Playing With History : Fantasy Writer Harry Turtledove Looks at the Past and Asks, ‘What If . . . ‘

Science fiction novelist Harry Turtledove got the idea for his new book from a postcard he received in 1988 from a fellow writer, Judith Tarr. Tarr complained that the cover art for her latest book seemed “as anachronistic as Robert E. Lee with an Uzi.”

What was an annoyance to Tarr was serendipity for Turtledove. In his new Civil War novel “The Guns of the South,” due out in October from Ballantine, Robert E. Lee’s Confederate troops pack AK-47s, delivered via a time machine by 21st-Century South African right-wingers.

Turtledove, 43, holds a Ph.D. in history, but turned to science fiction and fantasy when he couldn’t find an academic job, and has made his entire career as a writer of imaginary history. This field seems to better suit the scope of his imagination. In the dozens of novels and stories the Canoga Park resident has generated since graduating from UCLA in 1977, he has grappled with premises that would not fly in the halls of academe.

What if America had been first settled not by Amerinds but by a still-extant race of primitive man? (“A Different Flesh,” Congdon & Weed, 1988).

What if Christopher Columbus had to answer to the Environmental Protection Agency? (“Report of the Special Committee on the Quality of Life,” short story, 1980).

What if, in 1942, with the Allied and Axis powers in strategic balance, the world had suddenly faced invasion by aliens from space? (untitled novel-in-progress).

The premise of “Guns of the South” is also what if? What if in the late stages of the Civil War someone had flooded the battered Confederacy with 20th Century automatic weapons?

“My story detector light lit instantly,” says Turtledove of the Tarr postcard. “Who, I asked myself, would give Robert E. Lee an Uzi? But no, don’t give Lee an Uzi--it’s a police weapon with a short range. Give him a Russian AK-47. Give him lots of AK-47s. But who’d want to give Robert E. Lee lots of Kalachnikovs? How about the South Africans--150 years later in time? What if a band of Afrikaner terrorists, angry over the dissolution of apartheid, got their hands on a time machine?”

Alternative or alternate history is not a new intellectual game. In 1836, Louis-Napoleon Geoffrey-Chateau published the first known example. The premise of “Napoleon and the Conquest of the World, 1812-1823” was that the French emperor had not made the fatal mistake of invading Russia.

In 1931, a number of historians and social commentators, including A.J.P. Taylor, G.K. Chesterton and Winston Churchill, tried their hands at alternate history in a book of essays called “If; Or History Rewritten.” Thirty years later, Look magazine published two essays: “If the South Had Won the Civil War,” by MacKinlay Kantor and “If Hitler Had Won World War II,” by William Shirer.

The appeal of the genre has extended to a gamut of writers, especially in science fiction whose practitioners include Philip K. Dick, Ward Moore and Keith Roberts. Within the literary mainstream, Britain’s Ronald Clark titillated the English literati with books like “Queen Victoria’s Bomb,” exploring the consequences of premature nuclear proliferation.

In 1976, Kingsley Amis published “The Alteration” about a modern-day Europe under Catholic domination. Len Deighton, Vladimir Nabakov and John Hersey have also tried their hands at remaking the present by tinkering with the past. Even former cyberpunk gurus William Gibson and Bruce Sterling turned to history in 1991 with “The Difference Engine,” postulating Victorian England driven by coal-powered computers.

Underpinning some alternate history are scientific theories of parallel universes. Physicists including Murray Gel-Mann, Hugh Graham and Stephen Hawking have pursued the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, in which it is speculated there could be “a universe in which all possible outcomes of an experiment actually occur,” according to an article in Physics Today.

Physicist and writer Gregory Benford, who has edited three anthologies in a “What Might Have Been” series and will soon publish a fourth, says of the genre’s popularity, “It’s the Zeitgeist . Throughout Western civilization we have become more and more aware in the last century of the fragility of events, the arbitrariness of history. This crucial idea emerges from some of the feelings of uncertainty and anomie and Angst that go along with modern times.”

Alternate histories are proving increasingly popular because unlike conventional science fiction, they appeal to readers who are either fearful of science or simply geared to the past rather than to the future, says Charles Platt, a science fiction critic and the author of “Dream Makers: The Uncommon Men and Women Who Write Science Fiction.”

“Alternate histories have a non-fiction appeal,” says Platt, “because they have real history wrapped up in them. Overall, there’s been a general trend in the last 20 years in book publishing toward fiction which has a more documentary flavor, and I think this upsurge fits into that.”

Alternate history even has sub-genres, historical events that repeatedly stir the imaginations of writers and readers. Probably the biggest is: What if the Allies lost World War II? There have been so many “Hitler Victorious” stories that they fill an anthology of that title as well as any number of novels.

One such, Robert Harris’s “Fatherland,” about the state of Europe years after a Hitler victory, has topped British bestseller lists for months. Published this month in the United States by Random House, the book landed on Publishers Weekly’s national bestseller list June 22, and film director Mike Nichols has optioned the book for $1 million.

The Civil War and the Kennedys are also popular topics. “The Fantastic Civil War,” along with “The Fantastic World War II,” are the subject of anthologies of alternate history published in 1990 and ’91 by Baen Books.

This year, author Mike Resnick compiled an anthology published by Tor entitled “Alternate Kennedys.” Among the possibilities entertained: What if the Kennedy brothers had grown up to be the hottest rock group in the world? What if U. S. Atty. Gen. Robert F. Kennedy had been told to investigate--and perhaps cover up--a break-in at the Republican Party headquarters in 1964? What if John Kennedy had landed in the real Camelot?

Turtledove says that it was an early interest in science fiction that sparked his fascination with history. A native of Gardena, Turtledove recalls a third-grade encounter with L. Sprague De Camp’s 1941 novel, “Lest Darkness Fall,” a Mark Twainish romp about a man who travels back to 6th-Century Rome and tries to stave off the Dark Ages.

“I started out trying to find how much of the book was real and how much wasn’t. By the time I’d finished, I was hooked,” says Turtledove.

At UCLA Turtledove specialized in Byzantine history. The appeal of that empire, he says, is that it preserved Christian theology, Greek philosophy and Roman law. The attraction Byzantium holds for him as a science fiction writer, however, is that few general readers in this country know anything about it.

“I have command of a large store of incidents and characters that are unfamiliar to the general reader,” he says, “but which are made for adaptation into fiction because they are interesting, exciting and vivid.”

Turtledove’s Byzantium novels, all published by Ballantine-Del Rey Books, include “The Misplaced Legion” (1987), “An Emperor for The Legion” (1987), “The Legion of Videssos” (1987), “Agent of Byzantium (Congdon & Weed” (1987) and others. His titles sell a very respectable average of 75,000 copies each.

Searching for a launching point for the novel, Turtledove settled on the Battle for the Wilderness, which marked the opening of Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s Richmond campaign in 1864. The 47th North Carolina was the first regiment to meet Grant’s troops, and would be his recipients of the modern Afrikaner guns. But a visit to the UCLA library failed to reveal who the 47th’s commander was.

“I wrote cold to the North Carolina Department of Archives and History asking about who some of the officers were in early 1864,” Turtledove says. “I figured they might know that. What I didn’t figure--in Byzantine history you are dealing with patching threads of material rather than being overwhelmed by it--a fellow named W. T. Jordan would mail me the regimental history written by one of the captains and, better yet, a complete roster with everyone’s age, rank, home town, occupation and wounds suffered.

“It gave me half of my characters,” he says.

Turtledove set the book late in the Civil War, he says, because if the South had won early, “they wouldn’t have learned anything other than that they had been right all along. I wanted to make sure that the South had to confront all of the problems it would eventually face.

“What science fiction does better than any other form of literature,” says Turtledove, “is look at where we are now through a fun house mirror. Playing with history--I really have little interest in looking ahead at the far future--just gives you a different kind of mirror to look through.”