An Alternative Reality

Poul Anderson, The Stars Are Also Fire, 7.

"[Kenmuir] had often wondered what would have developed if [Luna] had stayed clear of the Federation. Idle imagining, of course. When reaction to the War Strike doomed mighty Fireball, the end of separatist Luna was in sight, however long a delaying campaign Niolente and her cohorts might wage. Yet, in some hypothetical quantum-mechanical alternative reality -" (p. 97)

Kenmuir, over here, some of us live, breathe, sweat and excrete alternative realities...

What was the War Strike? Who was Niolente? I am going to have to reread the whole Tetralogy. With our god-like perspective from entirely outside that timeline, we can descend as disembodied observers into any of its historical periods and not necessarily in chronological order.

Poul Anderson could have written a novel set in that "...hypothetical quantum-mechanical alternative reality..." A tetralogy might cover not four periods of a linear history, but four alternative versions of a single period. But, of course, no author can pursue every possibility. After Harvest Of Stars and its three sequels, Anderson gave us other works, including Genesis.

I once had this idea:

an author writes a novel about a family living in an English stately home;

his second novel begins as if it were a prequel, e.g., it starts with a meeting between a man and a woman whom we recognize as the grandparents of the generation featured in the first novel;

however, the man and the woman do not get together, neither they nor any children of theirs move into the stately home, which remains unoccupied;

then we realize that the first novel had recounted not what did happen but what would have happened if the events of the second novel had gone differently.

And it is all fiction so none of it happened, anyway.