Change makes story, history makes context.
By Lara Elena Donnelly
What if the Nazis cracked the atom bomb? What if the Aztec empire never fell? Alternate history is a genre obsessed with things that never happened, and equally obsessed with things that did.
Why write about real people and real history if you aren’t interested in what really happened? Then again, why write alternate history if you’re that interested in reality and accuracy? Isn’t the whole point of our genre making things up? Except, definitionally, alternate history has everything to do with real history, even where it deviates.
So how do you choose when and where to strike out into the wilds of invention? How do you choose which pieces of the historical record to keep, and why?
Back in 2017, I published a World War I time-travel novelette with Sam J. Miller, about Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, that led to a lot of give and take around “how much fact, how much invention.” Could we invent a psychiatrist to treat Owen? Could that psychiatrist himself have invented a science fictional treatment? Sam was all for it; I had to be convinced. Sassoon’s side of the story—mine—adhered rigidly to historical fact. Or, as rigidly as you can adhere to historical fact when there’s time travel involved.
While Sam and I were working on “Making Us Monsters,” one of our Clarion classmates sent us his notes from World Fantasy 2013, where he heard Tim Powers on a panel saying “If, according to your best information your character broke his arm on Thursday, you cannot come in and say he broke it on Monday because you need that to make your plot work. To do otherwise would be to prose as Frost said free verse was to poetry: playing without a net.”
This truly insane piece of advice resonated with me, a truly insane person. At the time, I couldn’t have told you why. Stubbornness, maybe. And if it was good enough for Tim Powers, surely it was good enough for me!
Andrew Mayden 
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