SCIENCE FICTION Writers alter history to build new futures

Novels explore what might happen if historic events had different outcomes.
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
Have you ever lamented the road not taken, the kiss not stolen or the harsh word spoken?
If so, and who hasn't, you understand on a personal level the appeal of a category of speculative fiction, or science fiction, known as alternate history.
There are no mulligans in the real world, no do-overs in the game of life. But what if there were? What would you do differently and how would it change who you have become?
Alternate history asks the same sort of questions on a grand scale.
What if Hitler had survived and Germany had won World War II? What if Lincoln had not been assassinated? What if the South had won the Civil War? And what, asked Steven Barnes in his novel "Lion's Blood," if Africa had colonized the New World.
There are even more imaginative scenarios. What if aliens had landed at the start of World War II? What if racist South Africans traveled back in time to arm the Confederacy with AK-47s?
These last two ideas are from the fevered and prolific mind of Harry Turtledove, regarded as the dominant writer in the genre today.
Libraries and bookstores stock alternate history novels in the science fiction section, although Harry Harrison's "Stars and Stripes" Civil War-era trilogy about how the North and South unite to defeat England also can be found in the general fiction section.
In love with history
Turtledove has a doctorate in Byzantine history, which, he recently said, qualifies him as "one of the most unemployable human beings on the face of the planet."
"But one thing (academia) did teach me was how to do research. The imagination knows where it wants to go, and the research is the car that takes you there. Research is what makes the imagination feel real."
So when the words he puts in the mouth of Abraham Lincoln in "Guns of the South" or "How Few Remain" sound uncannily like the president himself, it's because they were taken or adapted from what he really said in speeches and letters.
"Guns of the South" "happened by accident" when a colleague described something being as anachronistic "as Robert E. Lee holding an Uzi." Turtledove's response was "Who'd want to give it to him? Time-traveling South Africans?" And then he realized, "Wow, I can do something with that."
Turtledove has written about 50 novels, including the upcoming "Ruled Britannia," about an Elizabethan England ruled by Spain. Its main characters are William Shakespeare and the Spanish playwright Lope De Vega.
'Lion's Blood'
Award-winning science fiction writer Steven Barnes spent a year and half of "very intense research, plotting and planning" to create "Lion's Blood," which envisions a New World colonized by Africans.
Barnes said the genre's unbending tenet is that "you can change one (significant) thing and one thing only and everything else must flow from that and must flow logically." For example, the industrialization of Africa is the major change that makes the "Lion's Blood" timeline possible.
For "Lion's Blood" and its just completed sequel, "Zulu Heart," Barnes wondered "what would be necessary to create a technological situation in Africa" that would allow such a scenario and then took "a step back from there. You have to ask what prohibited it in the first place. And once you have a theory for that, then you can come up with ways to postulate" its opposite.
Barnes, who is writing a new "Star Wars" novel and two books set in prehistoric Africa, is one of the few major black science-fiction writers.
Russell Letson, a reviewer for the science fiction magazine Locus who has written about and taught science fiction for 25 years, said that because alternate histories tend to deal with "pivotal and world-shaping events," Sept. 11 eventually will attract the attention of writers, especially if it leads to bigger and more dramatic events or movements.