Friday 15 January 2016

Alternative Literatures

We recently referred to CS Lewis. Lewis wrote A Grief Observed, originally as NW Clerk. There is an A Grief Observed in SM Stirling's Draka timeline but it is written by Yolande Ingolfsson.

In our timeline, EP Thompson wrote The Making Of The English Working Class and Eric Hobsbawm wrote The Age Of Revolution, The Age Of Capital, The Age Of Empire and The Age Of Extremes. In the Draka timeline, EP Hobsdown wrote The Age Of Domination.

In Stirling's Angrezi Raj timeline (as far as I remember), Kipling continued to write after the divergence, recounting the Exodus, while Conan Doyle instead wrote detective stories set in the London of an alternative timeline where there had been no Fall.

It is logical that fiction set in an alternative timeline should refer to and even quote fiction written in that timeline. Sandra Miesel's interstitial passages in Anderson's Psychotechnic History mention "What if there had been no World War III?" fictions.

In a British TV drama set in Nazi-occupied Britain, the writer of a TV historical drama about World War II remarked, "Well, I can't rewrite history!"

2 comments:

David Birr said...

Paul:
Let's not forget, too, Stirling showing in *The Sky People* that *Star Trek* had instead been made as *New Frontier* -- I was especially tickled when a man taken over by an alien intelligence said resistance was futile and one of the good guys groaned that now the aliens were quoting TV.

Paul Shackley said...

David,
Nice one.
Paul.