, you might want to check out the essay "Cuban Missile Crisis: Second Holocaust" in the Robert Cowley book What Ifs? Of American History. It offers some fascinating insights into the political, diplomatic, and environmental consequences a full-scale nuclear strike on the Soviet Union might have had for the United States.)

Resurrection Day and "Fleeting Wisp of Glory" use the common premise of the Missile Crisis mushrooming into all-out war to spin gripping-- and at times heartbreaking --stories. Resnick’s short story, set a thousand years after the superpowers have annihilated each other, uses the aftermath of nuclear war to illustrate the power of myth to capture the imagination; she neatly ties the legend of Camelot together with the more recent JFK mystique to illustrate how a folk tale can endure long after its original tellers are gone. In DuBois’ novel, set in 1972, makes the Crisis the springboard for an edge-of-your-seat murder mystery as the book’s hero, Carl Landry, tries to unmask the truth behind a series of seemingly random untimely deaths among ex-White House officials. Day ranks up there not only with other great AH mystery novels like SS-GB and Fatherland, but also with the best of Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle.

2)The Nazis invade/conquer Britain(SS-GB, Invasion!, Kevin Brownlow’s movie "It Happened Here")

Apropos of SS-GB, that leads me to another premise which has been fruitful soil for AH writers: the notion of the Third Reich invading Britain in 1940 after the Wehrmacht’s conquest of western Europe. Martin Marix Evans’ book Invasion! uses this hypothesis as the cornerstone for a serious exploration of how the British might have defended themselves against a German amphibious assault on the UK and eventually defeated it. Mixed in with Evans’ gripping story of the counterfactual battle between British and German troops for the possession of southern England is a generous dose of real history detailing how Hitler’s generals tried to prepare the German army for an invasion that (thankfully)never took place. (To see a good example of an analytical book about how the Nazis might have carried out a successful invasion, you might want to read the late Kenneth Macksey’s book Invasion: The German Invasion Of England July 1940.)

In SS-GB and the movie "It Happened Here", the authors base their story on the premise of Operation Sealion succeeding in its objective of conquering England. SS-GB is everything that Jo Walton’s Farthing could(and should) have been; Len Deighton’s protagonist, Scotland Yard superintendent Douglas Archer, is a fascinatingly complex figure who tries his best to navigate the ethical minefield that is Nazi-occupied Britain while simultaneously investigating a murder that may or may not be tied to a secret plan to sneak the deposed King George VI to safety in America. Deighton’s depiction of Archer’s attitude towards his German colleagues is an accurate reflection of the moral dilemmas civil servants often had to wrestle with in countries occupied by the Germans during the Second World War.

In "It Happened Here", set in 1944 in a Britain where anti-Nazi partisans equipped by the United States battle German occupation forces and British SS volunteer divisions, the central character-- a former nurse played by Pauline Murray --also has to cope with the moral questions posed by trying to serve the public trust under a regime where lack of trust is encoded into every paragraph of official government policy. Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo, co-directors of the movie, give us a champagne drama on a soda pop budget, showing Murray’s character trying to resume her nursing career only to find out that doing so can only come at the price of setting aside her old apolitical worldview and joining the fascist Immediate Action party which acts as the Nazis’ surrogate on British soil. The consequences of her enlistment in that party, while I won’t go into detail about them here, will stay with you long after the end credits have rolled.

3)The US invades North Vietnam(Chris Bunch’s "Murdering Uncle Ho", Kevin F. Kiley’s "To Go In Boldly Amongst Them")

Oddly enough, alternate histories based on the idea of US troops mounting an invasion of North Vietnam during the Vietnam War aren’t as common as you might expect. While there have been a number of AH writings dealing with the political movement that evolved in protest of the war and a handful of stories depicting how the situation in Vietnam might have brought about larger global conflict, you can practically count on your fingers the number of works of fiction that attempt to seriously explore the notion of an American invasion of North Vietnam and its aftermath.

One of these, "Murdering Uncle Ho", tells the hair-raising story of a group of Special Forces troops fighting to get out of the jungle alive after a covert assignment to liquidate Ho Chi Minh goes hideously awry. As the story unfolds, the narrator-- a platoon leader who was one of the survivors of the ill-fated mission --gives a brief yet harrowing account of how an initially victorious but later bungled invasion of North Vietnam led to the assignment to bump Ho off in a last-ditch attempt to end the Vietnam War before the 1968 presidential elections. I don’t want to give too much away here, but JFK plays a considerable part in the chain of events leading up to the mission to whack Ho.

Another story based on the premise of a US invasion of North Vietnam, "To Go In Boldly Amongst Them", takes a more academic kind of approach to the topic, focusing on the nuts-and-bolts of how such an invasion might have been planned and successfully carried out. A part of the Peter G. Tsouras-edited book Cold War Hot, this piece also deals at length with the planning process leading up to the invasion; incidentally, in one of the story’s early segments there’s a priceless gag about notorious Watergate secretary Rosemary Woods. "Boldly" does an outstanding job of outlining how a successful invasion of North Vietnam might have been pulled off and summarizing the consequences of that invasion.

4)Flying machines are invented in the 19^th century(Allen Steele’s "Riders In The Sky", Howard Waldrop and Steven Utley’s "Custer’s Last Jump")

For some reason, I feel as if ‘Those Magnificent Men In Their Flying Machines’ or ‘Danger Zone’ should be playing in the background while I type this. Anyhow, the notion of powered flight coming into existence before the Wright Brothers made their legendary test run at Kitty Hawk is one of the most intriguing premises in the entire AH genre.

"Riders In The Sky" and "Custer’s Last Jump", both of which I’ve reviewed in previous "Sidewise" articles, take this concept and run with it like Rickey Henderson going for the steal at second base. In fact, "Custer" takes the concept one step further and mixes in the fascinating extra twist of Benjamin Franklin inventing the internal combustion engine. "Custer" also puts an interesting spin(as you may have already guessed by the title) on the Battle of the Little Big Horn by having the Sioux receive air combat instruction from the Confederates and-- I’ll just stop right there before I inadvertently let slip crucial plot details.

"Riders" recasts legendary bank holdup man Jesse James as an airship robber; you might particularly enjoy its unique take on the Northfield, Minnesota shootout that ultimately destroyed James’ gang and sent James himself into hiding. Steele, a Tennessee native who has also lived for a number of years in St. Louis, does a bang-up job (pardon the pun) with his overall characterizations of Jesse, Frank, and the rest of the James gang as well as his depiction of James’ murder at the hands of Frank Howard.

5)The Union brings an early end to the American Civil War(Peter G. Tsouras’ Gettysburg: An Alternate History, Brendan DuBois’ "The High-Water Mark")

These two works do an equally great job with the same premise(an early end to the American Civil War) but do it in vastly different ways. In Tsouras’ book Gettysburg: An Alternate History, the method of choice for exploring this notion is to paint a broad panoramic portrait of how different strategic and tactical decisions by the Union and Confederate armies at the Battle of Gettysburg could have led not only to an earlier Union victory in that engagement but also to a swifter collapse for the Confederate cause. It also deals with how the capture of a key Confederate officer(I won’t say who) inflicts a nearly crippling blow on the Confederate Army’s morale.

Brendan DuBois’ short story "The High-Water Mark" also uses a different Battle of Gettysburg as its launching point; however, in this case the author opts to take a more intimate approach, framing the story as a grunt’s-eye-view account of a Russian peasant soldier’s participation in the epic showdown between the Union and Confederate armies. As the narrative unfolds, we learn that the peasant was in turn part of a larger Russian Imperial expeditionary force dispatched to counter British intervention on the Confederate side following the Trent incident; what happens from there is something you won’t want to miss.

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That just about does it for sublime AH concepts; now it’s time to brave the ridiculous ones. So brace yourself for...

1)A US presidential candidate turns out to be a killer ET(Robert Sheckley’s "Dukakis and the Aliens")

Whenever I read this, I’m very tempted to invoke that famous Nicole Wallace ‘Donnez-moi un break’ quip from Law & Order: Criminal Intent. Some concepts are just too far-fetched to work even in AH stories, and the idea of Michael Dukakis being an extraterrestrial goon in disguise definitely falls in that category. I mean, the guy couldn’t even get worked up about the idea of his wife being raped and murdered, so how can anyone possibly believe he might be capable of working up the kind of bloodlust necessary for a campaign of world conquest? I reviewed this story in further detail in Sidewise, Side Foolish II, so I don’t think I need to reiterate its shortcomings here. I will say, however, that if you’ve never read Robert Sheckley’s work before, this is most definitely NOT the story to start with.

2)Marilyn Monroe’s ghost tries to tempt JFK into committing suicide (Chuq von Rospach’s "Till Death Do Us Part")

I’ve heard von Rospach once got a Hugo Best Fan Writer award; how he earned it I don’t know, but this story couldn’t have done much to help his case. It is six kinds of awful from start to finish. Even taking into account his bedroom transgressions both real and alleged, one would like to think that JFK had somewhat more character than to off himself just for the sake of bedding Marilyn Monroe. And to say the ending is a cheat would be a ridiculous understatement; it’s the final cherry of disappointment on top of a sundae of crummy writing.

3)Joe Kennedy Jr. survives World War II and becomes President of the United States only to wind up killing his brother(Barry N. Malzberg’s "In the Stone House")

Not exactly one of Mr. Malzberg’s shining literary moments-- in fact, frankly most of this story sucks like a Hoover vacuum at full power. This reads more like a Kennedy-hater’s wish fulfillment fantasy than a serious attempt to fashion an alternate timeline; turning Joe Kennedy Jr. into a giggling lunatic is not my idea of good AH or of good storytelling in general. While there’s a slight glimmer of good material in the beginning of the story, what follows from there is a spit in the eye of the AH genre and of sci-fi in general. Why on earth  the Kennedy family hasn’t sued Malzberg is a mystery for greater mindsthan my own to ponder.

4)Lord Nelson betrays England(John W. Mina’s "Vive L’Amiral")

Clearly the author doesn’t know Lord Horatio Nelson all that well, or else he would have had more sense than to try and create a short short based on the notion of Lord Nelson turning into another Benedict Arnold and selling the British fleet out to France. Nelson was the quintessential defender of the Crown during his years in the Royal Navy; it would have been easier to sell the idea of him being a mutant from the Crab Nebula than to try and make readers swallow the idea of him becoming a turncoat.

Though "Vive L’Amiral" does perform a fairly credible job of portraying the Battle of Trafalgar, its characterization of Nelson leaves a lot to be desired. And the author throws in a gratuitous double-cross twist at the end that, while I won’t go into details about it here, further undermines the story’s already highly shaky credibility.

5)Albert Einstein gives up his scientific aspirations to become a violin teacher(Sheila Finch’s "Old Man and C")

Whatever faults Albert Einstein might have had, and he did have a few, lack of drive certainly wasn’t one of them. And yet the author of this bungled attempt to fashion an alternate bio for one of the greatest physicists of the 20^th century would ask us to swallow the incredibly far-fetched idea of him allowing a few early life setbacks to make him resign himself to a less-than- fully satisfying life as a small-town violin instructor. She makes Einstein over from the towering intellect we know and love into a pathetic shell of a man-- and as if that wasn’t enough of an insult to his memory, she does all of this with stilted third-rate prose that would embarrass an eighth-grade composition student. For the love of God, somebody send this woman to a remedial writing class, please!

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And that’ll do it for my third "Sidewise" commentary. If you have any comments on this or my previous two "Sidewise" articles, feel free to e-mail me at ChrisO_01801@yahoo.com or beacon92@hotmail. com; your feedback will be highly appreciated.

The End