Timeline Thursday: Winged Hands of the Reich by SpanishSpy

"Winged Hands of the Reich" is a silly, but enjoyably meta timeline that you can read on the AltHistory Wiki. Created by SpanishSpy, its point of divergence happened in 1940 when the Zheronians ("a fierce batlike species") arrive on Earth using their ships equipped with ISOT drives and ally themselves with Nazi Germany as part of their plan to conquer humanity. With the help of the Zheronians, the Axis powers defeat the Allies and divide the planet between themselves. With the planet under the heel of fascism, humanity begins to colonize the Solar System.

So...do you see what I meant when I said it was silly? Trust me, it gets even weirder the deeper you go into this timeline. For example, Adolf Hitler gets cybernetic enhancements and personally kills Joseph Stalin, while Charles de Gaulle becomes a space pirate. This is one of those timelines, however, that is not meant to be taken seriously. References to ASB, ISOT and other popular alternate history tropes are prevalent throughout the timeline. Take Operation Sealion, which only succeeded in this timeline because the Germans had the help of the bat-like Zheronians (and if you don't understand why that is funny then turn over your alternate historian card this instance!). In fact, discovering them all is half the fun of reading "Winged Hands of the Reich".

You can really tell SpanishSpy is a true fan of alternate history, not only from what I mentioned above, but also because of all the cameos by famous alternate historians in the timeline. Harry Turtledove, L. Sprague de Camp and Philip K. Dick are all leaders of the dissident literature movement of Pluto, a dumping ground of the Reich for undesirables (which includes not only John Birmingham, but also real life Jewish partisan Mordechai Anielewicz, who was made famous as a POV character in Turtledove's Worldwar series). S. M. Stirling, sadly, never made it to the relative safety of Pluto and was eventually captured by the Reich (a reference to his banning from AlternateHistory.com perhaps?).

To be fair, "Winged Hands of the Reich" is not without its flaws. The articles associated with the timeline are rather bare and not much work has been done since 2013. Additionally, I couldn't find any maps, flags, photos or any other original graphical content associated with the timeline, just stock images (hence why I used the image above that I found through Google instead of pulling it from the timeline). With a dedicated crew of contributors, this could become a first class ASB scenario that will make readers both laugh and think critically of the genre they love. As for now, its just junk food, which should always be consumed in moderation.

If there are any other web original timelines you would like me to review, please share in the comments below or email me at ahwupdate at gmail dot com.

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Matt Mitrovich is the founder and editor of Alternate History Weekly Update, a blogger on Amazing Stories and a Sidewise Awards for Alternate History judge. When not writing he works as an attorney, 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 and YouTube. Learn how you can support his alternate history projects on Patreon.

Custer at the Alamo: An Alternate History of the New Texas

Guest post by Gregory Urbach.

Custer at the Alamo (available for $2.99 at Amazon with a print edition due in the fall) is an alternate history novel with a small degree of time displacement.  In this thoroughly researched adventure story, Chief Sitting Bull knows his people will win the Battle of the Little Big Horn but perish on the reservations.  Just as the battle is starting, he prays to Wakan Tanka, the Great Spirit, to find a new path for his people.  On a ridge overlooking the village, Lt. Colonel George Custer and his brother, Captain Thomas Custer (twice winner of the Medal of Honor), realize they've stumbled into a big fight.  Tom urges a retreat, but Custer’s instincts tell him to attack.  The 7th Cavalry charges down Medicine Tail Coulee, but instead of reaching the river, they ride into a strange fog and a new version of history.

I've always been fascinated by the great losing causes: the Spartans at Thermopylae, the Old Guard at Waterloo, the British at Islandlwana, and the Marines at Wake Island.  Historians have said there has been more written about the Alamo and the Little Big Horn than any other U.S. battles except Gettysburg (Custer was at Gettysburg, too).  These famous events involve larger than life personalities.  George Custer, the brave but reckless cavalry commander.  Davy Crockett, backwoods hunter turned congressman.  General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, the Napoleon of the West.  Leaders such as Sitting Bull, William Barrett Travis, and Jim Bowie also play major roles.  What if these diverse characters came together in a clash that could change American history?

The story concept began with a simple plot; Custer would be sent back in time 40 years and win the battle of the Alamo.  My personal library on these subjects is so large that research was never a problem.  But there was a problem with the premise that the characters themselves quickly pointed out.  Would soldiers who had survived the Civil War now fight for Texas in 1836 knowing it will later join the Confederacy?  Probably not.  And what does Sitting Bull’s vision of a better life for his people have to do with the Alamo?  It took a good deal of time and thought to bring these elements into play, and I think the results will show an interesting version of what Texas might have become under different circumstances.

The Alamo has often been compared to Thermopylae.  Just as Leonidas waged a holding action against the vastly superior Persian army, the Texans in San Antonio were trying to hold back Santa Anna’s attempt to crush their revolution.  Few of the men defending the Alamo were soldiers.  Most were lawyers, doctors, shopkeepers, ranchers and adventurers.  The battle is not well documented.  No one knows exactly how many Texans were killed, or how many Mexican soldiers died taking the fort after a thirteen day siege.  Davy Crockett (David, as he preferred) was the most famous casualty, a former congressman trying to rebuild his fortunes after losing reelection.  William Barrett Travis was a rabble rousing lawyer from Alabama.  Jim Bowie was an infamous land speculator, militia leader and knife fighter.  None of them had any idea how to defend the broken down fortifications of the Alamo when the Mexican army suddenly arrived on February 23rd, 1836, marching out of the winter desert.

The Battle of the Little Big Horn was instantly controversial and has remained so ever since.  General Alfred Terry, who was in charge of the operation, blamed Custer for disobeying orders.  Elizabeth Custer blamed Major Marcus Reno, who had failed to go to her husband’s support.  For many years, Custer was considered a hero, the brave leader whose gallant last stand would forever be remembered.  In recent years, Custer has been made the great villain of the Indian wars, now being blamed for every wrong ever committed on the Great Plains.  This would have surprised Custer, for he saw himself as a soldier carrying out orders to the best of his ability.  As anyone who reads history knows, it’s folly to place the values of another time into our own framework and expect to appreciate them.

There are many factors that help make a simple story more complicated.  The defenders of the Alamo had no strategy for victory.  The chief engineer, Green Jameson, was a lawyer.  But George Custer was a graduate of West Point.  He was one of the Union army’s most successful commanders, and accepting defeat was not in his nature.  In this story, Custer does not have a large force, barely 125 men, but they are armed with the 1873 Springfield carbine, a far better weapon than a Brown Bess or Kentucky long rifle.  Custer’s officers carried repeating rifles, such as the Winchester, and all were armed with Army Colt revolvers.  These are not huge advantages when facing a trained army of thousands, but they help.

The Texas revolution was not just about white Americans coming for free land.  The Native Americans, especially the Comanche, considered Texas to be their country.  The Tejano population generally opposed Santa Anna but did not trust the new rebel government.  The Cherokee, forced off their Eastern lands by Andrew Jackson, were tying to build new homes in North Texas.  And even though it was illegal, slaves were being imported to work the new plantations.  After winning independence at the Battle of San Jacinto, Texas passed a rigid slave constitution, joined the Union in 1845, and seceded in 1861.  Much of what would happen was unknown in 1836, but Custer and the 7th Cavalry come from 1876.  What effect, if any, will their knowledge of the future have?

I did not want cardboard personalities for this novel, spouting facts and changing events at random.  I wanted real people, with real problems, figuring their way from one situation to the next as best they could.  Reviews of Custer at the Alamo have supported this vision.  Though the plotlines are filled with historical details, what really makes the novel worthwhile is the characters.  As Mr. Norman Stiteler of Frisco, Texas wrote, “the characters are surprisingly human, cantankerous and complex.”  Just as history should be.

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Gregory Urbach, an Urban Studies graduate from California State University, Northridge, has been writing science fiction and fantasy for 20 years.  His works include the nine-book Waters of the Moon series (the Tranquility books) and Magistrate of the Dark Land.  He has a website at www.custeratthealamo.com and can be contacted at his Facebook page.

Review: Wolf Hunt by Sebastian Breit

Guest post by A.J. Nolte.

When you think of alternate history, two time periods jump immediately to mind: the American Civil War and World War 2. By far, these two conflicts are the most frequently re-imagined periods in alternate history, with many novels, anthologies and scholarly essays dedicated to them. Among these alternate histories, many posit the idea of modern, or even slightly near-future military elements going back in time to change the course of the war. Harry Turtledove's Guns of the South and John Birmingham's Axis of Time trilogy are only two of the more well-known examples. With Wolf Hunt, Sebastian Breit appears to be embarking on a project similar in scope to Birmingham's well-known trilogy. So when I read Breit's novel, I was looking for it, ultimately, to do one thing: distinguish itself from every other World War 2 alternate history ever written.

At this, I would have to say Wolf Hunt was modestly successful. The premise is a bit too reminiscent of the Axis of Time trilogy for total uniqueness; an allied, U.S.-led force is on its way to perform a humanitarian intervention, when it is pulled back in time to World War 2. After an extremely devastating bout of blue on blue violence which feels just a bit contrived, the up-timers set about trying to change the course of the war, to the detriment of the Nazis. Beyond these similarities, however, many of the differences actually favor Breit's novel over Birmingham's. For one thing, and this is the true hook of Wolf Hunt, over half the modern task force is German. This also makes the eventual blue on blue violence somewhat more explicable than Birmingham's "oops, we just ran into the down-timer U.S. navy" plot device in Axis of Time.

Legitimate difference over national interest rapidly heightens the tension between U.S. navy Captain Stephen Flynn and his German counterpart and friend, Captain Florian Hallwinter. One might be forgiven for thinking that two men who obviously knew and trusted one another as thoroughly as Flynn and Hallwinter would have found some more effective way of dealing with these divergent interests, and confronting their mutual enemies. On the other hand, what actually happens isn't totally unreasonable, given a totally unprecedented and panic-stricken situation, and it's clearly necessary to keep the story suspenseful. This was something which bothered me a great deal while I was reading the book, but less so in retrospect. Still, I would have liked to see more attention paid to this conflict; while it's a necessary element of the plot, the way it's presented comes off feeling just a little bit forced.

Throughout the rest of the book, the parallel story-lines follow Flynn and Hallwinter, as well as their crews. The American sections, while well-written, feel a bit boiler-plate. The Americans have the now almost stereotypical encounters with J. Edgar Hoover, the racism and sexism of the 1940s and so-on.  Will any of the Americans use their future knowledge to try and change the future of American politics, subtly alter American society, or even simply help their grandparents? Hopefully, more of these human interactions will become apparent in future books.  The sections dealing with the modern Germans are Wolf Hunt's strongest element, most distinguishing feature, and clearly the plot which most interests the author. (It's an open question in my mind as to whether the book might not have been stronger without the American plot-line altogether; I will give Breit the benefit of the doubt for now on this score as he seems to be setting up for a longer series in which the Americans will be pivotal).

Captain Hallwinter, clearly a tormented soul whose decisions sometimes seem questionable, his conflicted XO, a young and highly competent Turkish officer, the ruthless Colonel Kaufmann, and even a pair of grousing helicopter pilots seem, on the whole, better flushed out than their American counterparts. And their mission, the overthrow of Hitler and the Nazi Party at the height of their power and success, is interesting, uncertain, and leaves the reader guessing until the end. I hope Breit's second novel, Clash of Eagles, has put a bit more thought into the development of the American plot-line in some non-standard directions. Additionally, there's very little attention paid to non-German and non-American perspectives in this novel. What will all these changes mean for the British, the Soviets and the Japanese? These answers are hinted at, but I'm hoping to see some viewpoint perspectives from these nations in future books.

All that said, I found Wolf Hunt a satisfying read. If you're looking for a book that does something totally new in the field, you'll be disappointed, but this is a fast-paced and interesting story told very well. In fact, most of my problems with the book are probably the type of frustration any reader will have with the first novel in a series, where some things are left for development in the future. Breit clearly knows his subject in great detail, but avoids the sadly all-too-common tendency to overload the reader with technical jargon in favor of a lean and clean story. There are some relatively minor grammatical issues and the writing's a bit clunky in parts, but for a first novel reasonably priced at four dollars (for the e-book version), it's well worth your money. And if, like most fans of alternate history, you just can't get enough of World War 2, Wolf Hunt is almost certainly a book you need to add to your collection.

Grade: 4 out of 5 stars.

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A.J. Nolte is a PHD candidate in international relations at Catholic University and an aspiring sci-fi and alternate history writer . He is knowledgeable in Byzantine, medieval, ACW, Cold War, Islamic and post-colonial history. Also, he'll read almost anything once if it's got an airship in it.

So You Want To Change The Past?

Guest post by Chris Nuttall.

Dale Cozort’s article on the Prime Directive and Alternate History got me thinking.

Star Trek’s Prime Directive was invented, in universe, by a post-scarcity society that didn’t really have much (if anything) at stake.  Most, if not all, of the Prime Directive issues that Kirk and Picard agonised over were unimportant to the Federation as a whole.  Certainly, the moral dilemma posed by the crisis was worrying, but it was not a major threat.

This cannot be said for people and societies that get moved back in time.  Nantucket in the ISOT universe needs food from the outside world; the only real way to avoid ‘contaminating’ history is to destroy themselves so completely that future archaeologists will find no trace of their existence.  The same can be said for Grantville in the 1632 series, although a case can be made that history was derailed the moment they arrived and Simpson’s grand plan to seal off Grantville was utterly useless.  It is a great deal easier to argue academically that interference is bad when you don't have to worry about starving, being killed and/or raped by local barbarians, enslaved by slave traders, infected by smallpox and a thousand other nasty fates.  What would Captain Picard have done if he’d been forced to spend the rest of his life in a far more hostile era?

There are plenty of stories about people and societies that go back in time and produce a better world, at least as they see it. Lest Darkness Fall, The Guns of the South, Island in the Sea of Time, to name, but a few.  But really...would it be as easy as you might think?

The most immediate problem is language.  Languages change.  Someone from the Britain of 2012 isn't going to be completely comprehensible to Winston Churchill in 1940, even though both of them seem to speak the same language.  How many ideas have entered our language since Churchill died?  He would not understand the use of the word ‘laser,’ for example, or ‘microcircuits.’  Both of them were largely developed after his time.  The same can be said of American English; chances are that George Washington would find it difficult, if not impossible, to talk to someone from our era.

This only gets worse as you go further back in time.  How many people speak whatever language the Aztecs spoke, as they spoke it?  I doubt there are many, if any.  The same goes for the Romans; our Latin is not their Latin.  A student of the Roman Empire might be able to make himself understood, but even he would find it difficult.  Someone from an ordinary background would have to learn to speak Roman Latin the hard way, which is not easy at all without a tutor who speaks both languages – and who will speak modern English in Ancient Rome?

So you go back in time to Rome, where you are effectively mute.  Can you overcome this barrier before it is too late, or will you simply wind up being enslaved, or starving to death on the streets?

The second problem is cultural.  Cultures change, and not always for the better.  A case can be made that the rise of Islam immensely improved the Middle East, only to see that early advantage lost as Islam splintered and the repression of independent thought started to spread out of control.  A Muslim from our era would probably not fit into the early Caliphate; how much stranger (to them) would someone from our world be in Ancient Rome?

Consider; the Romans believed that women should be seen and not heard.  Athens believed that women should be neither seen nor heard.  That’s at least partly why there are so few famous Roman women (and those that we do recall were often scandalous in their time).  In fact, the Romans nursed a fear of powerful women. Augustus had little difficulty drumming up support for war against Cleopatra because she was a foreign queen.  A single woman from our era is highly unlikely to be able to make changes on her own, unless she finds a powerful male ally and protector.  It is far more likely that she will be enslaved and lost in the great heaving mass of Roman slavery.  And those who think that slavery is somehow sexy have never actually been real slaves.

[I came across a woman who argued that she would have liked to be a slave in Rome, after reading a corny erotic novel on the subject that was rather less convincing than Stars and Stripes Forever.  One day, I will write a story that serves as a rebuttal to that story.]

It gets more complicated in other places.  The Confederate States of America believed, quite firmly, that black men were inferior.  They liberally sprinkled the term ‘nigger’ throughout their conversation and, if someone had pointed out how rude that was, they would have been frankly uncomprehending.  The word ‘nigger’ was not forbidden to them.  It would be extremely difficult to convince them that they were wrong; even the success of black soldiers fighting for the USA didn't change many minds.  Tell them that the 44th President of the United States was black and they’d think you were making it up.

Or...what if you tried to convince the Founding Fathers to ban slavery.  Many of them – even Washington – were slaveholders themselves, but let’s assume you succeeded.  It’s unlikely that the American South would go along with it; instead, they would split off from the northern states.  If your overall objective was to create a USA that had never had slavery, odds are you would have failed spectacularly.

The modern world spends literally decades agonising about justifying itself.  Millions of trees have been killed while the world debates over the rightness or wrongness of invading Iraq, the War on Terror, Global Warming (or Cooling)...the ancient world rarely bothered to justify itself so comprehensively.  Rome never really bothered to question its own right to rule an empire, not in the sense we do today. Even the most ‘moral’ Romans would be somewhat amoral by our standards.

If you want to make meaningful change, you’d have to understand just what you were dealing with – and that isn't easy.  There is a school of thought that claims that slaveholders were basically evil and, by extension, the CSA was evil.  Most people believe that to be true, but the Southerners themselves didn't see it that way.  Chattel slavery survived because it was immensely profitable, very much the underpinning of the South’s economy.  The same can be said for most issues throughout history.  Can you learn while fighting to stay alive?

[Star Trek points out that the Federation doesn't always know what’s going on, hence the idea that it is better to stay out of the whole affair.  But as I say above, the time traveller may have no choice.]

The third issue becomes knowledge.  What do you actually know?

Take a look around your room.  How much could you build completely from scratch, if you had no other choice?  I doubt the average citizen could produce much of anything (hence the reason most ISOT stories feature people with experience and skills denied by the average western citizen.)  Do you know enough about computers to go back to 1975 (when Bill Gates was starting his business career) and beat him to the punch?  I don’t – and how many people with computer skills would be completely familiar with the tech from 1975, if they were born in – say – 1990?  If you happened to go back further in time, everything you knew about modern computers would be completely useless.  You couldn't hope to produce even a BBC Basic computer in 1940, unless you happened to be Mr. Spock:

Spock: Captain, I must have some platinum. A small block would be sufficient, five or six pounds. By passing certain circuits through there to be used as a duo-dynetic field core...

Capt. Kirk: [interrupting] Uh, Mr. Spock, I've brought you some assorted vegetables, baloney and a hard roll for myself, and I've spent the other nine tenths of our combined salaries for the last three days on filling this order for you. Mr. Spock, this bag does not contain platinum, silver or gold, nor is it likely to in the near future.

Spock: Captain, you're asking me to work with equipment which is hardly very far ahead of stone knives and bearskins.

It actually gets more complicated as you delve into the past.  In 1632, the main character speaks of using what remains of a 20th century technological base to hammer out a 19th century technological base.  Grantville has enough people – and a knowledge base – to make that possible.  However, if you were on your own, would you even know the formula for gunpowder?  And if you did, could you make it?  Outside of people I know who served in the military – and, I suspect, not all of them – I know few people who could produce gunpowder completely from scratch.

Even if you can, it doesn't solve all of the problems.  Primitive cannons were regarded as somewhat unreliable, partly because they could explode if shoddily made.  Not because of deliberate malice, but because metalworking wasn't entirely up to the task.  Accidents were not uncommon and they could be disastrous.  There were also problems when putting early firearms up against archers; it wasn't until the first set of bugs was ironed out that archers became obsolete.

Other things are easier.  Pretty much everyone with any sense knows that untreated water can be dangerous, and the simplest way of dealing with it is boiling it to kill the germs.  Plenty of epidemics spread through the pre-1900 world because no one knew to boil water, or wash their hands after going to the toilet, or understood exactly how diseases moved from victim to victim.  (Considering the AIDS crisis, where the exact method of transmission was not very well understood for decades, it isn't something uncommon even today.)  You could save millions of lives in Rome, for example, just by insisting on scrubbing the room where someone gives birth.  Poor sanitation accounted for a terrifyingly high rate of death in childbirth; maybe, if you could convince someone to have the room scrubbed with soap and water, you might save lives.  What if you saved Julia Caesar, the wife of Pompey the Great, from her untimely death?

There are two problems with this that need to be addressed.  The first is that the locals might not understand germ theory when you explain it to them.  It wasn't really considered until the American Civil War and, for quite some time, there were doctors who didn't take it seriously.  The second is that the local medical establishment might resist your new innovations.  You would be threatening their livelihoods.

That, as I mentioned above, is something else to keep in mind.  People tend to be guided more by ‘what’s in it for me?’  Slaveholders will resist you trying to ban slavery because it would mean the end of their livelihoods.  Generals might object to you introducing gunpowder because it would put too much power in the hands of barbarian tribes; landlords would oppose it because it would give their peasants too much power.  Pretty much everything you introduce will upset someone.

On the other hand, the people from the past are not stupid.  Give them a concept (as the Romans learned from Carthage) and they will probably be better than you at figuring out how to adapt it to their technology.  I could design a steam engine; someone from the Roman Republic might be able to actually build it.  They’d also probably be more capable of developing technology to match your concepts, because they’d know more about where they were starting from.

And there are all kinds of tidbits you could pass on to someone from the past, even if they’re not primarily technological.  What about Arabic numerals and English letters, so much more useful than anything from Ancient Rome, or even something as simple as stirrups?  Or what about America?  If you went back in time before Columbus, you’d know about the vast American continent just waiting to be discovered and exploited.  What if you told the British of 1812 that there were vast gold fields in California just waiting to be discovered?  Or oil in Saudi Arabia?

The fourth major problem receives less attention in alternate history than I would expect, although it is actually quite a serious issue.  Disease.  The locals may well be more immune to local diseases than you (for a given value of immune); smallpox will kill anyone from our era who doesn't happen to be vaccinated.  (Can you convince them to use cowpox to generate immunity to smallpox?  Would you recognise cowpox when you saw it?)  Any time-travelling mission will have to take that into account.

The fifth major problem concerns supplies.  What if you take a modern carrier back to 1940?  That’s nice, but what happens when the carrier runs out of missiles, bombs, bullets and jet fuel?  Modern-day cruise missiles are completely irreplaceable by any pre-2000 tech base, so if your carrier goes back to 1941 (as in The Final Countdown) there will be no resupply of everything you have with you.  You might end up sinking the Japanese Navy and then having to return to America, working with the locals to build up their tech base.

If you happen to be completely on your own...realistically, what can you have with you?

That is not to say that you can't get a good story out of an ISOT.  I’ve read and written many.  But there are issues that have to be considered carefully before you start writing.  In the end, knowing what you’re talking about allows you to present the past to the reader in its true nature, rather than hackneyed clinches and stereotypes.  Do plenty of research – and don’t be afraid to be politically incorrect.

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Chris Nuttall blogs at The Chrishanger and has a website by the same name. His books can be found on Amazon Kindle. Check out his upcoming book The Royal Sorceress.

Interview: Rhys Davies

I now present to you dear reader my interview with Rhys Davies, author of Timewreck Titanic.  Enjoy:

Can you tell us a bit about yourself?

Oh, this is a hard one. Well, I was born just before Christmas 1986 in the town of Pontypridd, South Wales. As a child of the nineties I grew up on an eclectic mix of Saturday-morning cartoons, blockbuster films and all manner of literature, which I guess eventually coalesced into a love of science-fiction and fantasy; as an example, when I was young my favourite movies were Back to the Future, Jurassic Park, and Titanic. Through these I somehow found my way, at age eleven, to reading full-length novels by authors such as Michael Crichton, Clive Cussler and Tom Clancy, though looking back on that I’m a little ashamed at how fervently I worshipped before the altar of ‘airport literature’. Thankfully that was a phase I eventually grew out of.

My then taste in reading material notwithstanding, it was apparent from my childhood that I was going to develop into a ‘creative’ individual, so it only made sense that I should pursue a suitable dream (namely, becoming a published author), and eventually I attended Lancaster University in the northwest of England, studying English Literature with Creative Writing.

Nowadays I’m very much a multimedia person; I write stories, shoot amateur films and edit videos and audio dramas for fun. It’s only now though that I’ve actually started trying to build a career out of these interests, and, fingers-crossed, I’m about to see some success in that.

What got you interested in alternate history?

Well, as I mentioned already, I was very much a fan of Back to the Future as a kid, which got me to wondering what the consequences might be if one tiny event in the course of time was altered or prevented, and from that dangerous line of thought I eventually arrived at where I am now.

In all seriousness however, I once read that the two most dangerous words in human history were “what if?” and I have found myself spiraling further down that particular rabbit-hole. I can’t remember when it was that I ‘discovered’ the genre of alternate history, but it was probably when I read the appendices to The Lord of the Rings. Much like a model-maker might craft a boat, locomotive or landscape from scratch, shaping it to match his personal vision, JRR Tolkien had sought to ‘create’ a complete mythology with these books; the back-story explored in the Appendices, but barely touched on in the actual narrative, led me to the concept of ‘world-building’, which acted as my ‘gateway’ to Alternate History. I think that is the main appeal to me, the freedom to craft an entire reality and then either guide it towards one particular outcome, or let it take on a certain life of its own and see where this divergent timeline leads.

What is Timewreck Titanic about?

The basic premise of the story is that on April 14th 2012, the centenary of the Titanic’s sinking, a number of ships have gathered over the wreck site to pay tribute. Suddenly, several vessels from the fleet are thrown back in time by exactly a century. They find themselves in close proximity to the sinking Titanic, with no guarantee they can ever go home. The rest of the story flows from that concept, explored through the multiple perspectives of both real-life figures involved in the disaster, and a number of fictional time-travellers who are all-too aware both of the terrible cost of the sinking, and of the bloody course that the twentieth century is set upon. I’d like to think that the story asks the reader ‘what would you do in this situation?’ but honestly that would be giving me too much credit!

What inspired you to write the novel?

Much as I would like to say the concept sprang fully-formed into my mind, the actual story is much more convoluted, and consists of three divergent ideas coming together.

I’ve felt an affection for the ‘Ship of Dreams’ for many years and, at the same time, a certain dissatisfaction in how almost every film or novel involving the ship just tells the same story all over again, with perhaps the addition of a fictional subplot or two. After reading a rare exception to that rule, Joseph L’Episcopo’s One Last Voyage, which exposits that Titanic just missed that infamous iceberg and sailed on until withdrawal from service in the 1940s, I began wondering whether or not I could do something similar.

At the same time, I was reading Eric Flint’s excellent 1632 stories, in which ‘Grantville’, a West Virginia mining-town, is displaced in time and space, landing in the German province of Thuringia in the middle of the Thirty Years War. The idea of a large group of modern ‘everymen’ being forced into interaction with historical figures appealed to me, set several gears turning in my mind and opened my thoughts to the possibility of combining alternate-history with time-travel. In tribute to this, one of Timewreck Titanic’s main characters, Jordan Jones, hails from Farmington, a real town in the same region that Flint drew on to create his fictional community of Grantville.

Finally, through the zombie-horror film Outpost, I stumbled across the urban legend of ‘The Nazi Bell’, a supposed anti-gravity device developed by the Nazis during WW2. The similarities with the equally mythical ‘Philadelphia Experiment’ struck me as good material for a story, but at first I was considering developing it into a webcomic starring a Captain America-esque superhero to be named ‘The Spirit of St Louis’, powered by technology smuggled out of Germany by defecting scientists. The project stalled however when I was unable to locate an artist to collaborate with.

Then in August 2011, I met a gentleman named Gary Chalk, an author and illustrator, while the both of us were on holiday in France. During a very long ferry-ride he described to me how through e-books and self publishing it was nowadays easier for new writers to get a foothold in the publishing world, and I decided I would try and write something short, sharp and snappy and publish it online as an experiment.

That’s all well and good, but unfortunately, I did not know what to write about! Then, about a month later I was driving home one night and listening to some rock music at eardrum-shatteringly loud volumes. A series of rapid electric-guitar chords suddenly caused me to visualise the image of a helicopter taking off from the deck of a ship and powering across a dark ocean to a sinking vessel, the Titanic, while a figure yelled through a megaphone the words “Captain Smith, prepare to receive pumping assistance!”

Eureka. Suddenly all three individual ideas dovetailed together. The Titanic, time-lost people, and secret tech. I finally had my idea.

After musing on it for a month I finally sat down on October 3rd last year and started writing. The initial plan was to have a first draft of 120,000 words completed by Christmas, but the story just kept growing until it was not finished until April, by which point it had nearly doubled in size. Far from being ‘short, sharp and snappy’ Timewreck Titanic somehow grew into this massive narrative full of numerous ships and characters, probably because I kept indulging myself by working in every new idea that came to mind.

What sources did you use in researching the novel?

Too many to name in all, but besides my own library of Titanic literature, the most valuable resource I found to hand was the Internet. Through it any prospective writer has unlimited access to historical documents, period accounts, modern commentary and debate, and multiple perspectives from which to build your own stance on a familiar subject. It’s amazing how much information can be at your fingertips in seconds nowadays; in fact one problem I had was that right up until the final day of writing I kept stumbling across new tidbits which prompted more and more rewrites, until eventually I just had to say to myself “STOP!”

Readers have complimented you on the period language used in Timewreck.  How did you get such a good grasp of the old lingo?

Honestly, I’m not consciously trying to sound ‘ye olde world’ when writing, it just comes quite naturally. I honestly believe that after years of digesting period books and drama, I’ve assimilated some of the language of the time. The only actual convention I set myself when crafting dialogue was to keep the period characters simply ‘formal’ rather than pushing the clichéd “I say, old fruit, Pip-pip, tally-ho!” style of dialogue. Against this, the time-travellers are ‘looser’ in their language, and more prone to using informal slang, abbreviations, contractions, curse-words and nicknames, which perhaps goes further to underscore the differences between the two eras.

How did you come up with the title?

The title was actually one of the harder parts, because I wanted something that would convey that this was a time-travel novel, and that the Titanic was involved. Ultimately it was a friend of mine, Daniel Price, who finally suggested that ‘Timewrecked’ would be a good base to build upon, as it combined the idea of ‘time’ with a nautical theme, and matched the idea that the majority of the characters have in effect been shipwrecked, becoming castaways in time. After a little massaging, I finally settled on the current title, Timewreck Titanic.

Who designed the cover? 

This is a bit of a story itself. My father recently retired from a position at the local further education college, and through some of his old contacts he put me in touch with their Art Department. I sent in a brief describing the book and explaining that I needed a piece of art for the cover, and their response was extremely enthusiastic. As a result, designing a cover for Timewreck Titanic was set as a project for that term’s first year class, with me going in once every two weeks or so to give pointers and feedback. There were eighteen students, all of whom had their own vision of what the cover should be, and choosing a winner was pretty tough; in the end I narrowed it down to three and then went and slept on it for a fortnight before making my final decision. The winning artist is an incredibly talented guy named Gwalchmai Doran, and I’m sure he’d be gratified at the positive mention his work has already received in the site’s review.

Why do you think we continue to see works set during the sinking of the Titanic?  Why are people so intrigued by this tragedy?

That’s a question I tackle multiple times in the book itself, and I’ve still not got a definite answer. The best I can offer is that it is a ‘romantic’ tragedy in which all parts of society were involved, from the painfully elegant passengers in First Class to the hopeful immigrants travelling in Steerage; it is impossible among all these different people to not find at least one we can empathise with, which humanises what might otherwise be a very impersonal disaster.

Contrast as well the horror of that fateful April night with the all-too-brief life of the great ship herself; born of boundless optimism, and five years in the making, she sank in less than three hours, gaining in her death a certain immortality. In my eyes, this huge vessel born on a Belfast slipway is tangled up not just with the individual lives of all who sailed in her on that one voyage, but also the society that birthed and built her. Titanic was the first disaster of the twentieth century that managed to reach out to people in all walks of life (though sadly, not the last), and that is no less true today.

If you could travel to any point in the past, when would it be and why?

I’d say the early-to-mid 1950s, just to experience first-hand the post-war sense of pride and accomplishment, and to witness the last hurrah of the Age of Steam, such as the great locomotives and ocean liners that once bestrode the world like giants.

Plus, hey, with my future knowledge I could probably be the Bill Gates of this new timeline. “Money, money, money...”

The last half of the 20th century had a lot of tragedies and armed with knowledge from the future, would you attempt to intervene in any of the events?  

Most likely. It would be wonderful to prevent the worst excesses of the Cold War, but it is questionable as to whether or not a single individual could make a considerable difference based on how much momentum the nuclear arms race would have already gained by the 1950s. Alternatively I could opt not to take action and allow history to proceed ‘on course’ until the 1960s or 1970s, when I could potentially intervene in events such as the Kennedy Assassination or the Vietnam War.

Ideally, if I was travelling in time with the goal of altering history, the ideal temporal destination for me would be the era of the Titanic’s sinking, in those crucial years leading up to the First World War. My belief has always been that the ‘War To End All Wars’ actually started the chain of events that led to the deprivations of the 20th century, and that the first priority of a time-traveller seeking to play God with history would be to avert that conflict or lead it to a quicker outcome in favour of the Allies.

What do you think would happen as a result of your interference?

I’d say it was impossible to predict. One of the lessons history has taught is that it does not run on tracks; once you turn it loose, it is going to run amok into pastures new. This is the potential danger of meddling in post-WW2 politics; the world came so close to atomic war in the original timeline that there’s a grave risk of accidentally inflaming the Cold War into actual nuclear annihilation.

Tampering in Edwardian history at least removes the hazard of immediate destruction, giving that nuclear physics was still in its infancy – the flip-side is that in order to procure peace you would have to prop up a pair of oppressive regimes (Imperial Germany and Russia) in the hope that they would turn towards a better path, but with no guarantee that they will. The outcome could be stability, or simply allow the conditions that led to both WW1 and the Bolshevik Revolution to fester until they erupt into a new and equally devastating conflict.

Do you have any other projects you are working on?

Oh boy, yeah. Besides initial ideas for the next volume in the Timewreck Series and a potential handful of children’s books, for the past six or seven years my best friend and myself have been co-developing a work called Project Aurora, the first volume in what promises to be a massive science-fiction story (practically an ‘epic’). We’ve had several false-starts but with my recent success in completing Timewreck Titanic I’m confident in finally making some headway on it. It’s going to be a much-more focused narrative set in the early thirty-first century, centred on three youths gradually uncovering a century-old conspiracy in which they are all unwilling pawns.

What are you reading now?

Surprisingly, not much at all. During the final few months of writing I basically stopped reading for pleasure in order to focus on the project, and now that I’m done I’m having a hard time picking up something new; I’ve tried getting back into the 1632 books, and the second volume of Orson Scott Card’s Ender Series but I’m struggling, so if anyone has anything good they’d like to recommend, drop me a line. Quality alternate history would be very welcome.

Do you have advice for would be authors?

Don’t give up hope guys; there has never been a better time for aspiring writers to break into the market. The Internet has opened up all manner of possibilities for self-publishing and self-promotion. Once published, you can also gain new insight from evaluating the finished manuscript, exploring strengths and weaknesses through feedback from readers, so gaining valuable experience as a writer. More importantly, once you’ve completed your first manuscript, you can set it to work earning you some cash on formats such as the Kindle and Lulu. In a sense, your work becomes an asset that can begin drawing in revenue even as you try promoting it to publishers and agents.

And as the song says, “don’t stop believing, hold onto that feeling” – if you’ve got an idea, or a concept, or a vision, hold on tight and take it as far as you can. You might at times doubt yourself, and question your abilities, but you only fail if you give up along the way. So sit down, pull up a keyboard, and see where your imagination will take you!

Good luck!

Review: "Red Inferno 1945" by Robert Conroy

Red Inferno: 1945

Well, revisiting Conroy's Red Inferno: 1945 brings out the nostalgia. It was my first review and the very first post on my own blog back in the fall of 2010. It was also the very first review I had ever written about an alternate history novel, since I was comparably new to the literary genre at the time, with my exposure not going beyond Stirling's ISoT and Flint's 1632. With all the things that have happened in between - changes in my personal life, my first novel successfully published, me dabbling with video reviews - I thought it would only be prudent to go back at the old stuff and re-evaluate some of it.

At the time of my initial review, I had heard mixed opinions about some of his earlier works, but that did not keep me from getting my hands on Red Inferno: 1945. You see, I am German, which makes my Kraut-Sense tingle with delight whenever an author of alternate histories with some repute - such as Robert Conroy - sets out to twist the actual events around and makes history diverge from what we know has happened. Russians and Allies clashing in Germany in 1945? Potentially awesome! An interesting point of divergence (POD) can make for some truly great stories, especially if an author knows the time and the historical protagonists he is writing about.

Only, it really is not that much of a good book. Spoilers incoming:

Creating Parallel Universes: A History of ISOT

ISOT (pronounced "eye-sot") is an acronym for the plot device used both in published and online alternate histories.  The term originated from S. M. Stirling's 1998 novel Island in the Sea of Time, the first of the three alternate history novels known as the Nantucket or Islander trilogy.  The novel describes the events following "The Event", which transported the island of Nantucket, its inhabitants and a nearby United States Coast Guard ship Eagle to the 1250s BC.

Following the publication of the novel, the term began to appear in many online discussion groups, probably the earliest being the alternate history newsgroup soc.history.what-if.  ISOT became a verb meaning "to move a large area of land through time to another era".  Though ISOT often stands for the title of Stirling's novel, it also has been defined to mean "Island Sea Of Time" and sometimes "In Sea Of Time".  The term also references the event which cased the time travelling, if the author uses another name for the event.  Due to the implausibility of such an event, it usually appears in the ASB section of many online forums.  There also exists an online role playing game which has run continuously since 2000 called SHWI-ISOT with a POD in 1800.  Players act as characters sent from the 21st century back to an alternate early 19th Century.

The ISOT plot device does not apply solely to travel through time.  In 2000, Eric Flint published 1632, the initial novel in the shared world series (also known as The Assiti Shards series). The premise involves a the fictional American town of Grantville, West Virginia being sent back to April 1631 in the middle of the Holy Roman Empire during the Thirty Years War (caused by an event known by the characters as the "Ring of Fire").  This reader learns in a prologue about the alien Assiti who can be blamed for removing Grantville to the past because their "artwork" often alters time and space. 

In both series, the event transports the land Nantucket and Grantville replaced to the present day.  The geographical location transported to the present rarely makes an impact to the story following the switch and can be ignored.  The setting for Stirling's Emberverse series, however, involves the same timeline Nantucket of the Nantucket series originated from.  In the series the Bronze Age Nantucket causes an event known as the "Change" which alters the laws of physics to prevent the use of high technology (with disastrous consequences for humanity).

Unlike the other famous term popularized by alternate historians, alien space bats, ISOT has yet to appear in any published literature.  The term alien space bats has appeared in many novels (Dies the Fire, Without Warning, Outrageous Fortunes), but not ISOT.  Perhaps the absence of the term can be explained by the lack of people who have actually read Island in the Sea of Time or visit online alternate history forums. Meanwhile, the term and proper use of "alien space bats" can be appreciated without ever reading another novel.

Despite originating as a device to move land masses and their populations to other time eras, the term has evolved to cover time travel by a single or multiple individuals without the need to move large land masses.  This evolution actually makes sense since time travel and alternate history have long been intertwined with each other before Stirling published his novel  The time traveler s) create a new timeline due to their actions in the past. Authors rarely state what happened to the original timelines, but readers usually assume it exists parallel to the new timeline created by the traveler(s), as I tried to express in my Back to Multiverse series of posts. 

L. Sprague de Camp's 1939  can be credited with writing one of the influence alternate history/time travel novel: Lest Darkness Fall.  The novel influenced many alternate history authors who began their careers in the 1980s, including S. M. Stirling.  In 2005 he published the short story sequel to Lest Darkness Fall: "The Apotheosis of Martin Padway".  The story provides glimpses of what might have become of the reality Padway altered.  Pehaps de Camp deserves some credit for creating the ISOT plot device, since Stirling may never have wrote the novel which gave the plot device the name if he had never heard of the time travelling Padway.

ISOT can be applied to travels to the future.  In Harry Turtledove's 1987 novel The Misplaced Legion, a Roman legion and Celtic prince from the Gallic Wars (58-51 BC) accidentally transport themselves and a Roman legion to a parallel, fantasy universe modeled after the 11th century Byzantine Empire.  While continents and naturals laws may be different, the story nevertheless provides an example on how people from the past can effect people from their future.

This brings us to a major criticism of the ISOT plot device: most ISOT stories can too easily become wankfests.  As expressed in Max's First Law which states: the greater the technological and social advantage of the changed societies in question, the greater the wank.  The creator of the law lists three reasons why an ISOT story can become a wank:

1. Technological Advantage: A society or group from the future knows how to do more things more efficiently than people in the past do.
2. Foresight: A society or group from the future knows what happens in the past, at least before the butterfly effect becomes dominant.  Thus with advanced knowledge, the time traveler s) can profit from their advanced knowledge of events.
3. Access to Increased Resources: Past societies have more non-reusable resources available than are available in the present time of the time traveler s). This means more oil, coal and other resources can be used by the time traveler(s) and their allies.

When considering those factors, having an ISOT becoming a wankfest makes a certain kind of sense.  Dr. Gregory Guzman, my favorite history professor, said when an advanced culture comes in contact with a primitive culture, the less advanced culture will give way to the more advanced culture.  Thus, from one point of view, the Nantucket of Stirling's Nantucket Trilogy could plausibly manage to create the beginnings of a global empire by the end of the trilogy.

Nevertheless, people have objected to this tendency to become a wankfest as "time-ism", or the irrational belief of the inherently superiority of people from the future compared to people of the past.  This anti-time-ism theme appears in both the 1632 series, Harry Turtledove's 1992 novel The Guns of the South and several online alternate histories.

Despite the criticism, however, the plot device remains popular in the alternate history community and will probably remain so for some time.

* * *

Matt Mitrovich is the founder and editor of Alternate History Weekly Update and a volunteer editor for Alt Hist magazine. His fiction can be found at Echelon Press, Jake's Monthly and The Were-Traveler. 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.