When last I wrote here, I had presented the steps a writer had to take to craft a well thought out re-creation of a historical period in any fiction written by that person.  I detailed how said writer could go about researching the chosen period and bringing those details to the piece, making the story grounded in a very real past.

This time around, I'm telling you how to ignore all that and just throw the damn setting at the wall to shatter like fine crystal, then re-assemble it piece by piece with chewing gum while sitting in a wind tunnel with a blindfold over your eyes, and produce something both strange and wondrous  that sort of resembles what it was at first.

Alternate history, also know as counterfactual history, is a fiction that imagines that the past is not the one we remember, although it's one that could have happened.  This is a genre that has been coming into its own during the last decade, although examples of it have been in print since  as far back as 1832.  Among the writers who have imagined alternate pasts have been Harry Turtledove, Mike Resnick, Robert Harris, Philip K. Dick, Noel Coward and Winston Churchill.  Among some of the more popular alternatives imagined have been a Nazi victory in World War Two, a Confederate victory in the Civil War, and a Roman Empire that never fell.

In addition to the basics involved in how to write a decent alternate history story, or AltHis (as it shall be referred to hereafter), this article will pay special attention to how a writer of Beatles fiction can best put these skills to use.  While some may argue that almost any piece of fanfic may be a de facto AltHis piece, wherein the Beatles meet someone in the past that they never encountered (usually an extension of the author), we work here on the assumption that the piece to be written is a reflection of a more radical departure from the facts as we remember them.

1) Propose a "What If?" Scenario

The first step is to start with the basic scenario.  While all writers do this as part of the writing process, there is also the step for the AltHis writer of asking how history could be different.  The best way to do this is to ask a basic question that begins with "What if...?"  This may sound rather simplistic, but what you are doing here is giving your scenario the comfort test; if you ask this question and think about it for a few minutes, then find that the possible answer doesn't make you comfortable, you probably have a scenario that you're not likely to pursue with all of your gifts and therefore should think of another one to use.

In asking this question, keep in mind that there are three basic levels of likelihood for a change to have been made in history that most such questions asked will fall under:

a) The Possible:  This is a proposed change to history that was very likely to have happened had things not gone the other way, based on the available evidence at hand.  A good example is Al Gore winning the 2000 US Presidential election; how that could have happened has already been argued over ad nauseam.

b) The Probable:  This is a proposed change to history that would have needed a little help to have turned out differently, but could still have happened because the likelihood was in the realm of possibility.  An example of this is Napoleon keeping his empire, which would have required a lot of good generalship and avoiding of some fundamental mistakes, but which could have been done.

c) The Long Shot:  This is a proposed change that would have needed a lot of help and some luck to come about, but still is likely within reason.  An example of this is Caesar failing to conquer Gaul, which would have required Jupiter and the rest of the gods to have really had it in for him, but still is not an impossibility.

As an example, let's look at a writer who wanted to do an AltHis Paul story who then asked herself,  "What if Cromwell's Republic never fell?"  After some thought, realizing that she didn't think a Puritanical England would be something she could write about comfortably, especially considering what happened to most entertainers under the Roundheads, she then asks,  "What if the Roman Empire continued on?"  Feeling a lot more comfortable with that proposition as a writer, she has something to go on now, to the next step,

2)  Study Your History Well

Admittedly, I did in the beginning suggest that you could ignore the facts.  What's actually happening in an AltHis is not the ignoring of the past, but the altering of it.  And in order to change the past successfully, you must understand it well enough to be able to alter it in such a way that you can make the reader accept it as being possible.  (Even some of the worst examples of this in the genre do manage to do their homework; Harry Turtledove's WORLDWAR series has aliens from a 1950's B-Movie dropping in on World War II, which by itself is a silly idea, but is kept from sinking under its own weight by Dr. Turtledove's extensive study of the major personalities and forces of the 1940s, allowing his human characters both historic and fictitious to react in a well grounded manner to a ridiculous premise.)

As far as accomplishing this, everything I said in my earlier piece applies here as well.  Once you have this under your belt, you can then move to the next step,

3) Find a Point of Divergence

What makes an AltHis is that what we remember of the past has been changed.  Often, this change starts with a single event, sometimes a great one like the outcome of a battle or a small one like a successful first date.  This is known as the point of divergence, the point at which history takes a different course. 

Settling on a point of divergence for your work happens at the very beginning of plotting the story.  Once we've asked "What if...?" then the next question should be "So how did that come about?"  How deeply you need to answer this question depends on whether you take one of these two types of divergences:

a) The recent past:  Your story might involve a divergence from history that occurs during the story itself, or shortly before the story begins.  A good example of such a story is "Over There" by Mike Resnick.  The story begins with Theodore Roosevelt presenting Woodrow Wilson with his proposal to re-form the Rough Riders to fight for America during World War I, which did happen in 1917, and in the first paragraphs Roosevelt coerces the President to authorize its formation, then follows Roosevelt and his volunteers to their ride over the trenches to their destiny.

b) The prequel:  In such a story, the point of divergence occurred well before the story begins, and we see the effects of the change many years later.  A good example of this is Esther Friesner's story "Jane's Fighting Ships," where the point of divergence is in the past, Napoleon's conquest of England, but the story looks at how this affected the life of Jane Austen years after the change.

The level of detail required from you as far as determining how such a divergence comes about depends on how essential it is for the story you are writing.  Obviously, a piece where the point of divergence is in the recent past requires a great deal of thought, as it will be essential to the narrative you are presenting.  A story where the point of divergence is in the prequel may not require as much thought, depending on the focus of the story and how essential this is to the tale.

Going back to our example, our writer may be setting her story in the year Anno Romanarum 2715, looking at the fate of the musically gifted Iacob Saul Brittaniarum; how the Roman Empire survived long enough for this version of Paul McCartney to be born may not be material to the story unless it is essential to the plot (although a brief mention in passing may mollify the serious history buffs among her readers).  But, what is essential for this or any AltHis to proceed is the next step,

4) Plot Out the Changes

Once you've determined that history is going to change from a set point, the next thing to be done is to trace the effects of such a change.  Much like throwing a rock on a still pond, such changes leave ripples on the surface; it's in determining this effect after choosing a point of divergence that the true work begins on a counterfactual.

The amount of work you must do is in inverse proportion to whether you chose a point of divergence in the recent past or the prequel.  If the past is changing as you write, there's not much plotting you have to do before writing the story, but if it occurred before the story began, you have to set down the changes as they are relevant to your story.  A good example of this is the Philip K. Dick classic, The Man in the High Castle,  where Dick concentrated on what life in Axis-occupied San Francisco was like as the characters experienced it between hits of dope and readings of the I-Ching.  Other than mentioning his point of divergence, FDR's assassination in 1932, he presents only those elements in his alternate 1962 that would be experienced and dealt with by his characters; because he didn't have to re-fight the entirety of the war for his novel, such details were not essential for him to work on.  (If he had done such work, it never made it into the final book, so there's the assumption that those details that were not essential were never sweated over by him, and therefore you need not knock yourself out either unless you have a compulsive masochistic streak.)

Going back to our writer and Iacob Saul Brittaniarum, for her purposes all she needs is a sense of what life would be like for her character's social strata in Brittania, maybe a few details about life in Roma and Terra Nova across the Mare Atlanticae, and what type of music her character might perform.  An emperor's list for the last thousand years or a listing of all the legions in the Empire and who leads their cohorts, on the other hand, would be pointless unless they were essential to the story.

A major caveat must be given here:  The level of detail you bring to your piece will dictate to a large extent the length of your work.  A novel, it need not be mentioned, will per force contain far more details of such alternatives than a short story; thus, while Len Deighton's novel SS-GB and Hilary Bailey's short story "The Fall of Frenchy Steiner" deal with the same scenario, England under Nazi rule, Deighton has a lot more space to devote attention to the details of such a condition.  But in both works, the characters do the same thing, interact with their world while accomplishing their immediate goals, which brings us to the next step,

5) Don’t Forget the Story

You've gone to great lengths to examine your counterfactual history, and you've taken great pains to get every little detail set, and you even have a full notebook of changes over the years from the point of divergence between our history and your AltHis world's.

But if the story you have is not worth telling, all the work you put into the details won't be worth a thing.

Keep remembering that first and foremost, as a writer of fiction, you are trying to tell a good story.  There have been a few AltHis works out there where the counterfactuals proposed were more important to the writers than the actual plot (case in point, Gibson and Sterling's The Difference Engine), and unless you're using the story as a flimsy excuse to discus your views on history like Edward Bellamy, you owe your readers something more.  It's assumed that before now, you had a story idea that would be worth telling in such a "What if...?" scenario; if your idea could just as easily been told in a straight historical setting, you might be dividing your effort between two projects which would not be serving your purpose well.

As to our example, our writer of Iacob Saul's problems starts to look at her research and realize that she can't simply have him be a folk singer; that would seem to be just as easily set in our world as that one, and would make all the work she'd done pointless, for if he were just a folk singer in our history she'd have written the damn story by now. She looks back at her notes, though, not willing to admit she's wasted her time, and realizes that if Iacob Saul Brittaniarum were not a freeman (assuming that her never-ending Roman Empire maintained its institution of slavery), then there might be a story there to justify all that work...

The Beatles as AltHis Heroes

Using the above as an aid, one can see that there were many opportunities in the lives of the Beatles for things to have turned out differently around which you could build a whole story.  Referring back to our three levels of AltHis one could explore with the Beatles as characters, such a story could be as follows:

The Probable:  One could talk about John Lennon having a deep conversation with Syd Barrett, who was recording his first album with his band Pink Floyd, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, just down the hall at Abbey Road at the time Sergeant Pepper was being laid down.  In fact, the only thing to keep us from assuming that such a thing didn't actually happen is that there's no record of it having occurred.

The Possible:  John and Syd do some work on each other's album, with John doing vocals and some guitar on "The Gnome" and "Flaming" while Syd does some work overlaying a lead guitar rift during the orchestrations on "A Day in the Life" and vocals on "For the Benefit of Mr. Kite."  Admittedly, Syd would probably have to be less into LSD for this to have happened, but having a few less "friends" slip Syd something in his tea would not be unlikely.

The Long Shot:  John and Syd change bands.  For this to happen, the "Pepper" sessions would have had to been as disastrous as the "Get Back" ones were a few years later, and Roger Waters more likely to dump Syd from Pink Floyd at this time then he would have been a few years on, but again as later history would show it's not unreasonable to make such a leap.

In addition to the above, in many ways the Beatles make very good characters for writers in the AltHis genre not trying to do a straight Beatles story.  Because their every move was extensively documented, they serve as good indicators at any age in their lives as to how different the world they are used in is to ours.  And the use of historic personages as characters whose point of view we follow in AltHis is a common literary trick in the genre, as seen in Brian M. Thomsen's use of Samuel Clemens in "Bloodstained Ground" to show how Custer's victory at Little Big Horn would have turned out years later.  In fact, writers who may want to deal with changes whereby the Beatles never became musicians at all would be justified in doing so if the AltHis scenario so demanded it.  It's tempting to say that most such uses would show just how harsh a world the writer imagined if the Fab Four never sang in it, but as anyone who deals with AltHis knows, all things are possible...

SUGGESTED READINGS

For writers who are interested in this genre, a few books other than the ones alluded to above are recommended:

Dozois, Gardner, and Stanley Schmidt (eds.), Roads Not Taken, New York: Del Rey, 1998

A collection of short stories that appeared before in other (better) AltHis compilations, this book has the advantage of (a) still being in print, and (b) being a sort of "best of" collection of AltHis stories.  Consider this recommendation as the equivalent of recommending the CD 1 to someone who's never heard of the Beatles; there's lots more good stuff out there than just this, but it's a decent start.

Hite, Kenneth, Craig Neumeier and Michael S. Schiffer, GURPS Alternate Earths, Austin: Steve Jackson Games, 1996; and

Hite, Neumeier and Schiffer, GURPS Alternate Earths 2, Austin: Steve Jackson Games, 1999 

While both of these books were written as supplements to the Generic Universal Role Playing System (GURPS) game, a casual reader can ignore references in the books to game mechanics and appreciate these very detailed examples of thorough examinations of alternate histories, serving as great examples as to how to go about plotting out changes from a point of divergence.  In addition to examining such standard scenarios as the Nazis conquering the world and the failure of the American Revolution, these books also examine some little-considered situations, such as the Vikings sacking Constantinople and Nikola Tesla marrying J. P. Morgan’s daughter.

Cowley, Robert (ed), What If?, New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1999

Cowley (ed), What If? 2, New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2001

Extrapolated from an article that had originally appeared in Military History Quarterly  Vol. 10, No. 3, these collections of essays by historians and writers with an interest in history (most notably Caleb Carr) are a good examination of AltHis scenarios by professionals, the equivalent of having physicists and chemists writing SF about life on other worlds.  And as the historians chosen here are good writers, the work as a whole is quite readable.  William H. McNeill’s examination in volume 2 of how history would have changed had Pizarro not brought potatoes back to Europe is especially recommended.

Ferguson, Niall (ed.), Virtual History, London: Picador, 1997

An in-depth historical analysis of the process of composing counterfactual history, this is very academic and a little dry, not really meant for the general public.  However, Ferguson's long introduction makes some very good points about the nature of counterfactual scenario building and its history as a serious field of study, which for the devoted AltHis writer offers some essential insights.

James Ryan has been on the verge of actually being recognized as a writer in the past; who knows, someday it may happen.... His work has appeared in such places as Dragon magazine, Lacunae, the Urbanite, the New York Times, and some of the better men's room walls across the state of New York. Until he gets the chance to follow the program for disenfranchised neurotic writers, he's doing the regular job and grad school schtick. His wife Susan and son Jamie just nod and smile when he starts to rant, which, all said, makes things that much easier.