"Building Alternative Realities"

  By

  Robert Silverberg

  Science fiction, which is what I've been writing for the past fifty-odd years, is sometimes described as fiction that deals with alternative realities. So it does, in certain special ways which I'll shortly describe. But, strictly speaking, all fiction is about alternative realities. That's what makes it fiction.

  Even the most autobiographical of novels, the books that offer themselves as stenographic transcriptions of experienced reality, aren't quite the one-to-one equivalents of the real world that they purport to be. Such autobiographical novels as James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, D.H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers, and Thomas Wolfe's Of Time and The River come quickly to mind, and some of the best books of Saul Bellow and Philip Roth are thinly disguised autobiography, too, but in each case these great writers felt free to make things up here and there, to edit and shade, to add little touches of color, to make this character or that one a bit larger than life, for the sake of giving greater dramatic emphasis to the underlying autobiographical material they were drawing upon. So even these books, undeniably rooted as each one is in the novelist's own experiences, deliver not a pure jolt of transcribed reality but, rather, an alternative reality modulated and modified by the fictional process.

  Then there are the novels that are spun entirely, or almost entirely, out of the writer's imagination: Thomas Mann's Confessions of Felix Krull, say, or William Faulkner's Sanctuary, or Franz Kafka's The Trial, or Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory. These are books about invented people and situations, in no way autobiographical except, perhaps, in the most

  far-fetched metaphorical sense. Mann was never a slippery rogue of a con man; Faulkner was never a sinister gangster given to creepy sexual practices; Kafka was never suddenly placed under arrest and put on trial before a tribunal of unknown makeup and jurisdiction; Greene was never an

  alcoholic Mexican priest. Like all writers, they drew on certain aspects of themselves, however transformed, distorted, inverted, to create these characters and situations. But those characters are very different from the writers who invented them, and what the writers are providing in their

  books is depictions of realities that never existed, alternative realities that we find convincing and plausible because of the skill of their inventors.

  What makes these books convincing is that the invented aspect of reality, the fictional dimension (Felix Krull's roguery, Faulkner's gangster's creepiness) is embedded in as careful a representation of existing reality, the actual quotidian world, as the writer could create. Note that I say a representation of reality. The desk in front of me as I write this has very solid reality. It's big and bulky, and when I slap it with my hand it responds with a loud noise, and its middle drawer contains real postage stamps, paper clips, and staples. I could write long paragraphs about my

  desk, its shape, its color, the scars that time has inflicted on it, but no matter how eloquent those paragraphs were, they wouldn't constitute a desk. They'd just be clumps of words describing a desk. If I were to paint the most cunning depiction of my desk that was possible to paint, a dazzling trompe-l'oeil simulation, it would still be only a thing of two dimensions made out of pigment and canvas, useless for holding paper clips. Similarly, a map of California isn't California. A photo of Marilyn Monroe isn't Marilyn Monroe. Novelists try to construct, out of words alone, convincing imitations of the world about them, against which they set their invented

  characters and let them move through the invented situations of their plots. The novel itself isn't the world about the novelist; it's a verbal recreation of it, what the semanticists used to call a first-order abstraction. Putting imaginary characters and imaginary plot situations into it jumps us up into a second level of abstraction, the alternative reality that all fiction, however grittily realistic it pretends to be, is delivering.

  Even when we look at science fiction -- and we should, about this time, because science fiction is the subject on which I'm best qualified to discourse -- we find ourselves, usually, only one further level of abstraction up from the "realistic" novel, even though science fiction is commonly thought to be fiction about worlds that don't exist.

  Consider one of the first great s-f novels, H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds. Everything about it is realistic -- it is set in the village just outside London where Wells lived, in the time when Wells was living there, and many of the characters are portraits of Wells' own actual neighbors -- except for one intrusive item of fantastic non-reality, which is the landing of an invading army from Mars in the suburban town of Woking. Woking really exists, and Wells does his best to make us see it as it was in his day, and what sort of people his neighbors were. But there aren't any Martians in the actual universe, and even if there were, they wouldn't have been anything like the ones Wells described, and they wouldn't have journeyed across space to invade Woking. That part is pure fantasy. It's what makes the novel science fiction. Wells' one big fantastic assumption, set against a background that attempts to represent our known reality, is

  what generates the story. He's openly offering us an alternative reality, one in which there are hostile Martians who might land in our midst.

  My own novel, Dying Inside, uses the same technique of juxtaposing a fantastic assumption against realistic representation. It is set in New York City in 1976 (I wrote it in 1971); the protagonist is an unhappy man of about my own age, David Selig, who lives in a seedy hotel very much like the one in which I lived myself twenty years earlier when going to school at Columbia; he earns his living by writing term papers for undergraduates, and I quote a few such papers in the book which are, in fact, term papers that I wrote in my own college days. In various other ways the life of David Selig is based on my own, too. All of that creates the texture of reality I was aiming for in the book. There's nothing bizarre or unfamiliar about the world David Selig lives in. It looks exactly like New York City of 1976 in every respect. It contains no Martians, no androids, no ray guns. But David Selig differs from you and me in one huge way, one science-fictional way, because he is capable of reading other people's thoughts as easily as you are reading these words. What makes the novel science fiction is its exhaustive examination of what it must be like to have that ability -- and Selig's telepathy is the only fantastic aspect of what is otherwise an extremely realistic novel.

  Even when science fiction moves off to other worlds it derives its power from the contrast between its reality-based texture and the single fantastic assumption that intrudes on that texture. Take Ursula K. Le Guin's novel "The Left Hand of Darkness." It's set on an imaginary planet, yes, but that isn't the fantastic part of the story. Le Guin goes to great effort to construct that imaginary planet according to the laws of science as we currently know them, and it's a completely plausible imaginary planet, which, as we travel through it in the course of the book, comes to seem as real to us as Wells' Woking or my 1976 New York. What is fantastic is the nature of the people who live on that planet, who are human in every respect, except that they are sexually metamorphic: neuter much of the time, they periodically shift into a sexual form, which could be either male or female depending on the hormonal flow of the moment. Oysters shift from one sex to another fairly easily, so I hear, but humans don't -- not "real" ones, anyway. Because Le Guin had important things to say about the nature of gender, though, she invented a variant race of humans who lack fixed sexual identities, and that is the big speculative leap that

  catapults the novel into an alternative reality and makes it a brilliant work of science fiction.

  There is a particular kind of science fiction, to which I am quite partial both as a writer and as a reader, that carries the speculative process one further step: to the realistic depiction of a world that in some ways is identical to the one we all inhabit, but which in fact is quite stunningly different, because an alteration, perhaps one that seems to be quite minor, has taken place somewhere in the course of its history, and the world has gone spinning off in a direction that takes it very far from the reality we think we know. Here we have alternative realities in their most extreme form. The writer is not merely tinkering slightly with the events and details of his actual experiences, as Joyce was in Portrait of the Artist, or thrusting Martians into a realistically drawn English suburb, as Wells did in War of the Worlds, or even devising a wholly new kind of human sexuality but setting it within a recognizably human society, as Le Guin did in Left Hand of Darkness. Reality itself, our shared history, the fixed course of the stream of time, is being given a twist, something seemingly small but in fact with colossal impact on the course of events, an impact sufficient to throw it into an entirely different path. I find this kind of story one of the most exciting aspects of the great mind- game that is science fiction.

  One of the earliest such tales of alternative reality that I know of is Edward Everett Hale's "Hands Off," published in Harper's Magazine in 1898. The one little twist here is the assumption that Joseph, the son of Jacob, was never sold into slavery in Egypt, but, instead, had escaped the slave traders and returned to his father's camp in the desert. Whereupon -- without the shrewd mind of Joseph to guide its government -- Egypt was conquered by Canaanite barbarians, who went on to engulf the rest of the ancient world. Judaism died out, the great culture of Greece never had a chance to emerge, Rome was crushed, and a reign of "lust, brutality, terror, cruelty, carnage, famine, agony, horro r" descended on humanity, until, after a series of hideous wars, civilization perished entirely. All because Joseph, son of Jacob, had never reached the court of Pharaoh!

  In 1931 an entire book of such speculative fantasies was published: If It Had Happened Otherwise, edited by J.C. Squire. This was a volume of eleven historical essays -- "lapses into imaginary history," Squire called them -- by such distinguished writers as Winston Churchill, Hilaire Belloc, G.K. Chesterton, and Andre Maurois. Each author chose a pivotal moment in history and gave it a different spin. One essay is called, "If Booth Had Missed Lincoln." Another, "If Napoleon Had Escaped to America." Churchill, characteristically, does a dizzying double switch in "If Lee Had Not Won the Battle of Gettysburg," postulating a Confederate victory in the American Civil War and then going on to speculate on what world history might have been like had the North won the war instead.

  Modern science-fiction writers have made this kind of alternative-reality speculation a lively sub-species of their field. They have given us such novels as Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle, unforgettably depicting a United States occupied by German and Japanese forces after its defeat in World War II, Keith Roberts' Pavane, showing a twentieth-century England untouched by the Industrial Revolution as the result of the assassination of Queen Elizabeth I in 1588, and L. Sprague de Camp's rollicking The Wheels of If, in which the Viking invasions of England in the ninth century had brought the British Isles permanently under Scandinavian rule and the Norsemen had gone on to establish a kingdom in North America that was still going strong in De Camp's greatly altered twentieth century.

  A skilled writer can create an alternative reality even in the limited space a short story affords. H. Beam Piper's "He Walked Around the Horses" shows a world in which the American Revolution failed; Poul Anderson's "Delenda Est" give us a Rome defeated by Carthage; in Philip Jose Farmer's "Sail On! Sail On!", Columbus discovers that the world actually is flat and his fleet goes hurtling over its edge. Other stories of this genre have shown Benjamin Franklin inventing the internal-combustion engine, Napoleon dying in one of the early battles of the French Revolution, the atomic bomb being developed during the reign of Queen Victoria, and Alexander Hamilton, having surviving his duel with Aaron Burr, going on to become president.

  During the course of my own career I've made use of altered history again and again to provide the impetus for a story. In "Translation Error," back in 1959, I had an emissary from another world take steps to avert World War I so that the second World War, which would lead to the development of atomic weapons, would also not take place. My novel of 1967, The Gate of Worlds, proposed that the Black Death of 1348 had killed so many Europeans that the Ottoman Turks had been able to conquer the whole continent, leaving the New World to develop independently under Aztec and Inca ruler and Africa as a continent of black-ruled kingdoms. And in "Trips," a short story from 1975, I packed a dozen or more alternative worlds into a single

  work less than thirty pages long, in which my protagonist drifts from one reality to another: in one section, Genghis Khan has created a worldwide Mongol empire, in another, President Roosevelt's retirement in 1940 has led to American neutrality and a German victory in World War II, and in another, John F. Kennedy was never assassinated. Finally my wanderer returns to what he takes to be the real world, his own world, our world, from which he had originally departed -- only to discover that he hasn't reached home after all, for this world, too, similar as it is to the one from which he first set out, is also an alternative reality, in which another version of himself is living in the house he takes to be his own. And in a story called "Needle in a Timestack" (1983) I devised a 21st-century society in which time machines are as ubiquitous as cell phones and people are constantly scrambling other people's lives by making changes in their pasts.

  My most elaborate venture into alternative reality, though, is the novel Roma Eterna (2003), which portrays, in ten sections spanning fifteen hundred years, a world in which the Roman Empire never fell apart, and is still -- in greatly altered form -- ruling the world in the twentieth century. The best way I know to show you how such visions of alternative reality are created is to describe, step by step, the process by which I constructed that book. What was the key factor, I asked myself, in the collapse of Imperial Rome? Isolate that factor, remove it from history, and, at least for the purposes of my story, Rome would withstand all challenge and survive through the ages.

  I had been reading, just then, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the classic work of the eighteenth-century historian Edward Gibbon. It was Gibbon's thesis that the rise of Christianity, adopted as the official state religion by the fourth-century Roman Emperor Constantine, set in motion the forces that caused the crumbling of Roman power. There were other factors as well, of course -- the encroachment of barbarian tribes on the Roman borders, for example, and Rome's catastrophic decision to enlist barbarian troops in its own armies -- but Gibbon saw Christianity as a poisonous creed, preoccupied with sterile theological debate and focused on hypothetical rewards in a future existence in a supernatural world at the expense of a practical concentration on the problems of life in the here and now, and he felt that its spread had dealt the Empire its death-blow. "I have described the triumph of barbarism and religion," he said toward the end of his immense book, a famous sentence succinctly encapsulating his analysis of the Empire's decay.

  Gibbon's views on Christianity were controversial in their own day, of course, and later research has shown them to be oversimplified and inadequate. For one thing, he chose not to try to explain the survival of the eastern, or Byzantine, half of the Empire for a thousand years after

  the fall of the western half, though the eastern Romans were every bit as Christian as those of the West. He regarded the history of the eastern Empire as "a uniform tale of weakness and misery," when in truth for many centuries it rivalled or even exceeded in magnificence and power its

  counterpart of the West. For another, Gibbon lacked sufficient information about Mithraism and the other mystery cults of the Empire's Asian provinces, which had already infiltrated the Empire before the rise of Christianity and probably would have come to play the same dominant role in

  Roman spiritual life as Christianity did, had Christianity not been able to make itself the most successful creed of its kind

  None of that troubled me. I was planning to write a work of speculative fiction, after all, not a history of Rome. The first question one asks oneself when setting out to invent an alternative history is, "What if -- ?" My initial "What if -- ?" question was, "What if Gibbon was right about the effects of Christianity on the stability of the Roman Empire?"

  That gave me my starting assumption: remove Christianity from the historical mix, and Rome endures forever.

  The easiest way for me to achieve that would have been to remove Jesus from history -- by having him die in boyhood, let us say -- but I opted for a more radical process of elimination. The concepts that Jesus was teaching in the Palestine of two thousand years ago were formed as a reaction to the rigidly conservative Judaism of the culture in which he was raised. Because Palestine, in Jesus' time, was a province of the Roman Empire, both Judaism and Jesus' modified version of that creed were able easily to travel across the Mediterranean and take root in the Roman heartland itself. Very well: eliminate not just Jesus but Judaism itself from Palestine, and Rome is likely to remain pagan forever. I arranged this by going back twelve centuries to the Hebrew escape from Egypt -- the story told in the Book of Exodus -- and obliterating it from the time-stream. The Bible tells how the Hebrews, a nomadic tribe of the Near Eastern desert lands, had settled in Palestine in ancient times, had been carried off into slavery in Egypt, and then, under the leadership of Moses, had made their way back to Palestine to reconquer their old homeland and establish a powerful kingdom there. I found it easy enough to undo the Exodus for the purpose of creating alternative history. The science-fiction writer makes and unmakes centuries of history in five minutes at the keyboard. I saw to it that the Red Sea did not part before Moses and his people, and so the army of Pharaoh caught up with the fleeing Hebrews at the water's edge and annihilated them. Hence there was no migration into Palestine by way of Sinai, no establishment of a Jewish kingdom there, no development of monotheistic beliefs that ultimately would filter out into Rome and take permanent hold. The Jews would remain a small and stubborn tribe living in Egypt and the Romans would ultimately conquer the ancient world in the name of Jupiter.

 

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