More About Pesky Butterflies

Guest post by Dale Cozort.

I've heard that early on much of science fiction was clashing ideas, with stories often written to refute the ideas in other stories. I like ideas clashing, being tested. That's happening with my column "Those Pesky Butterflies". SM Stirling weighed in with a comment that pointed to Poul Anderson's concept that time is like tough rubber. You can deform it, but it quickly snaps back to original form. Another commentator pointed to Strange Attractors, which apparently push events toward the forms they take. This article by Tyler Bugg on (Alt)History Inc. argues, among other things, that strictly accounting for butterflies makes it impossible to write time travel or alternate history fiction.

Debates like this can be interesting and informative or they can drag on pointlessly. The big difference: Whether or not someone involved keeps track of common ground areas versus areas of genuine disagreement. With that in mind, I'll try to narrow down areas of genuine disagreement and point out where we're saying the same thing in different ways.

First, the (Alt)History post is right about one thing: If you take the tracing Butterflies to an extreme you give yourself an impossible task as a science fiction writer. You can't trace all of the Butterflies from a point of divergence over decades or centuries and get even an approximation of what the world would be like. I naively tried to do that decades ago for an abortive first novel set in a world where Spain didn't conquer the Aztecs. Months of research and thought (but no words written) later, I realized that tracing all the spreading impacts of the gold and silver flows and flows of people was not just impossible, it was nuts. Undoable. Within five years after a major point of divergence the ripples of change spread so far and the number of decision points where an author has to decide between two almost equally likely courses grows so large that you timeline becomes at best a pale shadow of reality, with a horde of unexamined assumptions that might undermine your scenario if you examined them.

Does that mean you should ignore Butterflies? No. Can you write time travel or alternate history fiction while taking the Butterflies into consideration to a reasonable extent? I think you can, though it makes an author's job harder. A big part of the trick is to understand how societies work and change. If you don't understand how real history works at a deep level, you won't write convincing alternate history. If you're so in love with an "if-only" scenario that you're unwilling to look at the downsides of the changes, you won't write convincing alternate history either.

I also agree with SM Stirling that no hypothesis about how time works can be tested. All we have are opinions and authors should be free to set up their own ideas on how time works. It's certainly acceptable to have a fictional universe where time-travelers can traipse around in the past with no lasting impact. Poul Anderson's rubber snapping back analogy is one way to get there. The "ripples in a pond" analogy also works. Another way is to think of time like a movie or book. All the pages or frames are already there. If someone goes back and scribbles on a few pages or frames, it doesn't change anything outside where they scribbled.

A time structure where nothing significant can be changed works very well. It's logically consistent. No Butterflies need apply.

So where is the disagreement? For me it comes when an author's universe allows big changes--Britain keeps control of the thirteen colonies, for example, or the south wins the US Civil War or the Axis wins World War II--but the author doesn't think through how those big changes affect things at a more personal level.

Every individual human being is incredibly unlikely. When a couple has sex, on average a hundred million sperm compete to fertilize the egg. Only one wins. Let's say we want Donald Trump running for prime minister of British-ruled North America--the result of Britain avoiding or winning the Revolutionary War. What has to happen? (1) His parents have to meet and marry, among tens if not hundreds of millions of people, in spite of all the cultural and economic and social differences between this alternate timeline and real history. How many times in a row would you have to roll sixes to equal how improbable that is? A lot. But even if they meet and marry, they still have to (2) have unprotected sex within the window for young Donald the Egg to get fertilized (two to five days at most). Add rolling another six or two in a row. (3) Then young Donald the Sperm had to beat his hundred million competitors to the egg. That's going to affected by a horde of factors, including the exact timing of the sex and the exact position the couple did the nasty in. A burp that kills the mood for a few seconds, probably equals no Donald. How sixes in row does that add to mix? A lot. Enough to make Donald's chances of existing are so low that as a practical matter it's essentially zero. (4) Then his parents had to name him Donald and he has to not die until time to run and more importantly become famous enough to run. How many more sixes do we have to roll to equal that improbability? Again, quite a few. We may live in a society where everyone is famous for fifteen minutes, but staying famous enough to be considered for national leadership is a one in several million shot.

How many sixes in a row do all of those four steps together represent? At least hundred and probably tens of millions. However, If those four steps were all that had to happen, Donald the prospective Prime Minister might still be at the edge of acceptable. Odd coincidences do sometimes happen. The problem is that his parents had ancestors too, and the number of those ancestors doubles for every generation.

That same set of things (at least the first three) had to happen with his two sets of grandparents, which takes us back to maybe the mid-1920s. Then the four sets of great-grandparents all had to meet, have sex at a time when the same egg was heading down the tube and have the same sperm meet that egg. That takes us back to maybe the 1890s. Go back another generation, to the 1860s and all eight sets of ancestors have to meet and do the nasty on schedule. Another generation takes us to the 1830s and 16 sets of ancestors all getting together and having sex within the right few day window for the right egg to get fertilized. Yet another generation takes us to around 1800 and 32 sets of ancestors. And that's giving each generation thirty years, which is almost certainly too long. If you go back far enough, eventually branches of his ancestry would cross and cut the number of ancestors slightly, but that's rare enough over this kind of time period to be unlikely in the Donald's case.

Add it all up, and roughly 63 sets of couples had to meet each other, in spite of living in a world with a different government and a different economy and different wars and different social patterns and different timing of epidemics. Then, each of those ancestors had to have sex within at most five days of the time they did historically. Then the same sperm out of those hundred million candidates had to get to that egg first in every one of those 63 matings. Otherwise you may have someone related to the Donald, but not the Donald.

Having that kind of luck once is already extremely unlikely. Having it happen at least 63 times over more than 200 years keeps multiplying how unlikely it is. And the likelihood of a historical figure being born goes down dramatically (roughly cut in half) with every generation between the point of divergence and the time that person was born.

At this point you can see why fictional worlds where not just one but multiple historic figures show up hundreds of years after a point of divergence get met with derision among people who have thought this through.

So a fictional universe where big changes can happen but the same people show up is not internally consistent. Does that mean you shouldn't write in that kind of universe? Not necessarily. The (Alt)History post makes a good point when it says that people relate to historical figures and sprinkling them into an alternate history story gives readers a way to relate to the story. Writers sometimes call those historic figures "borrowed landscape". People have heard of Abe Lincoln and Winston Churchill, etc, so they can relate to the characters without the author having to work as hard to establish them.

The point of fiction is mainly to write a good story and I can excuse a certain amount of logical inconsistency if it makes the story possible or makes it better. As I mentioned in my earlier post, I put Rome in All Timelines Lead to Rome in spite of knowing that Rome probably wouldn't have become a factor given a point of divergence thousands of years before Rome existed.

At the same time, having historical characters appear in roles they couldn't possibly be around for gives readers another suspension of disbelief hurdle to overcome and I know some readers who will not just put a book down when they encounter out of place historical characters, they'll throw it down and tell their friends why the book sucks.

And if you can avoid spreading obviously illogical notions like the idea of historic figures being around hundreds or thousands of years after your point of divergence, why not go to the added effort to create your own characters that people will identify with?

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Dale Cozort is a novelist, editor of Point of Divergence, the alternate history APA, and a long-term Chicago area fan and writer. Check out his website, blog, Facebook and Twitter profiles.

Those Pesky Butterflies

Guest post of Dale Cozort.

If you visit the AH forums, you'll quickly figure out that alternate history has its own vocabulary. ASB. OTL, ATL and Butterflies are terms that get tossed around a lot.

The Butterflies bit comes from weather forecasting and refers to the claim that weather systems are so interconnected that a butterfly in Mongolia can cause a cascade of events that leads to a hurricane in the North Atlantic.

What does that have to do with Alternate History? Alternate history butterfly advocates claim that history is similarly connected, that major changes, or even minor ones, from real history anywhere in the world would rapidly cascade, making the resulting world unrecognizable within a surprisingly short time.

For example, if someone went back in time and stepped on a bug, the impact on history might appear to be trivial. The bug dies a few hours or days earlier than it would have and the world goes on without much change. Don't count on that though. Let's say that in reality the bug dies an hour after the time traveler would have stepped on it. No big deal, right? Well, actually it could be a big deal. As a matter of fact, the odds are pretty good that it would eventually be a big deal, though it might take a thousand or ten thousand or even a million years before that's apparent.

Whenever it dies, the bug's body would be recycled, feeding some kind of predator or scavenger. The molecules of that bug's body get recycled time and time again throughout the rest of the life of the planet, but if it died an hour earlier and in a slightly different location it goes along a different set of pathways. How many recyclings does it take before the bug's molecules are or aren't part of something important, like the sperm or egg of the ancestral wolf that either did or didn't kill one of Columbus's remote ancestors? It probably takes thousands of recyclings, but given enough time those molecules will probably be involved in something crucial.

Also, the bug has a more direct impact. Something ate the bug or didn't eat it. Maybe a predator doesn't survive long enough to mate as a result of not eating the bug--it continues foraging and something bigger eats it. Or maybe it survives and has offspring whether or not it eats the bug, but at subtly different times--which, given the low likelihood of any given sperm being the one that fertilizes the egg, means that it has different offspring depending on whether or not the time-traveler stepped on the bug. Whatever ate the bug has a different life trajectory, probably chasing and eating different prey at different times than it did in real history. Each of those chases starts a new cascade of changes from historical reality. So does anything the bug's descendants and the predator's descendants do. Actually changes start cascading from two sources, not one, because something probably ate the bug that wouldn't have without the time traveler and something didn't eat the bug that otherwise would have.

The time traveler walks across a field, with every step starting a cascade of changes from his reality. Some of those changes may damp out, though the odds are against it. Some may be apparent only at the microscopic level for years or decades or even hundreds of years before changing something noticeable.

It's even possible that the time traveler's changes don't become noticeable until after his own time. That's a nightmare scenario: Go back a million years from 2016, take a walk in a field and come back to a seemingly unchanged world of 2016 where the microscopic changes you made eventually, long after your departure date. cause a nuclear war that wouldn't have happened if you hadn't gone back.

The structure of how things happened in reality is fragile. A point of divergence starts a cascade of changes, probably unpredictable beyond a decade or two at the most. Unfortunately, that takes a lot of interesting questions out of the realm of "hard" alternate history.

What would Columbus have found if most of the big North America animals hadn't died off at the end of the ice age? An interesting question, but all those animals existing over thousands of years would have almost certainly butterflied Columbus out of existence. They would probably take  Spain and even a recognizable Europe with him. Too many fragile events went into the existence of that Europe. A Europe would undoubtedly exist and probably parallel the historic one in some ways, but with different languages and genetics.

Butterflies make it difficult to get to a lot of interesting questions. What if there had been a natural sea level Panama canal? No Columbus. No Spain. Probably not the same human species, though they might look a lot like us. The natural Panama canal closed several million years ago, changing climate across the world. If it hadn't closed, our ancestors might not have survived. Even if they survived, they wouldn't have gone along exactly the same path we did and genetic drift would mean that they probably couldn't produce fertile offspring with us after so many years.

That spoils a lot of alternate history (and time travel) doesn't it? How can we get to the interesting questions that butterflies make impossible? As a science fiction writer I don't let butterflies kill a good story. I get as much as I can right and ignore the logical holes butterflies rip in the story.

I did that to some extent in my novel All Timelines Lead to Rome. In All Timelines, primitive humans similar to the Flores Hobbits survived on a large Mediterranean island long enough that when Neolithic settlers reached the island around ten thousand years ago, those settlers decided to enslave the primitives rather than killing them off. So far, so good. The next step requires hand-waving though. The primitive humans remain slaves but don't spread through the ancient world and don't change the processes that led to the Roman Empire. Rome spreads them throughout the empire and remodels the empire around them, using them as crosses between slaves and pets. It's an interesting idea, but the chances of Rome creating a recognizably Roman Empire with a point of divergence over seven thousand years before the founding of Rome are slim.

I introduced a way to get around the butterflies in my novel Snapshot. Extraterrestrials with godlike powers make backups "snapshots" of Earth continents for tens of millions of years. Each Snapshot is an exact copy of a continent at some time in history. The Snapshots are each in a separate but interconnected universe. How does that get around butterflies? If you want a North America with Indians and big ice age animals, just time the Snapshot right. I'm currently writing stories set in a Snapshot taken of North America including Mexico in 1519, in the middle of the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs. The Snapshot cut off Spanish West Indies and Mexico from the Old World. Result: independent conquistador kingdoms in Mexico, which are hard to realistically get any other way. Future stories may involve a Snapshot of Europe taken in the summer of 1942--Europe isolated from the rest of the world and forced to cope with the Nazis on their own, Rainforest Australia, Africa before the dinosaurs went extinct and enough others that I can't do them all justice to in a lifetime.

The bottom line: Butterflies are a real issue if you're serious about your alternate history. They make some types of questions unrealistic. At the same time, we shouldn't allowed them to keep interesting questions from being explored, especially if they lead to interesting story settings.

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Dale Cozort is a novelist, editor of Point of Divergence, the alternate history APA, and a long-term Chicago area fan and writer. Check out his website, blog, Facebook and Twitter profiles.

R.I.P. Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury passed away today at the age of 91.  For those who do not know, Bradbury was a celebrated American fantasy, horror, science fiction, and mystery writer. Best known for his dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 (1953) and for the science fiction stories gathered together as The Martian Chronicles (1950) and The Illustrated Man (1951).  Bradbury also contributed to the alternate history genre with his short story "A Sound of Thunder" a classic work of science fiction that truly encapsulated how the butterfly effect works.

I read Bradbury's classic Fahrenheit 451 when I was a teenager and it had an effect on me much like Orwell's 1984.  Speculative fiction lost one of the greats today.  Mr. Bradbury, you will be missed.

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Matt Mitrovich is the founder and editor of Alternate History Weekly Update, a volunteer editor for the Alt Hist magazine and a contributor to Just Below the Law. One of his short stories will be published in the upcoming Echelon Press anthology, Once Upon a Clockwork Tale (2013). When not writing he works as an attorney in the state of Illinois and enjoys life with his beautiful wife Alana.

Points of Divergence 3: The Butterfly Effect

In previous posts in this series, I talked about the common elements of what we think of as alternate history, and how divergence extended over a long period of time can cause the story to be regarded as science fiction instead.

There is another type of setup for alternate timelines that relies on yet a different dynamic. Although the end result is technically a diverged (alternate) history, the way we arrive at it is along a path considered very science-fictional. I am speaking here of the random causality known in the vernacular as “the butterfly effect.”

Stories that use this technique to develop an alternate history are almost without exception thought of as strictly science fiction. 'Alternate history' is a label usually denied them, although in terms of end point achieved, that is precisely what they are.

Let's pick the butterfly apart a little, shall we?

Butterfly Effect Defined

This term refers to something in chaos theory called sensitive dependence on initial conditions. This means that what a later state looks like depends on how things were at the start. Making a small change in those initial conditions can result in a big change later on.

The term “butterfly effect” comes from the meteorological work of Edward Lorenz: if a butterfly flaps its wings here, the consequences of that initial breeze might snowball to alter the path of a tornado elsewhere, or trigger a storm later somewhere else. A more practical example might be to imagine placing a ball at the top of a grassy hill. The ball might roll off in any one of many directions, depending on slight differences in its initial position. It's not as evocative to call this “the rolling ball effect”, though, so we'll stick with Butterfly Effect (BE) for now.

Time Travel and the BE

In fiction, the BE is most often associated with the concept of time travel. Someone, usually the protagonist, will go back in time to attempt to alter something in the present. The result is that they change some relatively tiny thing in the past, and this results in some huge (and usually unwanted) change in the present. This has been portrayed very effectively in the movie The Butterfly Effect (Ashton Kutcher, 2004), in which the protagonist tries to “redo” parts of his past but keeps creating unintended consequences. We see this again in Run Lola Run, where tiny events like bumping into someone instead of passing them by have major consequences for the future.


A variation on this theme is that the person goes back in time and accidentally alters something that affects their future. One of the earliest short stories to play with this concept was Ray Bradbury's A Sound of Thunder, in which a time traveler on safari kills a butterfly, which creates undesirable consequences in his future. A fascinating read, and you can view the story online here.

And yet here we must note that time travel and the BE variations on it are traditionally thought of as being science fiction. If the story contains time travel, any alternate histories that come into play become overshadowed by the sci-fi umbrella that covers the whole tale. This may be a common way to classify such stories, but it completely obscures the presence of alternate history in the story itself – and that, to my thinking, is often one of the most intriguing parts of these “time travel” narratives.

“What If” and the BE

The alt-history connection becomes more clear when the story focuses on the “what if” of a minor event simply causing significantly different outcomes down the line. Here, the Butterfly Effect offers a lot of possibilities simply as a background dynamic leading to variant futures.

This kind of BE does not need someone from a future timeline to intervene and alter events. Individual agency is not an essential condition to create this alternity. Rather, events simply “randomly” evolve into this consequence or that one, based on chance and a near-infinite number of variables. The entire process rests on slight variations at “starting point A,” which is the necessary precursor to “end point Z”.

We can picture the results of this kind of small-cause, big-consequence causality with one intriguing example. Take, if you will, a world that looks very much like our own up until, oh, let's say the time the dinosaurs died out. Let's say that world-changing event occurred as it did in OTL. After that, as we know, primitive man evolved into the dominant species on this globe.

For that evolution to succeed, countless details came together in ways that promoted that possibility: from natural selection in reproduction, to a certain level of fertility, the ability to cope with environmental challenges, and much much more.

But what if tiny points of causality conspired against the evolution of homo sapiens? What if Australopithicines were disadvantaged in some way, and some bird was smarter than historically was the case: could small proto-human populations, large intelligent bird populations, and other environmental factors (disease, climate, whathaveyou) lead to a world where an avian species became the dominant race? In this timeline, half-intelligent ape-men might have been banished to the jungles and eventually hunted to extinction by tool-using bird-men.

Change enough of the variables along the way and you change the outcomes. And anyone would call our example science fiction. But is it?


Events Unfolding From Causes

The BE suggests that the proper definition of an alternate history is a history told about the big consequences unfolding from small, identifiable causes. It doesn't matter if time travel is involved, or if the large consequences that result are "key historical events" (per earlier discussion) or not. The result is nonetheless alternate history. In fact, it is probably more that than it is science fiction, and certainly has nothing to do with science, technology, or man in the future, if you consider those elements important to your sci-fi.

At the heart of the BE-type story is causality unfolding chaotically (as it always does) in a way that leads to different results than those we are familiar with. This “organically evolving” world can carry us down any one of a million merry paths, to a timeline and world that is Not The World As We Know It. Unequivocally, an alternate history.

Because of the sense of “improbability” here (for this process does not heed the momentum of known historical events), such stories are often classified into the “could be sf” camp, where anything speculative goes. But what, exactly, is improbable about the scenario I just described? Given enough supporting detail, a good author could spin you a perfectly convincing tale that illustrates the demise of proto-man and the rise of avis sapiens. Or any other outcome, really, given a miniscule point of divergence and enough time to see random, chaotic consequences unfold.

This Butterfly Effect, with a long time-frame divergence, is, I think, the third major way in which alternate timelines evolve: through the “natural” outcomes of myriad tiny shifts in causation.

In my next and last post in this series, I'll look at one last approach to creating alternate history. It is a method that has little to do with event outcomes or causality as we normally think of them, and can produce the most far-fetched worlds of all.




Deborah Teramis Christian is a science fiction and fantasy novelist with an alternate history work in progress. You can read more blog posts about this and related subjects at her website, Notes From the Lizard Lair.