Building Alternative Realities, page 2
With this hypothesis in mind, I started my book at the end, writing the last section first: "To the Promised Land," set in Egypt in the alternative-world equivalent of our year 1973. In this I showed a charismatic Jewish leader once more organizing an exodus from Egypt, not to
Palestine, this time, but to some world of space; and, after having established my final visionary image of this second Moses spurring his people to escape the iron hand of Rome in a spaceship, I worked backward to devise a completely new Roman history covering the previous twenty centuries.
Not quite twenty, exactly. The plan of my alternative reality did not require any historical changes in the first couple of hundred years of Imperial Rome. Let Augustus found the Empire, let him be followed by Tiberius and Caligula and Claudius and the rest of the original Twelve
Caesars, even let the crazy Emperor Commodus lead the Empire toward chaos by the end of what we in our reality call the 2nd Century A.D. and the equally crazy Caracalla have the throne a generation later. (I could not, of course, use the chronology of the Christian era in my book, and employed the Roman system instead, which dates from the legendary founding of the city in what we would call 753 B.C. So the assassination of Commodus, which occurred in 192 A.D. by our system of reckoning time, happened in the Roman year 945, and the assassination of Caracalla in the Roman year 970 instead of our year 217.)
I needed to do some tinkering with third-century Roman history, though, because in the real third century the Emperors who followed Caracalla, with just a few exceptions, were ruthless generals who seized the throne by force, ruled only briefly, and were murdered by some even more ruthless general. These decades of chaos allowed the barbarians of the frontier to make inroads into Roman territory that in time weakened the Empire beyond repair. So I invented a fictional series of strong third-century Emperors -- Titus Gallius, Gaius Martius, Marcus Anastasius -- who healed the damage that Commodus and Caracalla had caused. Their (fictional) intervention in the time-track allowed me to hand a greatly strengthened Rome over to the actual monarch who had ruled it in the early fourth century A.D., Constantine the Great.
My Constantine, like the historical one, sees that the Empire is too big to be governed from a single center, and divides it into eastern and western administrative zones, founding the city of Constantinople -- what is now Istanbul -- as the capital from which he will rule the eastern half. Like the actual Constantine he is a capable ruler who keeps the barbarians of the frontier in check and fends off challenges to his power from ambitious rivals. The one thing he does not do is proclaim Christianity to be the state religion, for I have seen to it that Christianity does not exist by preventing the Jews from leaving Egypt for Palestine, so that the intermingling of Jewish religious beliefs with those already established in the Near East which gave rise to Christianity did not occur.
Rome therefore remains pagan and strong, though it does, as it did in real history, split into two realms, each with its own Emperor -- a new Greek-speaking one with its capital in Constantinople, and the old western one with its capital in Rome. At times in my book, as in the real reality, the relationship between the two Empires is friendly and close; at other times they look upon each other with a barely veiled hostility, and sometimes the hostility is not veiled at all. But in our world the western empire will fall beneath the onslaught of the barbarian hordes late in the fifth century; in the world of my novel it goes on and on and on, century after century.
With all that established, I faced one of the most difficult tasks in writing an alternative-history novel: how to let the reader know where the point of divergence from real history occurs, without simply addressing the reader directly and straightforwardly spelling the thing out. I solved this with a little prologue, set in the Roman year 1203 -- our year 450 -- in which two elderly historians, meeting by chance in the library, engage in a pleasant conversation in which one of them wonders what course history might have taken if that obscure Egyptian tribe, the Hebrews, had succeeded in getting out of Egypt and spreading their subversive cult's beliefs through the Empire. His colleague is unimpressed. "'Well,' said Aufidius, suppressing a yawn, 'all that is sheer fantasy, you know. None of it happened, after all.'"
And off I go into the first long section of the book. It takes place in 1282 -- our year 529, by which time in our world the Empire of the West had already fallen -- and is intended to depict life in the city of Rome itself with the western realm very much a going concern. That chapter is followed by one, set about eighty years later, in which a Roman who has been sent into exile in the torrid and unpleasant land of Arabia discovers a potential threat to the safety of the Empire, an intensely charismatic prophet named Mahmud who is preaching a monotheistic religion with an extremely powerful appeal. Mahmud is planning to spread his creed to all neighboring lands, and my Roman shrewdly takes steps to have the man done away with before he can cause serious trouble.
Then I jump six hundred years. It is the Roman year 1861, our year 1108. The New World has been discovered, far across the ocean, and, of course, Rome wants to conquer it. That is what Rome does: conquer places. But this place is too far away for easy conquest, and its natives are ferocious warriors; and so the Roman invasion of what we know to be the Mexico of the Mayas turns into a Vietnam-- style quagmire. (One of the incidental pleasures of devising alternative realities is that one can insert analogies of our own reality into the story, appropriately transformed to fit the context.) The overseas military disaster so weakens the Empire of the West that less than a century later it is conquered by its ambitious Byzantine rival; but this is not a book about the fall of the Roman Empire, after all, and I go on in later sections to describe the resurrection of the western realm, its vast new expansion during a period somewhat analogous to our Renaissance, its collapse once more during events that bear no small resemblance to the French Revolution, its evolution afterward into a republic, and so on until, finally, I arrive at the section where I had begun writing the whole saga, the chapter set in Egypt showing the Hebrews planning their exodus into space.
That's how this kind of speculative science fiction is done: choose a premise, consider all the possible consequences of that premise, and develop an expanding chain of events that illustrates those consequences in the most dramatic possible way. That's what I did in Roma Eterna, which I regard as my most successful adventure in alternative reality.
But every premise contains within it the seeds of its own refutation. The whole notion that changing one event can change the entire course of history was playfully demolished in 1958 in a satirical short story, "The Men Who Murdered Mohammed," by the great science-fiction writer Alfred Bester.
Bester, who evidently had read one alternative-history story too many, chooses as his protagonist Dr. Henry Hassel, a genuine mad professor who, consumed by resentment over his wife's infidelity, builds a time machine, goes back to the year 1902, and murders the man who will be his wife's grandfather. By so doing, he supposes that he will be editing his wife out of existence; but when he returns to his own year of 1980, there she is, still entangled in an adulterous embrace. He heads back to 1901 and kills her future grandmother as well. The faithless wife nevertheless survives. Perhaps, he reasons, time can be changed only through some really significant action. Back he goes to 1775 to assassinate George Washington. When that too fails to produce the desired result, he knocks off Christopher Columbus, Napoleon, and Mohammed, all to no avail, and then teaches Madame Curie the secret of nuclear fission. (She builds an experimental bomb in 1900 and destroys Paris in a test.)
None of this produces the slightest change in the world of 1980. Bewildered, now, he revisits 1775 and shoots Washington again, while the earlier version of himself, there on the same errand, looks on in annoyance. Then he heads for the early 1940s, where Enrico Fermi is working on the atomic bomb that Hassel knows had been invented forty years before by Madame Curie, and shoots him too. Nothing he does has any impact on the shape of the future. And then he encounters a fellow time-traveler, this one a professor of mechanics from Yale, who also has been roving through time unsuccessfully trying to change the course of events.
"I got Columbus," says Hassel.
"I got Marco Polo."
"I got Napoleon."
"I thought Einstein was more important."
"Mohammed didn't change things much -- I expected more from him."
"I know. I got him too."
Indeed, they had both assassinated Mohammed, nineteen months apart.
Hassel says, "But how could you have killed him after I killed him?"
"We both killed him."
"That's impossible. And the Yale man replies, "
My boy, time is entirely subjective. It's a private matter -- a personal experience. There is no such thing as objective time, just as there is no such thing as objective love, or an objective soul." They both had roved up and down the time-stream, making radical changes in history -- but only in their own subjective sense of history. Everybody else's history went right on, unaltered.
The Bester story is good sardonic fun, and I have read it many times with much enjoyment. But it doesn't, I think, stand up to serious logical analysis. I prefer to believe that if you change the past you irrevocably change all of time to come -- unless, of course, some other time-traveler
revokes the irrevocable by looping back in time to catch you in the act and cancel out your history-changing deed....
Not that I have any expectation at all that the creation of alternative realities will ever be possible for anyone except science-fiction writers. I look upon time machines and other such history-altering devices as things of pure fantasy, akin to magic carpets and wishing wells. But what enormous intellectual pleasure readers have found in stories of this kind, and what a great delight it has been for me, as a science-fiction writer, to tinker so often with the supposedly fixed course of time!
Robert Silverberg, Building Alternative Realities
