By Monroe S. Templeton
Alternate history is a genre defined by a sense of regret. It is the genre where we look at the past, at decisions which led to our present and which are often far beyond our own control, and ask ourselves: “but what if it had gone another way?” We are haunted by the ghosts of the alternative; of mistakes made, of opportunities lost, of spectres of potential. By the ‘what if’ and ‘what could have been’.
This is of course not to say writers of alternate history are sympathetic to these spectres – Robert Harris clearly does not regret the Nazis did not win, after all, and I myself am glad to live in a society where Penguin did not lose the Lady Chatterley Trial. But I believe our instinct to ask and explore the ‘what if’ is born from an intellectual ache in all of us to peek behind the curtains at the consequences of choices made or not made. An attempt to satisfy that craving to understand our present and our dissatisfaction with the choices made that led to it by imposing our own choices on history, by asserting our own agency, and proposing what might have indeed happened otherwise. The genre is, in this sense, about exorcising the ghost and freeing ourselves from our failed mourning.
I Won’t Go To Mars (Or Dance in Strangers’ Cars) is about such an exorcism. A novelette of some 16,000 words, it concerns Isabella Tártago, a young woman with the power to superimpose herself into alternate realities, a power that she uses to unmake the decisions in her life which have caused her pain. But it is also about what running away from the consequences of the choices which are within our own power means, and how we can only overcome our failure to mourn not by asserting control over the chaos of our lives, but rather by embracing the uncertainty of our own futures. Only by confronting what we sought to escape can we rebuild what is lost.
I wrote Mars as the dissertation project for my Master’s Degree. Its impetus was one of reflection on my previous two years of study, where I sought to put into practice the ideas I had been developing over that period of time in my writing, such as in ‘Night-Shade’ (available to read in the SLP anthology Pride & Points of Divergence). A sister story to the novelette, concerning a monk visiting a utopian vineyard on a ring world, ‘Night-Shade’ is a story about a failed mourning in the most literal sense, as the monk has come to retrieve the remains of their dead sister. But it is also the story where the ideas that Mars would explore more thoroughly began to coalesce. In particular, I was attracted to the juxtaposition of the intimate and fantastical, of a human struggle within a grandiose setting, and as I looked beyond ‘Night-Shade’, I felt that alternate history was supremely suitable for this, even if the genre as a whole can often struggle with this sense of intimacy for reasons I will discuss later.
At the time in 2022, there had also been a surge of alternate history within the popular conscious, both on television with programming such as The Man in the High Castle, SS-GB, and For All Mankind, but also the still-recent release of novels like McEwan’s Machines Like Me, Sittenfield’s Rodham, and much of Sea Lion Press’ catalogue. I had an assessment criteria that asked me to also reflect not just on my own writing, but the state of writing in general, and it felt only natural that with this reflective mindset that I would undergo a genre ‘homecoming’ of sorts, alternate history being the subgenre that first gave me the thirst to pursue writing seriously, and which was having its moment in the sun.
With that said, the alternate history of Mars did not come fully formed; rarely do any ideas. The story began as a simple sketch of my morning routine in January 2022, before I was due to visit my friend Martin (author of Presidential) in London. I had been inspired by Annie Proulx’s opening of ‘Brokeback Mountain’ (which came from her collection Close Range, which Martin had recommended to me), in which she describes her protagonist Ennis Del Mar’s opening ritual, and the description of my own morning survives, more or less, as Tártago’s introductory scene. A natural flow seemed to emerge once I moved past my own experience, and around the ~500th word I made the choice to introduce Nicola, a stirring bedmate pestering Tártago for sex. This felt like a natural way to bring conflict into the scene, making it impossible to return to the loneliness of the routine as described up to that point, but instead to contrast it immediately with the unwanted desires that makes the solitude’s absence more pointed. Eventually the train journey would end, and by the time I returned to Portsmouth I had decided to pursue this sketch for my dissertation.
I would arrive at alternate history as I developed the piece further; the next scene slipped into a Soviet Yalta, the Eastern bloc having never fallen but rather somehow maintained itself into the present, Crimea turned into a tourist trap akin to the Ibiza or Mykonos of our world. At first, my alternate history would be that of a world where the Second World War was greatly delayed due to the failure of Nazism in Germany (in a previous article, I rallied against the self-indulgent dystopias of a Nazi victory, and this felt like an ideal way to put my own words into practice) where the social mores of the interwar period carried on indefinitely, delayed somewhat by a conflict shortly before Tártago’s birth in which Colchester was nuked and Britain turned to a far more autocratic regime.
My intention was never to focus squarely on the alternate history – I felt it was important that Tártago be a by-stander, be someone whose awareness of the world was on par with any randomly selected passerby. Often alternate history narratives focus on people who are in a position of privilege when it comes to the divergence and effects, and I feel that it was important for the point of view to be the kind of person alternate history is generally bad at representing, who doesn’t get their story told. While the astronaut Roebuck Albright would wrangle the controls of his spacecraft, Tártago would be engaged in sex work; when we would later hear of him shaking hands with his President, Tártago would be scuttling through the Portsmouth rain. She was not a person who would go to Mars, but someone who struggled to pay rent. This particular notion of juxtaposing the optimism of space programmes against the cynicism of the interpersonal and even social disorder was inspired by Gil Scott-Heron’s spoken word poem, Whitey on the Moon, and particularly how it resonated during the ‘billionaire’s space race’ of 2021. I was also influenced in a similar vein by Octavia Butler’s haunting juxtaposition of a Mars mission and death of an astronaut – itself the death of protagonist Lauren’s hero – against the decay of a dystopian LA in the opening of her novel Parable of the Sower. I wanted to use the effects of the alternate history as a frame and indeed catalyst through which I could push Tártago and Nicola’s toxic relationship to its breaking point.
But those who have read Mars will be aware that this is not the final story. Some may have already guessed, but this was because the alternate history was too grandiose, and Tártago was – quite obviously – too abstracted from it. Little about the setting really impacted her in a way that was meaningful, and the ‘straight’ narrative just wasn’t working. The goals I had for the work left me at a cross-purpose; on one hand, I desired to write alternate history. On the other hand, I wanted to write what is a quite personal, indeed quite autobiographical, piece about a relationship’s death and the transgender identity. At first, these two goals may not seem mutually exclusive, however they are two distinct forms of storytelling, between the sociological and psychological, between one where incentive for characterisation comes from external forces that influence and shape an inner life, versus one which concerns the individual in a personalised struggle.
To illustrate this, consider Robert Harris’ alternate history classic Fatherland: Harris uses the premise of a Nazi victory to inform the nature of the protagonist Detective March, his inner life and his incentives. The central mystery of the novel centres around the success of Generalplan Ost and the Final Solution, two grim conclusions of a Nazi victory, with March unravelling the truth of the latter. Conversely, in this initial stage, the failure of Nazism in Germany, and thus the failure of a Second World War to manifest, did little if anything to inform Tártago’s inner life, her struggle with Nicola, the Mars landing playing on in the background, or really anything beyond the general staging. As I saw it, I could not push the alternate history to the forefront at the expense of the narrative I had been constructing about Tártago and Nicola, as it would have required a major restructure of the story and could eliminate the pound of flesh I wanted to put on the page. At the same time, I did not want to remove the alternate history, even though I accepted that the alternate history I had originally sketched out would not work. I knew the story I wanted to tell and the genre I wanted to tell it in, and I knew that if I failed to save this story, I would have failed as a writer.
It would have been around the summer that I hit this wall, and it was one that I worked a way out of during long walks along Hilsea Shore Path. In a dense island of brick and concrete, one where it was easy to feel crushed by the sheer compression of life, this thin sliver of the coast was a place I felt I could breathe and have the space to think through the narrative and what changes I would be making.
The first was simple but profound – a shift from third to first person. Shifting this perspective moved Mars away from a didactic narrator telling us what Táratgo must be feeling to Tártago herself convey her emotional interiority, which let me get to the point more readily and defined the work as a psychological narrative, moving it away from previously messy ambiguity and towards a greater sense of purpose. And as the story deftly became one of the individual in an interpersonal struggle, this gave me the room to properly address how I could integrate alternate history. I reflected back onto an initial idea I had for the narrative, where Tártago was stuck in a time loop. While I was not especially interested in this by June, what I took away from this reflection was to push more towards a fantastical notion, a temporal strangeness. I did not have to tell a ‘straight’ alternate history, and the genre often does incorporate these more fantastical notions. With this intention in mind, I was inspired by Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Seconds and the Daniels’ film Everything Everywhere All At Once, which both use a reality hopping protagonist to tell a story of rejecting nihilistic self-destruction.
But, like many a queer 20-something, I was also looking at Mark Fisher’s writing, particularly on Derria’s hauntology (as I reference in the introduction) and suicide. For example, in his essay ‘No Longer the Pleasures’, Fisher posits that in the face of the omnipresence of market capitalist dominance, suicide is one true autonomous act that we can make, to walk away from Omelas. To Tártago, switching becomes this opt-out, a pseudo-suicide which allows her to regain autonomy over her own life. However, as readers will be aware, I refute Fisher’s conclusion. While I felt it important that the reader understands the intoxication of switching, why, in her despair, Tártago would succumb to the switch, it was also important to me that it was clear that this does not grant her the desired autonomy, that it is still an ensnarement in the structures that she is running from. Giving up on the ghost doesn't matter if the ghost refuses to give up on you. From here, I circled on the conceit of our personal alternate histories, of the what-ifs of our own lives where had we made decisions things could have gone differently, and from here I felt it naturally that Tártago would instead “superposition into parallel realities,” and explore the what-ifs of her own heart.
Another idea that I sought to explore in this work was that of the liminality of the transgender experience, be this in the pure act of transitioning (though I feel that overly focusing on the transformation of transitioning would lead to writing within the cisgaze), but also the systemic hostility towards transgender rights and existence within my native UK. This liminality is not merely that of existing between two states of being, but also existing in an Othering, beneath a cisgender gaze that defines you as an Uncanny for the crime of exercising bodily autonomy and the violence our cisnormative society inflicts that reminds us that such bodily autonomy is illusionary. It is a sensation that I had explored in ‘Night-Shade’, and one which I wanted to tap into and address more concretely in Mars, and I felt from the beginning that this personalist approach was a perfect way to do so.
Of course, there is still the grander-scope alternate history. During my study, we would have a visiting lecture by Alison Macleod, a former lecturer of my alma mater, who was discussing her recent work Tenderness, concerning Jackie Kennedy and the Lady Chatterley Trial. I was struck in particular by an idea she threw to the room: that without the victory of the publisher Penguin in R vs Penguin, the entire permissive society may have been killed in its infancy, with the liberalisation that Britain underwent and indeed led would have passed at a much later date in a more conservative, potentially more authoritarian society.
Admittedly, I didn’t quite interrogate this idea as thoroughly as I could have, and many of the butterflies would fail to make the final cut. But I found the implications of the trial going the other way very interesting, and that many of the elements – a surviving USSR, Mars mission, the state of transgender rights – to be compatible with the basic conceit of the premise, though in retrospect I do regret those cuts as I think it removes a lot of context for those elements being present (I do suspect I may one day return to this point of divergence and flesh it out much, much further). However, it also, I feel, makes the work unique and adds an important texture atop this concern of a personal alternate history by placing Tártago into a context alien to our own; just how impactful have previous jumps by her ancestors been? What is the impact of an individual decision? Of our individual decisions? And really, how many alternate histories fix their conceit as being about R vs Penguin going the other way, or even interested in such topics as the impact of literature? Not that many.
Rather, alternate histories are obsessed with spectacle, often war. They do not exorcise the ghosts of their regrets, but instead to ennoble them, unintentionally or not. There is a ‘type’ of story that is traditionally told in alternate history, and Mars is not that story – because it is a story about the little person ill-considering their context. It is about the ant instead of the anthill, or the anteater coming to swallow them up. I think a lot about Truffaut and his belief that the French New Wave should be about the dispossessed instead of the classical hero, or Gibson’s belief that Cyberpunk would be about low life contrasted against high tech. And I think, despite Tártago’s obvious superpower, Mars embodies this.
As I write this, I am sitting by the windowsill of my flat in Glasgow, overlooking the grass square. My kitten is chirruping at the birds in the trees; it has been three years to the day since I began writing Mars. And I still think of those questions, about the impact of my own choices and how they will shape the future, and how choices made years before me shape the now. I think about regret, of the ‘failed mourning’ – about how much of these questions are born from the desire for alternatives.
I feel that alternate history is oftentimes a genre that is far more conservative than it needs be, too restrictive over what does and does not constitute inclusion to its canon, or attempts to claim works that fall beyond its scope as its own. As alternate historians we should seek to write beyond a narrow definition of the genre, to embrace the possibilities that writing within it offers – to plunge into murky depths that we may be uncomfortable with and return with something that may scare us.
Otherwise, all we have are the ghosts of our regrets.
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