All The Alternative Histories

Is there a catalogue of alternative histories anywhere? We know who the main writers are and what the main themes are. Roy Tully in SM Stirling's Conquistador (New York, 2004) summarizes two:

"'...I know the concept. South wins the Civil War, Hitler wins World War Two, that sort of thing. Been some pretty good movies that used it.'" (p. 177)

There are other obvious themes:

Alexander the Great lived longer (Poul Anderson, Greg Bear, SM Stirling);
different outcomes in 1066 (?);
no Reformation (Kingsley Amis, Philip Pullman);
a successful Spanish Armada (Keith Roberts);
Oliver Cromwell lived longer (a DC Comics Elseworld) -

-and less obvious:

aliens invaded Earth during World War II (Harry Turtledove);
Mars and Venus were terraformed long ago (SM Stirling);
someone discovered how to degauss the effects of cold iron (Poul Anderson).

Bring The Jubilee by Ward Moore begins as a Confederate States alternative history but ends as a causality violation time travel novel, thus showing the degree of overlap between these two sf themes. Did Bring The Jubilee influence Anderson's "Time Patrol"? Anderson could not remember. However, conceptually, Bring The Jubilee does belong in a sequence of precursors to the Time Patrol:

Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee...;
HG Wells, The Time Machine;
L Sprague de Camp, Lest Darkness Fall;
Moore, Bring The Jubilee;
Anderson, "The Little Monster" and "The Man who Came Early."

An involuntary time traveler prospers and makes changes that do not last;
the Time Traveler invents the Time Machine and his dinner guests discuss anachronisms on battlefields like Hastings;
a second involuntary time traveler prospers and makes lasting changes;
a time traveling historian unintentionally diverts the course of a decisive battle;
a third involuntary time traveler survives but a fourth comes to grief;
the Time Patrol is founded to prevent accidental or deliberate historical changes.

In Anderson's "The House of Sorrows" and also in the deleted timeline of his "Delenda Est," Christianity does not get started whereas, in his Westfall timeline, Christendom exists but is destroyed. In all three timelines, Europe remains divided into small warring states practicing polytheism. The difference is that the Westfallers eventually develop science.

Aldiss, Amis, Anderson, Asimov, Lewis

I list these names as an arresting alphabetical arrangement with curious conceptual connections. In book shop science fiction sections, I always look for Anderson, Poul but usually find instead Aldiss, Anderson, Kevin and (a lot of) Asimov.

A recorded discussion between Kingsley Amis, Brian Aldiss and CS Lewis was the Introduction to Kingsley Amis' and Robert Conquest's Spectrum IV science fiction anthology. Although well known as anything but "sf writers," both Amis and Lewis wrote some science fiction. Lewis also wrote a poem that could have been aimed directly at Asimov's Galactic Empire novels and Anderson's Terran Empire series:

"Why did you lure us on like this,
"Light-year on light-year, through the abyss,
"Building (as though we cared for size!)
"Empires that cover galaxies,
"If at journey's end we find
"The same old stuff we left behind,
"Well-worn Tellurian stories of
"Crooks, spies, conspirators, or love,
"Whose setting might as well have been
"The Bronx, Montmartre or Bethnal Green?

"Why should I leave this green-floored cell,
"Roofed with blue air, in which we dwell,
"Unless, outside its guarded gates,
"Long, long desired, the Unearthly waits..."

- as it does in Lewis' own interplanetary novels. (Lewis is a period piece, writing "Tellurian" rather than "Terrestrial" or "Terran.")

Finally, to complete this sequence, Brian Aldiss, in conversation at an sf convention, made precisely the same point as Lewis' poem and specifically about Anderson, saying, in effect, "Poul Anderson will tell you a dozen ways to get to another planet but what happens when we get there? The same things as on Earth!"

I think that this criticism is far more valid of Asimov than of Anderson. The latter's dozen different ways to get to another planet are scientifically informed and imaginative. Asimov merely invokes the cliche "hyperspace" whereas Anderson gives us a different and plausible interpretation of "hyperspace," among other means of interstellar travel.

Asimov wanted a humans-only Galactic Empire merely to give him a population big enough for Seldon's psychohistorical predictions to work whereas Anderson gives us a far more plausible and colorful declining interstellar empire. In an entire novel, The People Of The Wind, Anderson's colony planet Avalon successfully resists Terran imperial annexation. So far, then, Lewis' and Aldiss' criticism seems valid. However, the Avalonian environment and its non-human colonists are realized in detail. We are not still on Earth.

Anderson's Flandry series gives us "...spies, conspirators, or love..." in exotic settings. It has to be acknowledged that action fiction in extraterrestrial and futuristic settings was one appeal of Planet Stories sf. However, Anderson creates, and Flandry contends with, planetary environments like Talwin which are not the Bronx moved into space. And Anderson's later novels, like Genesis and Starfarers, venture into speculative futures going far beyond interstellar espionage or imperialism.