perelgut@utcsrgv.UUCP (Stephen Perelgut) (08/25/83)
All this talk of alternate worlds has got me re-reading "Paratime" by
H. Beam Piper. There is a very good introduction by John Carr, and the
stories are concerned with what happens when small (or large) changes
occur in what we consider "history". For example, what if Benedict Arnold
is shot in Quebec and this results in the 1776 revolution failing. And this
in turn doesn't exist to excite European political sentiments which means that
there is no French revolution and thus Napolean remains a gunnery officer.
Other interesting stories have been written by Robert Silverberg (Spanish
Armada wins); Harry Harrison (American Revolution fails); L. Neil Smith
(American revolution succeeds but results in a Libertarian state); Fletcher
Pratt (deals more with how to change history).
--
Stephen Perelgut Computer Systems Research Group University of Toronto
{ linus, ihnp4, allegra, floyd }!utcsrgv!perelgutbrucec@tekecs.UUCP (Bruce Cohen) (08/27/83)
Odd coincidence, that Stephen Perelgut just re-read "Paratime", since I finished re-reading it just before starting reading this series of articles last week. Anyway ... as long as we're talking about history-changing stories. I thought I'd mention a few more of the ones that I consider classics. First and foremost in my mind, though I haven't even seen a copy in years, is Ward Moore's "Bring the Jubilee," about a secret plot to change the history of Confederate-dominated 20th Century America. The thing that makes this story so good is the detail in the differences in history, and the care with which the characters are developed in the context of those differences. On a somewhat less literary plane, there is the trilogy by Richard Meredith: "At the Narrow Passage," "No Brother, No Friend," and (oops, forgot the title of the other one). This is the story of a man recruited from a time-line similar to ours into a war between two forces moving into the human-inhabited time lines from opposite sides. These books (as Meredith acknowledges) are indebted to Piper's Paratime stories for much of the concept of the (para)physics of timelines. Where Piper seems to have had an idea of a linear segment of timelines (or maybe a ray, it's not clear), Meredith's idea is an infinite line, with timelines stretching off to the Temporal East and West (political analogy may have been intended). He also wrote a story called "Run, Come See Jerusalem," which I have not read, but from the cover blurb, it would seem to be about trying to erase the history of a future theocracy. Hmm ... there are a lot more than I though when I started. OK, I'll mention one more: a short novel called "Two Dooms," by Cyril Kornbluth, written shortly before he died. It investigates the question of what would have happened if the Axis powers had won the Second World War, and may have been the first story to do that [you'll correct me if that surmise is wrong]. I'm fairly sure that it was part of the inspiration for "The Man in the High Castle" which was published 5 years later. Bruce Cohen UUCP: ...!teklabs!tekecs!brucec CSNET: tekecs!brucec@tektronix ARPA: tekecs!brucec.tektronix@rand-relay
edj@mspiggy (Ed Johns) (08/31/83)
by L. Sprague de Camp, which involves (as I recall) a New York Attorney who is transported into an alternate universe where the Vikings colonized North America. Like almost all of de Camp's stuff it is good fun.