Marooned guest: Jonathan Edelstein
Picture courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
Today’s marooned guest on Lavender Island is one of the longest-serving members of the Internet AH community, being an established member of soc.history.what-if back in the days when logging on involved getting a dial-up frying-bacon sound before connection. He’s the author of the acclaimed Malê Rising , which remains one of the few timelines to focus on Africa. He is, without doubt, one of the Elder Statesmen of the online community.
I refer, of course, to Jonathan Edelstein.
Welcome to Lavender Island, Jonathan. You must have seen many changes to the genre over the years. How have the disparate elements of the genre (online discussion forums, published books, magazine content, general awareness in the outside world) changed over the years?
I’d like to say that I’ve seen both the birth and diversification of a genre. The term “alternate history” existed in the early 1990s, as it might not have a generation earlier, and there was already a healthy corpus of novels and stories out there, but not nearly enough for it to be a genre in its own right rather than the domain of a limited number of hobbyists. I remember the arguments about whether alternate history was a subgenre of fantasy or science fiction. I leaned toward fantasy at the time but have since changed my mind; historiography, economics, linguistics, and the social sciences are all useful tools in determining whether an alternate history concept is plausible and how it might progress, and that might be enough to move it to the SF column.
Anyway, it’s certainly a genre now – New York Times bestsellers, imitative works that are derivative of the old masters, popular movies and television series, a Wikipedia article – for better or worse, it’s become a cultural trope. The corpus of works and numbers of active authors are both immeasurably greater than thirty years ago. And possibly the most compelling proof that alternate history has entered the vernacular is that there are now novels and stories where AH is simply the setting rather than the central concept – there are AH detective stories, AH fantasies (such as this , if I may be allowed a moment without shame), and near-future SF that incorporates an alternate history background. When we’ve reached the point where readers can be expected to understand and take an AH setting in stride even when it’s just part of the furniture, it has well and truly become a mass culture concept.
Obviously, there’s good and bad. As previously mentioned, a successful genre inevitably spawns derivative works, and many of these works are not of the highest quality. Lord of the Rings breeds Shannara. And there are also incentives for established authors to pad their resumés with mediocre pot-boilers (most of you will instantly read this as a reference to one particular author, but he’s not the only one). But the growth of the genre also means that there’s more room to explore, more diversity of settings and approaches to history, more of the panorama of possibility that in its pure form is what alternate history is really about. Sturgeon’s Law applies to AH as to everything else, but the more works and the more authors, the greater that top 10 per cent will be.
And on the hobbyist/discussion group level, I remember that 1990s discussion would typically consist of for-real timelines (“1066: Harold Godwinson kicks some Norman ass; 1068: William the Bastard, having recruited a new army, marches for Paris”) or else academic discussions of concepts (“surgeons successfully reattach Jenkins’ ear, what happens next?”) followed by collaborative debate over both the concept and its consequences.
The latter still exists, but the former has evolved into extended works by single authors written in short-story and/or pseudo history-book format. I like to think I played a part in codifying that, but it was really a lot of people, and it generated a consensus in which timelines are judged as much on literary merit as on plausibility and academic rigour. And the shift toward literary merit has also made discussion-board audiences more willing to forgive lapses in rigour – my current project , for instance, would have been roundly torn apart in the 1990s because I’ve caused the extinction of whole subfamilies of Lepidopterae, but these days I can get away with it simply by declaring a “butterfly net.” Tastes change, the ambient literary environment change; the discussion groups change along with them.
Also, there’s a lot less use of time travel, which is an unalloyed good. Fight me.
We now move to your first AH book. What is it, and why have you chosen it?
I’ll go way back in the files for this and pick Lest Darkness Fall, by L Sprague de Camp. It was a trope-maker in many ways, including the focus on technology and culture in driving history, and it can be mined for concepts with every reading. It’s well-written and well-paced, and I’ll forgive the time travel – this was the 1930s, they didn’t know better.
Picture courtesy Amazon.
What about your second AH book?
My second pick is a short story, not a novel (this will not be the only one – I read short fiction much more than I do novels these days, and short stories are often the right length to explore alternate history concepts. It’s also from the 1930s – Murray Leinster’s Sidewise in Time. This is also a trope-maker, but my favourite thing about it is its unabashed portrayal of what I’ve described above as the panorama of possibility. I first read this story when I was about twelve and it blew my mind in ways I distinctly remember. This story, more than anything else, was what got me interested in the alternate history concept in the first place.
Picture courtesy Amazon.
Moving on to your third AH book?
Agent of Byzantium, by Harry Turtledove. I have to include at least one Turtledove, and this is still my favourite of his.
It’s a collection of short stories, thus restraining his tendency towards padding and repetition; it involves an area of history in which he is a genuine expert; it involves technological changes that were entirely possible for the time and which have revolutionary consequences; and it features an engaging and sympathetic character.
Most of all, it doesn’t try to do too much. Basil Argyros’ Byzantium may be the stronger for the inventions that come into play in the stories, but it doesn’t become an all-conquering behemoth, and the divisive aspects of these inventions are also explored. And OK, I love the idea of Muhammad as an Orthodox Christian saint.
Great book, but argh, those colours.
Picture courtesy Amazon.
What have you chosen for your fourth book?
Other Covenants, a collection of Jewish alternate histories edited by Mark Shainblum and Andrea Lobel.
I submitted a story to this anthology and was rejected. All is forgiven, not only because it was a very nice rejection and because the story, which I still consider one of my best, eventually found a home , but because it treats a subject near and dear to my heart and because it has several quality stories and a good variety of approaches to the theme.
Picture courtesy Amazon.
What about your fifth and final AH book? What have you chosen?
Lands of Red and Gold, by Jared Kavanagh. This isn’t a “book” in the traditional sense, of course, or even in the sense of a collection of stories, but it’s an amazing example of what can be done in the discussion group format, and it’s one of the most vividly-imagined and culturally fascinating alternate worlds out there. It’s a lot of work, but the payoff is more than worth it.
Picture courtesy Amazon.
Moving from fiction, you’re allowed one OTL history book. What will you take with you?
A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century, by Barbara Tuchman. [10] This is my go-to for what popular history should be: the grand sweep of an era, treating political, cultural, religious, economic, and environmental factors. The idea of bounding the discussion by the lifetime of a particular person who was involved in each of these historical threads is one I’ve found useful in some of my own writing.
Second place: The King’s Two Bodies, by Ernst Kantorowicz, not only because of what it explores about the creation of political mythology, but also because Kantorowicz is a fairly fascinating historical character in his own right.
One does not live by reading alone. There’s also music. What piece of music from some alternate history would you take?
Dreams of a Martyr, by Giacomo Meyerbeer – a piece from the 1538 Sanhedrin universe (see above) in which Meyerbeer is attracted to Paris by the patronage of the Jewish communal institutions founded during the Napoleonic era, and composes an opera based on the Sol Hachuel incident which occurred in Morocco in 1834.
It’s a more consciously Jewish work than Meyerbeer’s operas in OTL, drawing musical and poetic themes from Sephardic piyyutim (hymns) and the poets of medieval Iberia.
And a luxury item from AH?
A wheel of six-year-old Republic of Vermont cheddar.
Those are all your items. How well do you think you would cope with the isolation on Lavender Island (which tends to last until the next guest arrives).
Isolation for a week or two is easy. Read, explore, swim, contemplate, enjoy the respite from the relentless assault of news and information. Maybe come back with a story.
Discuss this interview Here.
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