Best of 2013

Another year of exploring the multiverse has come to an end. Its time once again to recap what we learned this year and pick out the best alternate history of the year.

Just a reminder, there really is nothing scientific about my selections. The works we honor could have been published this year or decades ago. I only honor subjects we covered this year. Some are picked using my own subjective opinion, while others are based on the most page views received. So without further ado (I'm on a budget so I was only able to buy a little ado this year) I bring you the BEST OF 2013!

Best Book

Out of all the books we reviewed this year, I felt the best reviewed book on The Update had to be Dominion by CJ Sansom, reviewed by Alison Morton. This alternate WWII book which features a Britain that made peace with Germany in 1940, won this year's Sidewise Award and was described by Alison as being "an exciting, but moving account of people who become heroic but remain very human."

Best Anthology

We didn't review many anthologies this year, but my vote has to go to Alt Hist 5 edited by Mark Lord. Although there were a couple stories you could skip, it was still another good entry for the only alternate history periodical on the Internet. Please continue to support original alternate history by either buying a copy or sending your own submission.

Best Short Story

I was split on this decision, so the honor for this year's short story goes to "43*" by Jeff Greenfield and "Adrift on the Sea of Rains" by Ian Sales. "43*" gets a shout out for the dubious distinction of being reviewed not once, but twice, on this blog. "Adrift", meanwhile, in my humble opinion should have won the Sidewise short form award. Go check this out.

Best Comic

The honor for this distinction has to go to Before Watchmen, which was reviewed in its entirety through a series of posts by longtime contributor Sean Korsgaard. Check out Sean's introduction to his reviews and read all of his opinions on the prequel to Watchmen using this tag.

Best Film

Although it might be debatable whether this is actually alternate history, Django Unchained gets the nod for best film this year. This revenge fantasy set in the Old South caused quite a bit a controversy, but it was rather entertaining movie. I certainly recommend it.

Best Television Series

I was surprised by how much traffic this review brought in this year so I could think of nothing better than Samurai 7 to pick as the best television series. Reviewed by Sean Korsgaard, who called it the "best anime I've ever seen" is a steampunk-retelling of Seven Samurai. So if you would like to see some steampunk not set in Victorian England, this is a good pick for you.

Best Map

Daniel Bensen submitted a lot of great maps to The Update, but his American Nation-States has to be the best:

Read the article to find out how the map was made.

Best Article

With so many alternate histories about whether the Nazis won World War II or whether the Confederacy won the American Civil War, it is refreshing to see a truly original what if like Ben Ronning's Alternate History and Superheroes. In this article Ben describes the comic industry's experimentation with counterfactuals over the years. Go and check it out now!

Best Interview

This was a difficult category to pick a winner, but if I had to pick the single most interesting person I interviewed this year it was podcaster Jordan Harbour. Host of Twilight Histories and the upcoming Battles of Rome podcast, Jordan has continued to produce great content and is a true fan of our favorite genre. More importantly, he is an interesting guy who has led a full life. Learn more by reading my interview and checking out his podcasts.

Best Contributor

This year's best contributor goes to...everyone who submitted a guest post to The Update in 2013. Yeah, maybe this is a cop out, but this year has been full of excellent guest posts. From contest entries, to author promotions and fan posts, I couldn't have provided such great contest all by myself. Thank you to everyone who submitted this year. I look forward to seeing more work from you, and hopefully new faces as well, in 2014.

Well that's it for year 2013. See you all next year when on January 6th, The Update returns to a full schedule.

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Matt Mitrovich is the founder and editor of Alternate History Weekly Update and a blogger on Amazing Stories. His new short story "Road Trip" can be found in Forbidden Future: A Time Travel Anthology. When not writing he works as an attorney, enjoys life with his beautiful wife Alana and prepares for the inevitable zombie apocalypse. You can follow him on Facebook or Twitter.

Review: 43* by Jeff Greenfield

Guest post by Kieran Colfer.

It was a familiar refrain from the political left all the way though the Bush years and ever since: "Everything would be different if only Gore had won the election". There would be no budget deficit, no Iraq War, everyone would still love the USA and we'd be well on our way to solving global warming. There have been many fantasies about this, including even a Saturday Night Live skit by Al Gore himself, but here it finally gets the full book treatment.

Normally the "President Gore" fantasies begin with the election night count itself, but here the author does something a bit cleverer, he moves the butterfly back a year to a little boy being washed up on a Florida beach. As a result, the Florida election turnout is slightly different enough to not need a recount, and so Al Gore returns to the White House as The Man rather then The-Man-In-Waiting. This isn't the only butterfly in the book, however, the second one blows the whole "9/11 was as bad as things can get" idea right out of the water. This particular twist sends subsequent events off on a direction totally different from our timeline - or does it?

The book itself takes a little bit of time to get used to - most alternative history books you read are about events and characters long since consigned to the pages of history, but here you are reading about events that you have lived though (or "would live through" maybe?), so it was slightly strange seeing characters and saying "ah yeah, I remember him".  One nice touch here is in the battle between the recently defeated Republican power players and the newly elected Gore -  a lot of the quotes here will look very familiar, as they are quotes used by the Republicans after Obama won in the 2008 election. For those who look back on the Post-Bush days through rose-tinted glasses and imagine a Gore presidency as a halcyon time of bi-partisan co-operation, this book may come as a rude awakening, but politics was never a gentleman's game, and we see this here in spades.

My one big issue with this book is the ending - in the context of the book itself, it's a good place to end, but it's a bit abrupt, you're left hanging wondering what will happen next. Will a second order counterfactual kick in for Iraq, or wont it? This is a book that begs for a sequel, although it is a clever move by the author to leave the public wanting more.

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Kieran Colfer is a member of the AH Weekly Update Review Team.

Review: 43* by Jeff Greenfield

Guest post by Andrew Schneider.

Few historical events have presented themselves so quickly as fodder for the game of “What If?” as the 2000 U.S. presidential election.  The race between George W. Bush and Al Gore is often oversimplified as having come down to a single vote. Had one Supreme Court justice switched his or her ruling and allowed the vote counting in Florida to continue, the argument goes, Gore would have ultimately carried the state and won the White House.

In his introduction to 43*, political commentator Jeff Greenfield (author of the Sidewise Award nominated Then Everything Changed) observes a Gore win in the Supreme Court wouldn’t have ended the matter. Florida’s Republican-run legislature was prepared to award the state’s votes to Bush in any event.  Instead, Greenfield gives Gore the win by using an earlier point of divergence. He imagines a different outcome to the case of Elián González, the six-year-old Cuban boy rescued from drowning off the coast of Fort Lauderdale on Thanksgiving 1999.

In our world, Elián was the sole survivor of an escape from Cuba involving his mother and her lover.  A prolonged struggle ensued over whether Elián would be returned to his father in Cuba. It ended only in June 2000, when federal agents seized Elián from the home of his Miami relatives. If Florida’s historically Republican-leaning Cuban-American community needed a reason to vote against the Democratic Vice President, they had one now, and they came out in force on Election Day.

Greenfield posits that if Elián’s mother had lived, and her lover had drowned, the last thing she would have wanted would have been to stay in Little Havana with the family of her estranged ex-husband. Had mother and son returned to Cuba of their own accord, he suggests, enough Cuban-Americans would have sat out the 2000 election to give Gore a clean win.

What happens next in this world, though, is anything but the dream scenario that many Gore partisans held to during the eight years George W. Bush occupied the White House. Like Bill Clinton throughout his last six years in office, President Gore is faced with Republican majorities in both houses of Congress.  Gore, lacking his predecessor’s charm or flexibility, finds much of his domestic agenda stymied -- particularly his environmental and clean energy policies.

The crux of 43* is how President Gore would have faced the threat of al Qaeda.  The Clinton Administration took years to come to grips with how serious a danger Osama bin Laden represented. But by the time Bill Clinton left office, his national security team classed bin Laden as the single greatest threat to the security of the United States. Those individuals went to great lengths to try to convince the incoming George W. Bush Administration that this was the case and were ignored.

A President Gore, Greenfield argues, would have taken the threat of bin Laden much more seriously. But Gore’s national security bureaucracy would have been hampered by the same lack of interagency communication that Bush’s did.  The result in 43* is that the 9/11 hijackers still make it into the U.S. undetected. And by having Gore take steps to make air travel more efficient -- steps that George W. Bush ended up taking towards the end of his own time in office – 9/11 turns into an even bigger catastrophe than it was in our own history.

One of the great strengths of 43* is that the author interviewed many individuals who worked closely with Gore and likely would have been part of his transition team, if not his actual administration. Greenfield says in his epilogue that these conversations gave him insight into how Gore would have behaved in office. The results are convincing to anyone who followed Gore as vice president and as a presidential candidate.

What is less than convincing is the degree of influence Greenfield attributes to the neoconservatives over not just the Republican opposition but American public opinion.  In 43*, as in our world, the neoconservatives blame Saddam Hussein for the 9/11 attacks. Soon, the public is clamoring for an invasion of Iraq. President Gore’s determination to keep the focus of US military efforts on Afghanistan and rooting out al Qaeda wind up costing him dearly.

Numerous accounts of the Bush Administration, notably Barton Gellman’s Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency, have debunked the notion that the neocons drove U.S. foreign and security policy going into the Iraq War. The views of Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and others gained prominence not because of the neocons themselves but because those views happened to coincide with those of Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. It was these two, with their influence over the Bush White House, that led the U.S. to all but abandon the Afghan War and build the dubious case for war with Iraq. Subtract Cheney and Rumsfeld, replace George W. Bush with Al Gore, and the neocons would have had as little influence shaping US policy as they had either under Clinton or under the first President Bush.

It’s tempting to imagine that much of the pain of the past dozen years might have been avoided with a simple change of leadership.  Greenfield’s account reminds us that history is rarely that simple. But it’s possible to overdo things. Trying to argue that the Iraq War was as unavoidable for a President Gore as deeper involvement in the Vietnam War was for, say, a President Kennedy who survived assassination in 1963, is perhaps a step too far. Greenfield’s reluctance to stray too far from the script of our own history is perhaps the greatest weakness of 43*.

Had Al Gore actually won the presidency in 2000, he would now have been out of power for only four to eight years. A more plausible account of a Gore presidency will require some greater distance on events for reflection.

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Andrew Schneider is the business news reporter for KUHF Houston Public Radio. 

Weekly Update #72

Editor's Note

Got our first visitors from Sri Lanka and Ethiopia. Welcome! I really need to post a new reader map soon.

Thanks to all of our fans who provide feedback to our posts. While hearing your opinion is great, the best way to thank me and all the other contributors to AHWU is to share our work through social media. If you follow us on Twitter, please RT. If you like us on Facebook, hit share on one of our articles. Help spread the word and keep this window to the multiverse alive.

Turns out YouTube actually keeps track of the videos I post on this blog. If you want to find all of the videos we link to on Weekly Update, then subscribe to our feed on YouTube. Perhaps one day we will even have our own channel...

And now the news...

43* by Jeff Greenfield

Big news last week was the publication of a new short story by columnist and author Jeff Greenfield (Then Everything Changed). The story is called 43* and asks a "what if" many liberals I assume ask themselves a lot: what if Gore won the presidency in 2000? What if Gore was president during 9/11? What would he have done differently? You can read excerpts from the short story at Yahoo and at the publisher's website. You can also watch Jeff discuss his story on msnbc.

ABC Developing Steampunk Drama Gaslight

ABC made waves last month among speculative historians by announcing a steampunk detective series featuring Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. ABC has done it again when last week they announced a new steampunk tv series called Gaslight. It has been described as a "soapy drama set in a modern steampunk San Francisco where three rival families battle each other for control." The show will be produced by Ian Sander and Kim Moses of Sander/Moses Productions and written by Michael Cooney. Not everyone, however, is pleased by this announcement. Margaret Lyons over at Vulture said "Oh, lord. A steampunk San Francisco? Can't we just let Burning Man be Burning Man?"

Nevertheless, I am excited, especially if this alternative San Francisco actually has a different history. What do you think?

Guns of Icarus Online Ready for Pre-Order

Guns of Icarus, the online dirigible combat game, is now available for pre-order through Steam. Set in a steampunk inspired, post-apocalyptic wasteland, this team-based co-op game allows you to play as one of three character classes: Captain, Gunner and Engineer. The Captain steers the ship, the gunner keeps enemies at bay and the engineer keeps the ship flying. There are a variety of missions to perform and air pirates are as thick as flies to keep things exciting. Good news, there will be no subscription fee, just a one-off retail purchase with in-game monetization elements.

Guns of Icarus will launch October 29th. You can check out the trailer below:

More on NBC's Revolution

By now most of you read Seb's excellent review of Revolution (spoiler alert: he didn't like it). Despite Seb's review, Revolution actually did well on its opening day. It had the best debut of any new drama in the last three years according to Pat Hauldren at Examiner.com who believes the SF/drama elements and the strong female lead have made it a hit among audiences.

Nevertheless, like Seb, most reviews of the show have been poor with some reviewers either lambasting the ridiculous premise, bad acting or reminding everyone that S.M. Stirling wrote a better story with the same premise. Yet Charlie Jane Anders at io9 still remains optimistic about the show pointing out the excellent actors in the show, the potential medieval action sequences and a Lost-esque plot development.

Is Revolution worth another chance? Episode 2 premiers tonight, will you be watching?

Things to do

Are you bored living in the real world? Take the next wormhole to one of these fine destinations:

Oct 5 to Oct 7: OctopodiCon 2012 in Oklahoma City, OK.

Oct 12 to Nov 3: The Starkweather Arts Center's upcoming exhibit "The Steampunk Show" in Romeo, MI. And they are still looking for submissions.

Nov 30 to Dec 2: TeslaCon: A Trip to the Moon at Middleton, WI.

Links to the Multiverse

Articles

An Alternate History: If the RIAA Was Innovative by Alan Cross.

Do Black People Really Read This Stuff? II: Science Fiction, Steamfunk & More! by Balogun at Chronicles of Harriet.

Imagining an alternate Big East history where Miami, Virginia Tech and BC never left by Jeff King at The Uconnblog.

Steampunking Fairytales by Kaitlin Branch at Steamed!

Books

1635: The Papal Stakes by Eric Flint Snippet 43.

New Novel Adapted From Rush's Steampunk Album by Kevin J. Anderson at Huffington Post.

Review of Alt Hist 4 done by Kelly Jensen at SFcrowsnest.

Steampunk III: Steampunk Revolution Coming 12/1/2012 by Book News Desk at Talk Books World.

This week's New York Times Bestsellers (September 17th) by Pat's Fantasy Hotlist.

Comics

The Arrival: graphic introduction to steampunk ARG by Cory Doctorow at boingboing.

COMIC REVIEW: The Manhattan Projects, Vol.1 – Science Bad TP by theforgottengeek at Geek Syndicate.

Games

Without clues, Dishonored was too difficult by Geoffrey Tim at Lazygamer.

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Matt Mitrovich is the founder and editor of Alternate History Weekly Update, a volunteer editor for Alt Hist and a contributor to Just Below the Law. His fiction can be found at Echelon Press, Jake's Monthly and his own writing blog. When not writing he works as an attorney and enjoys life with his beautiful wife Alana.