How to use Point of Departure in an Alternative History Novel

Guest review by Graeme Shimmin.

If you're writing an alternative history story and your readers say they find it implausible, this article shows how to make them suspend their disbelief by using a clear Point of Departure.

A True Story

My novel A Kill in the Morning is set in an alternate 1955. In the alternate world, the death of Winston Churchill in 1941 led to the Second World War ending in a negotiated peace in 1943. In the book the Nazis are still in power in Germany.

When it was being reviewed, I had a comment from a reader that went something like this:

Duh! First you say it's 1955, and then you say that Hitler is in power. Hitler died in 1945, dummy!

What's an alternate history author to do?

I could have just dismissed the criticism. Obviously the reviewer didn't get it. What a moron! But then I thought, if he didn't get it, maybe other people wouldn't get it either. I realised the problem was me. I was the moron.

I hadn't made the Point of Departure clear.

What's a Point of Departure?

A Point of Departure (or divergence) is a single incident that's not the same in the alternative world as it was in the real world. Because of that one alteration, more and more things change, creating the alternative history.

The Point of Departure starts with an actual historical event, such as Napoléon losing the Battle of Waterloo. It replaces that event with another, like Napoléon winning the Battle of Waterloo.

That point of departure is the starting point for building a different world. The alternative history is the answer to the question, ‘What if?’ As in, 'What if Napoléon won the Battle of Waterloo?'

Stamping Butterflies

The changes to real history caused by the Point of Departure should be predictable, at least to start with. Later, what are called 'butterflies' can come in.

The term butterflies is a reference to the famous 'butterfly effect', where a small change in one place can result in huge and unpredictable differences later.

The Butterfly Effect is a name coined by Edward Lorenz, who used the example of a butterfly flapping its wings causing a hurricane several weeks later.

So, if Napoléon winning the Battle of Waterloo means fifty years later Brazil is a world power, that's a 'butterfly'.

Example Points of Departure

• The Germans successfully invade Great Britain in 1940. SS-GB by Len Deighton
• Giuseppe Zangara assassinates President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933. The Man in the High Castle by Phillip K Dick
• Reinhard Heydrich is not assassinated in 1942. Fatherland by Robert Harris
• Victorian inventor Charles Babbage makes his mechanical computer work. The Difference Engine by William Gibson

The Alternate Timeline

Once we decide our Point of Departure we have to decide how history diverged afterwards, up to the time of the story. We have to research a timeline.

For example, when I wrote A Kill in the Morning my timeline involved spending time researching World War Two. I produced an alternative timeline starting in 1941 and extending to the time of the novel, 1955, which you can see as an appendix to the novel.

Who cares?

You could just say 'Who cares why the Roman Empire never collapsed. I just want to write about Roman gladiators fighting on the moon!'

But remember:

• The only way to sell a lot of books is to make your readers fall in love with your book.
• To fall in love, they have to suspend disbelief.
• To convince them to suspend disbelief, your alternate world needs to be as convincing as a real historical setting.
• One thing that helps to convince is a clear Point of Departure.

Yes, but how?

So how do we make the point of departure clear?

Spell out the Point of Departure twice in the first chapter.

It's simple really: the explanation has to be up front in the novel, preferably in the first few pages. If the reader is confused they will never get to your great description on page fifty.

I found readers only started to 'get' my novel when I mentioned the Point of Departure twice in the first chapter. People do tend to skim a bit sometimes and you can't be sure they will see your explanation unless you refer to it more than once.

Summary

So, we've learnt:

• The Point of Departure is a single incident where history diverged.
• A clear explanation of the Point of Departure helps you make your alternate history story grab the reader.
• The Point of Departure should be clearly explained in the first chapter of your novel.

* * *

Graeme Shimmin was born in Manchester, UK and studied Physics at Durham University. His successful consultancy career enabled him to retire at 35 to an island off Donegal, Ireland and start writing. He has since returned to Manchester and completed an MA in Creative Writing. The inspiration for A Kill in the Morning - his prizewinning first novel - came from Robert Harris' alternate history novel, Fatherland, and a passion for classic spy fiction.

Review: "Hitler's War" by Harry Turtledove

Review - Hitler's War

Hitler's War is my first consciously read Harry Turtledove novel, and I approached it with comparably high expectations. Turtledove has reached a point in writing alternate histories where some seem to consider him the Grand Master of the genre, and there's certainly some justification in such a stance. His successful novels have made the genre a bit more mainstream - and I say that as a compliment - and have given the works of other authors more well-deserved exposure. Having said that, Hitler's War comes with an interesting premise: the war starts early, and it does so over the Czech issues solved IRL in the Munich Agreement. But does it hold up to my expectations? Well, find out.

Points of Divergence 4: Different Rules

In earlier installments of this series, I talked about common factors in alternate histories, how the long tail of divergence can also create an alternative setting, and the implications of the butterfly effect.

In this post I want to look at the factor that may lead to the most far-out alternatives of all: changes in the fundamental laws of physics or properties we believe are “givens.” When they are different from those in our own timeline, where do they take us?

First, though, it is necessary to distinguish between parallel and alternate realities.

Parallel Versus Alternate Realities

Alternate histories stem from some kind of divergence from OTL. Whether that is a singular point, or the cumulative impact of many factors, these divergences can be identified. Prior to the first, the world was the same as we know it.


In a parallel history, there is no comparable POD. Rather, the world – although it may look similar to ours – is fundamentally different in some significant manner. Its earlier history was never an exact analog of OTL to begin with. Example of this are worlds and setting where, say, the speed of light is different than our own, the gravitational constant is different (see Raft, by Stephen Baxter), or sentient biology has always been ammonia-breathing or silicon based. This parallel world may exist alongside our and be reachable from ours, but it is not a divergence from ours.



Where the Two Meet

And yet, there are some cases where the basic principles of how the universe works can be different than we think, and yet result in a world that is an an alternate, not a parallel, to our own.

The crucial factor here is that the core difference between worlds must be a constant that we haven't yet defined in OTL. We must hold that element for an “unknown” or a “doubtful.”It is something we have not (yet) quantified, and cannot – in this timeline – state how, or even if, it functions.

If this is the case, then this leaves open the possibility that that very same factor may actually exist in our own world as well. In that case, we then experience our world and the other as two alternatives, not two parallels.

Da Vinci

To make this more clear, let me give a hypothetical historical example. If Leonardo da Vinci had walked through a portal into 2011, he may have thought he entered a parallel universe: a world that has evolved different from his own because its laws of nature are different. People talk to each other at far distances, send messages and pictures through the air, fly overhead.

If he does not explain these things as magic, he will at least believe they rely upon principles unknown in his time. At the most extreme, he may wonder if the laws of gravity and sound function differently here.

If Leonardo were right on the last point, he would be in a parallel universe. But as it happens, he is right on the second: these are principles not yet known or identified in his time, that shape the world he is visiting. Aerodynamcs, telecommunications, electromagnetic theory and more: these are things we have quantified after Leonardo's time. They existed then too: but untested, unquantifed and effectively unknown.

When Leonardo goes home, he may attempt to invent a flying machine. Although he won't nail the theory of it, he is fumbling towards principles that will alter future events and lives in his timeline.



“The Rules Are Different”

When the underlying rules appear different between World A and World B, then either you have a parallel universe (where they are different), or you have an alternate world where folks have not yet figured out how those rules work.

This latter fact can lead to wildly divergent worlds in alternate histories.

Let's say, for instance, that in World A “psychic powers” are poo-pooed. Some people believe in them, some do not; the scientific evidence is inconclusive. But in World B, such powers have always been with mankind. Instead of doubting and disbelieving early psychic experiences, people took them for granted and wished to cultivate them. Because of this concentrated interest, principles and properties of these abilities began to be identified in the Classical Age; by the Middle Ages, some universities concentrated studies in this area. By the Age of Reason, focused research began to uncover scientific principles that explained the what and how of these abilities and made it possible for them to be more readily developed and used.

The societies and cultures that evolve in a world like this will be potentially very different from those in World A, where science and the public do not generally believe such powers even exist.

To make this a more plausible fictional scenario, there might also be a genetic reason why people on World B are more actively and consistently psionic than those on World A. In this case, a genetic mutation would be one long-tail point of divergence that contributes to the other changes described here. But the path of “psionics as applied art and science” could be developed simply by uncovering its principles far earlier than has occurred in OTL.

Magic

Another example of the “rules are different” approach is when magic is assumed to be real. Quite often stories of this sort are classified as fantasy because of the presence of magic, but depending on the historicity of the rest of the tale, some of these might be better classified as alternate histories.

Unlike psychic abilities, which at least have been scientifically studied in OTL, magic as a practice has received little examination by western science. At the same time – as with those who claim psychic experiences – those who practice magic believe in its efficacy. It is possible that there is a set of principles in World A (as yet undiscovered by the mainstream) that account for the what and how of magic.

In World B, where these principles were discovered long ago, and have been refined ever since, the existence of magic will not be questioned. Indeed, its practice and use will be a known aspect of “how the world works.” Its overall impact will be a function of how common the phenomenon is, and constraints on its use, but its existence alone is sufficient to cause some divergence in timelines.

Some books that have strong history-based settings and include magic could be deemed alternate histories, although they are not typically classified that way in book marketing. One example is Randall Garrett's Lord Darcy series, in which royal investigator Darcy uses magic and detective skills to investigate crimes in an analog to 19th century England. (Except that in this Plantagenet England, the Plantagenets have never left the throne.)

Another interesting example is Poul Anderson's classic Operation Chaos, marketed as “science fiction” (again, presumably because he describes a world unlike any we know, as I wrote about earlier). The premise of this book is a fascinating use of magic and alternate history:

In an alternate world, where the existence of God has been scientifically proven and magic has been harnessed for the practical needs of the adept by the degaussing of cold iron, the United States is part of an alternate Second World War in which the enemy is not Germany but a resurgent Islamic Caliphate, which has invaded the United States. Werewolf Steven Matuchek and witch Virginia meet on a military mission to stop the invading Islamic army from unleashing a secret superweapon, a genie released from a bottle in which it had been sealed by King Solomon. Together, they fight against the demon and incidentally fall in love with each other.

Rules may be different because of scientifically documented principles, or simply because an author has declared that things have been this way since the misty past. Much of the writing in paranormal genres falls into this category, with the premise that this is just like our world except that ghosts/vampires/demons/[fill in the blank] are real. Most of these stories do not concern themselves with historical events in the way that alternate histories do. Some, though, are noteworthy for that very reason: Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's Count St Germain series features an undying vampire who time and again is close to the heart of power and intrigue in many different eras of historical events – many of which are impacted by his actions.

The more believable alt histories seem to depict societies and events with a strong resemblance to OTL. So even where “the rules are different”, events and plausibility may not stray too far afield from known history. Ultimately, though, if a story depends on “rules being different” for its kick-off into divergence, this permits a great deal of variance at the actual point of story telling. No matter how far out the tale may seem, if its divergence stems from “different rules”, this too qualifies as an alternate history.


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.

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.

Points of Divergence 2: The Long Tail

In my last post I talked about the most common characteristics of alternate history: a singular, major point of divergence, a story examining either that change or events relatively close to it in time, key historical figures in play in the story, other events outside the POD remaining pretty similar to how we know them in our own timeline, and so on.

Yet this prototypical “hinge point of change” story is not the only way that alternate histories come about. There is another approach to creating an alt-history milieu, and it is as likely to lead to a story being classified as “science fiction”, as it is “alternate history.”

I am speaking here of stories based upon “change over time.” For the sake of discussion I’ll narrow this down to only two types here.

One is “big change, long tail of divergence.” This is a story in which the narrative of events takes place at considerable remove from the POD itself. In fact, I think the point in time chosen for the narrative viewpoint probably has a much greater effect on how we perceive alt-hist stories than is generally recognized. I’ll call this the “point of narrative focus,” or PON for short (and yes, I’m dropping the F – PONF? Really? - because I have a limit to how silly I can bear my acronyms to sound. ;)

The reason PON matters is because the nature of the alternate history story shifts the more time passes between POD and narrative focal point. In Harris’ Fatherland, for instance, the story is set in 1964, relatively recently out of the shadow of WWII. It has a certain piquant flavor precisely because of this juxtaposition to the nexus of change (a World War that Hitler won).

What, though, if the major shift in timeline is, say, the fact that Napoleon won at Waterloo? This is all well and good if, as in “mainstream” alternate history, the tale focuses on “what happens next”. This very scenario was one of the earliest alternate histories ever published: Geoffrey’s “History of the Universal Monarchy: Napoleon And The Conquest Of The World” appeared in 1836, imagining victory over Russia, a successful invasion of England, and unification of the world under Napoleon’s rule.

What, though, if the PON is set long after a POD? In the Napoleon example, what happens over, say, 150 years of unfolding European history? Is there ever even a First World War, much less a Second? Perhaps the question of Hitler victorious never arises, because that line of causality simply never appears.

Instead, we must determine how the course of history ran instead. This is a happy field of engagement for many alt-history fans, as various discussions and alt-history gaming around the internet will show. My point, though, in analyzing this from my writer’s perspective, is that where the world ends up, when the PON is far removed from the point of divergence, might be extremely different than how it was in our own timeline. Or at least different in unsettling ways. ("What do you mean, America doesn't exist?")

And here we come to the significant underlying factor: the more the constructed history is at variance with what we “know” to be true, the more alien, even "fictional", the alternate timeline feels.

What We Know to Be True

One of the issues I discussed in my last post is the assumption that aside from the major point of divergence (and closely related events), pretty much everything else in the fictional world remains the same as it is in ours. In short, if it’s not affected by the POD directly, it general it is assumed not to have changed at all.

We can’t sustain this fiction over a long span of time, however. The more years pass, the more one change affects other events, and the consequences of causality trickle out over the temporal landscape. Many of these subsequent variations will be inconsequential, but many will not. Like I noted above: if Napoleon had united Europe, would there ever have been World Wars later on? The answer to that is as likely to be “no” as “yes.” Add to this technology and social changes over time, and we end up with a world that might just be unrecognizable to the 21st century person rooted in OTL.

At that point, we start to think, “hey, this isn’t just a “what-if” exercise about one event. It’s a whole ‘nother world!” And at that point, it begins to feel like science fiction.

The second way to reach this "science fiction" conclusion is along a similarly divergent path, but takes as its starting point many small, instead of one big, PODs. Here, multiple PODs happen in a cluster, or in sequence. They need not be very large events, but cumulatively derail “progress as we know it”. Columbus being spurned by the court of Spain, thus not funding his voyage of discovery¹, followed by Pasteur (or peers) not discovering vaccines, followed by religious strictures that squelched democratic movements in Europe – hey, it could happen. What would an under- or late-developed America, unmanaged epidemic diseases and lingering monarchial systems portend in Europe? Many factors of change, no one of which might be weighty enough for a traditional alt history – but all in all, the end result is:

This is not the world as we ever imagined it would be.

The Science Fiction Tipping Point

In this manner, long-tail divergence violates several of the unspoken precepts of “mainstream” alternate history. There is one or (the longer the timeline) more PODs; key historical figures are likely to not exist, the father down the resulting timeline we go; the PON is distant from the event, and the precept that we should have an otherwise-unaltered, recognizable world is blown sky-high.

The result can be a masterwork like Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Years of Rice and Salt. The book is a thought-provoking treatment of what kind of world might exist if the plague had wiped out Europe in the 14th century, and Muslim and Chinese cultures had become the dominant forces in the world instead. It covers a span from the 15th to the late 20th century, and has been praised for its evocation of cultures shaped by forces markedly other than our own western Judeo-Christian historical background.

What is noteworthy to me is that this book was widely adopted in specifically science fiction circles. It was regarded, yes, as an alternate history, but one of such “scope” – because of the timeline involved and provocative cultural questions raised – that it was somehow elevated out of the ranks of mere alt history and up to the level of winning the Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel in 2003, and being nominated for the Hugo, the Arthur C. Clarke, and the British Science Fiction awards in that same year.

The book was praised by reviewers as "epic science fiction" (the St. Louis Dispatch) and the product of "a scientifically informed imagination" (New York Times Book Review) - always important, and expected, in a work of science fiction. The moral here? Perhaps it is, “wander far enough afield in your chain of logical consequences, and even otherwise die-hard science fiction fans will enjoy your alt-history, deeming it to be science fiction instead.”

But that doesn’t make an alternate history not an alternate history. It just seems to cast it into the ballpark of wider appeal.

In my next post I’ll talk about another pathway into the realm of alternate history that is tricky to pull off in a convincing manner, and which also attracts the “science fiction” label like flies to honey.

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1. World-shattering as the failure to discover America might seem to Americans, I would argue that this continent would simply be ‘discovered’ later, by someone not Columbus, and so its lack of discovery in the late 15th century might not be as world-altering as some would assert.


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.