Rewriting History for Your Entertainment

Guest post by Brooke Johnson.

In 1882, Chroniker City did not exist. There was no known conspiracy to start a war between the British Empire and the French. There was no Guild of Engineers. There were no floating warships, no overland war machines, no taking of Calais, no battle of Amiens. There was no Chroniker University, no clockwork engineer named Petra Wade.

But I’m not writing about our world—not as it was, anyway.

History is a vast playground for the writer willing to delve into it, rich with the rise and fall of empires, conflict and tension between nations, numerous wars and battles ripe for the picking, political leaders both good and evil, and a variety of cultures spread across every possible geographical landscape, stretching back to the beginning of recorded time. With millions of stories hidden in the depths of the past, there is no limit to the number of novels you could write, whether those stories are true to history as we know it or mere speculation based on what little historical information we can find on a subject.

And altering that history opens up even more potential for story fodder. You can unravel the very fabric of the past and shift the threads to your will, unfolding a tapestry of endless possibilities. Change one thing in our history, and you have the opportunity to create a slightly different world from our own. Change several things, and it could be unrecognizable.

We writers of alternate history have the coveted key to the time machine and the means to change the course of the future. Whether that means rewriting the victors of World War II, changing the tragic fate of a historical legend, or building a city of inventors off the coast of Wales, we get to imagine how the world might be different if only history had taken a different course. We get to change the rules, and it’s up to us to see just how far that path takes us into the unknown, into the untraveled and untested waters of a different time.

What would happen if a man did build a technologically advanced city and then founded a guild of engineers to run it? What course would modern technology take? How quickly would it advance compared to our own time? Now, what would happen if a man rose to power in that city, a man with a vision for a different kind of future? What if he had the tools to see it done? What would it take to start a war between two countries already in conflict over international affairs? What would the First World War have looked like on the front lines if it had taken place thirty years sooner, with the hyper-advanced technology of the late Victorians?

How easy it is to change the course of history.

All it took was an idea—a man and his vision for the future—and by extrapolating on that idea, by exploring the consequences and asking what if, a story emerged.

But my work doesn’t end there. Writing alternate history comes with its own quirks and challenges, especially for those of us who strive for authenticity. Despite the differences in my alternate worlds, I try to include as much truth and fact as can be managed so that the story feels real. I may have changed history, but it’s still our world—a different one, to be sure, but similar enough to be familiar.

And that leads to one very important thing: RESEARCH. Lots and lots of it.

From the style of British military uniforms to the intricacies of clockwork mechanics; the street layout of a small port town to the operation of early telephones; storm patterns and shipping routes and the time of a sunrise in the early days of June—that much remains the same.

Tapping into that realism makes for some very detailed Google searches (bless you, internet) and lots of combing through historical records, maps, images, and other documents to find what I need to know to bring that authenticity to the story. Sometimes, I run into a problem—yeah, that airship flight I thought would take just a few hours to complete actually takes ten hours if I use the maximum recorded speed of dirigible flight around that time in our history—which means I just have to get a little more creative in order to make the story work within the confines of my historical rules.

Sometimes, that means fudging the details or rewriting another facet of history to fit the story. Sometimes, it means revising the story to fit history. But at the end of the day, writing with real world history, changing it, making it my own… there’s no greater feeling than figuring out how to marry fiction and reality in a way that serves both the story and the history I’ve chosen to include.

My job is to create that bridge, and hopefully tell an entertaining story in the process.

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Brooke Johnson is a stay-at-home mom and tea-loving author. As the jack-of-all-trades bard of the family, she journeys through life with her husband, daughter, and dog. She currently resides in Northwest Arkansas but hopes one day to live somewhere a bit more mountainous.

New Releases 8/9/16

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Hardcovers

Eterna and Omega by Leanna Renee Hieber

Leanna Renee Hieber's gaslamp fantasy series continues and the action ramps up in Eterna and Omega.

In New York City, fearing the dangers of the Eterna Compound--supposedly the key to immortality--Clara Templeton buries information vital to its creation. The ghost of her clandestine lover is desperate to tell her she is wrong, but though she is a clairvoyant, she cannot hear him.

In London, Harold Spire plans to send his team of assassins, magicians, mediums, and other rogue talents to New York City, in an attempt to obtain Eterna for Her Royal Majesty, Queen Victoria. He stays behind to help Scotland Yard track down a network of body snatchers and occultists, but he'll miss his second-in-command, Rose Everhart, whose gentle exterior masks a steel spine.

Rose's skepticism about the supernatural has been shattered since she joined Spire's Omega Branch. Meeting Clara is like looking into a strange mirror: both women are orphans, each is concealing a paranormal ability, and each has a powerful and attractive guardian who has secrets of his own.

The hidden occult power that menaces both England and America continues to grow. Far from being dangerous, Eterna may hold the key to humanity's salvation.

The Last Days of New Paris by China Miéville

A thriller of war that never was—of survival in an impossible city—of surreal cataclysm. In The Last Days of New Paris, China Miéville entwines true historical events and people with his daring, uniquely imaginative brand of fiction, reconfiguring history and art into something new.

“Beauty will be convulsive. . . .”

1941. In the chaos of wartime Marseille, American engineer—and occult disciple—Jack Parsons stumbles onto a clandestine anti-Nazi group, including Surrealist theorist André Breton. In the strange games of the dissident diplomats, exiled revolutionaries, and avant-garde artists, Parsons finds and channels hope. But what he unwittingly unleashes is the power of dreams and nightmares, changing the war and the world forever.

1950. A lone Surrealist fighter, Thibaut, walks a new, hallucinogenic Paris, where Nazis and the Resistance are trapped in unending conflict, and the streets are stalked by living images and texts—and by the forces of Hell. To escape the city, he must join forces with Sam, an American photographer intent on recording the ruins, and make common cause with a powerful, enigmatic figure of chance and rebellion: the exquisite corpse.

But Sam is being hunted. And new secrets will emerge that will test all their loyalties—to each other, to Paris old and new, and to reality itself.

E-Books

The Guild Conspiracy: A Chroniker City Story by Brooke Johnson

In the face of impossible odds, can one girl stem the tides of war?

It has been six months since clockwork engineer Petra Wade destroyed an automaton designed for battle, narrowly escaping with her life. But her troubles are far from over.  Her partner on the project, Emmerich Goss, has been sent away to France, and his father, Julian, is still determined that a war machine will be built. Forced to create a new device, Petra subtly sabotages the design in the hopes of delaying the war, but sabotage like this isn’t just risky: it’s treason. And with a soldier, Braith, assigned to watch her every move, it may not be long before Julian finds out what she’s done.

Now she just has to survive long enough to find another way to stop the war before her sabotage is discovered and she’s sentenced to hang for crimes against the empire. But Julian’s plans go far deeper than she ever realized . . . war is on the horizon, and it will take everything Petra has to stop it in this fast-paced, thrilling sequel to The Brass Giant.

Audio

Ack-Ack Macaque by Gareth Powell

In 1944, as waves of German ninjas parachute into Kent, Britain's best hopes for victory lie with a Spitfire pilot codenamed Ack-Ack Macaque. The trouble is, Ack-Ack Macaque is a cynical, one-eyed, cigar-chomping monkey, and he's starting to doubt everything, including his own existence.

A century later, in a world where France and Great Britain merged in the late 1950s and nuclear-powered Zeppelins circle the globe, ex-journalist Victoria Valois finds herself drawn into a deadly game of cat and mouse with the man who butchered her husband and stole her electronic soul.

Meanwhile, in Paris, after taking part in an illegal break-in at a research laboratory, the heir to the British throne goes on the run. And all the while, the doomsday clock ticks towards Armageddon.

Hystopia: A Novel by David Means

At the bitter end of the 1960s, after surviving multiple assassination attempts, President John F. Kennedy is entering his third term in office. The Vietnam War rages on, and the president has created a vast federal agency, the Psych Corps, dedicated to maintaining the nation's mental hygiene by any means necessary. Soldiers returning from the war have their battlefield traumas "enfolded" - wiped from their memories through drugs and therapy - while veterans too damaged to be enfolded roam at will in Michigan, evading the government and reenacting atrocities on civilians.

This destabilized version of American history is the vision of 22-year-old Eugene Allen, who has returned from Vietnam to write the book-within-a-book at the center of Hystopia. In conversation with some of the greatest war narratives, from Homer's Iliad to the Rolling Stones' "Gimme Shelter", David Means channels the voice of Allen, the young veteran out to write a novel that can bring honor to those he fought with in Vietnam while also capturing the tragic history of his own family.

The critic James Wood has written that Means' language "offers an exquisitely precise and sensuous register of an often crazy American reality". In Hystopia, his highly anticipated first novel, David Means brings his full talent to bear on the crazy reality of trauma, both national and personal. Outlandish and tender, funny and violent, timely and historical, Hystopia invites us to consider whether our traumas can ever be truly overcome. The answers it offers are wildly inventive, deeply rooted in its characters, and wrung from the author's own heart.

To readers, authors and publishers...

Is your story going to be published in time for the next New Releases? Contact us at ahwupdate at gmail dot com.  We are looking for works of alternate history, counterfactual history, steampunk, historical fantasy, time travel or anything that warps history beyond our understanding.

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Matt Mitrovich is the founder and editor of Alternate History Weekly Update, a blogger for Amazing Stories, a volunteer interviewer for SFFWorld and a Sidewise Awards for Alternate History judge. When not exploring alternate timelines he enjoys life with his beautiful wife Alana and prepares for the day when travel between parallel universes becomes a reality. You can follow him on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and YouTube. Learn how you can support his alternate history projects on Patreon.

Building Chroniker City

Guest post by Brooke Johnson.

When I sat down to write a steampunk novel, I knew that I wanted the setting to be unique, to differentiate itself from the settings of other steampunk novels and fill the absence that I felt was missing in steampunk fiction—an industrial techno-hub of science and engineering. Most of the other steampunk novels I had read up to this point blended steampunk elements with fantasy, or were of the adventure and exploration variety, where the characters traveled the world on an airship.

There was a painful lack of science in these novels, many of the authors seemingly ignoring all the invention and innovation of the Victorians that propelled the human race into the modern world. Where were the engineers? The mechanics? The scientists? I yearned for a story that brought the mechanical to life, that dug into the greasy guts and gears of extraordinary machines, and focused on engineers instead of posh society, but for all my searching, I could not find it. That’s when I knew that I had to be the one to write it.

Dissatisfied with the lack of gadgetry and science in the genre, I decided to create a steampunk setting that was neither paranormal fantasy or steampunk travelogue. No werewolves or vampires or fairies. No fantastic science. And no world-travelling airships. I wanted to create a steampunk setting based in reality, with real science and plausible machines that very well could have existed in a technologically advanced world, a city where society venerated engineers above all else, creativity and innovation were valued more than lineage or wealth, and mechanical inventions permeated every aspect of daily life.

And so Chroniker City was born.

Chroniker City sits twenty miles off the southern coast of Wales, built onto a small island of rock eight miles west of Grassholm. In our world, a remote lighthouse stands there, built in the late 1850s by the Trinity House after they bought out the previous leaseholders in the 1830s. However, in my alternate timeline, that was not the case. Instead, a wealthy German engineer by the name of Gumarich Chroniker purchased rights to build on that land and employed  engineers from all over Europe to help him construct his most ambitious engineering project—a mechanical, self-sustaining city that would become the foundation for the technological center of modern Victorian science.

It was from this point onward in my alternate history that the world diverged from our timeline. The construction of Chroniker City—and the addition of its prestigious polytechnical University—ushered in a swift advancement of scientific progress. The machines are made primarily of clockwork and steam, yes, but also include electricity and wireless technology, combustion enginery, and even electromagnetic designs.

The city proper sits atop a sprawling mechanical subcity, which houses the turbines, steam boilers, water reserves, and mechanical drives that deliver power to the city above. Above ground, the city itself hosts a number of innovative technologies unique to the setting—a trolley-lift for transporting passengers from the second-quadrant streets to the upper reaches of its illustrious shops and restaurants, automatic ventilation systems to remove smog from the air, a theater renowned for its mechanically operated stage and orchestra of musical automatons—as well as more ordinary inventions such as cranes, elevator lifts, wired power tools, and electric lights. Of course, the depths of the subcity hold their own secrets as well…

By creating my own city instead of taking over an existing one, I granted myself the freedom to establish my own rules, to explore avenues of the story and the setting that would have been next to impossible in a steampunk London or Paris. I was able to build a city that served the story, instead of the other way around. Had I chosen to set the story in a real-world location, I would have needed to restrict myself to a certain layout or history—or else transform the city into something unrecognizable to achieve the same fictional effect. Instead, I saved myself a lot of research and unnecessary complication while still managing to maintain a lot of the Victorian sociopolitical atmosphere of the world at that time.

With Chroniker City, I wanted to create the quintessential steampunk setting, an alternate history with the pinnacle of Victorian science at its core, and it’s my hope that as readers delve into the pages of The Brass Giant, they experience same fascination with the science and machinery of the city that I had while building it.

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Brooke Johnson is the author of The Brass Giant, the first novel in the Chroniker City steampunk series for young adults. She is a stay-at-home mom and tea-loving writer, and as the jack-of-all-trades bard of the family, she journeys through life with her husband, daughter, and dog. She currently resides in Northwest Arkansas but hopes to one day live somewhere more mountainous. Follow her on Twitter @brookenomicon.