Wednesday 3 October 2018

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.

7 comments:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

And, of course, in these fictional alternate realities, no REAL persons gets hurt. Which means authors can do anything with their characters!

Sean

paulshackley2017@gmail.com said...

Sean,
Alan Moore, in particular, is merciless to his characters.
Paul.

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

I've not read Alan Moore, but I do recall how ROUGH Poul Anderson and S.M. Stirling could be their characters. People can die in all kinds of gruesome ways in their works.

Sean

David Birr said...

Paul and Sean:
Years ago, I told someone that I was reluctant to begin reading George R. R. Martin's series A Song of Ice and Fire, despite my high opinion of his skills, because of how willing he is to create engaging characters, make readers care about those fictional people, and then do utterly horrible things to them. A cartoon I've seen shows Martin gloating, "They think they hate me now ... wait til they see who I kill off next!"

(The cartoon's next panel depicts a reader learning that Martin died before finishing the series, with the implication that he did so deliberately just to anger his audience.)

Paul, I see one problem with your two-novel idea, and that is that the alternate-reality aspect would only be seen by those who read both books.

paulshackley2017@gmail.com said...

David,
It wouldn't matter. The first novel could be appreciated as a fictional narrative in its own right with an extra dimension added by the second novel.
Paul.

David Birr said...

Paul:
Hmmmm. David Drake did something a little bit like that with Skyripper and Fortress. Both feature a ruthless U.S. intelligence agent named Tom Kelly, and both involve the Strategic Defense Initiative's anti-missile weapons possibly being used against invading space aliens. They are NOT in the same timeline, though.

Skyripper could be the near-future (as of 1983 when it was written) of our own world. Fortress, though, is set in a world where:
(1) SDI began in the presidency of John F. Kennedy,
(2) at a time when the U.S. had troops fighting in Lebanon. Also,
(3) the Israelis attacked not a U.S. intelligence ship, the Liberty, but a U.S. cruiser ... which couldn't possibly have been an honest mistake. This matters because Tom Kelly played a role in bringing the Israeli perfidy to public notice, so there are certain people who really wouldn't mind at all if he had a "tragic fatal accident."

So these are two very separate books in which the main character has the same name and personality.

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, DAVID!

I've not read George R.R. Martin's A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE series because of the criticisms I've seen of those books. That is, some commentators complained the series never seem to come to a "resolution," to have a goal or end. My impression was these books were about endless, violent, and vicious intrigues and civil wars by equally unpleasant opposing sides. If true, that discouraged me from reading them. If I want a long SF/Fantasy series, I prefer Stirling's "Emberverse" books. Plenty of war and violence in those books, but at least we can tell which side is better than the other!

Sean