![]() ![]() Jonathon Stroud’s Bartimaeus trilogy), alternate history gives us the chance to consider what our world would be like in entirely different circumstances. Whether the portrayal is fairly realistic ( as in Harry Turtledove’s Timeline 191 ) or completely fantastical ( e.g. The same “what if” question gives rise to alternate history, where we try to imagine our world as made different. ![]() In our private lives, we wonder how life would have turned out if we’d gone to college B rather than college A, if we’d gotten (or kept) a particular job, etc. Divergence as the Elephant in the RoomĪt some point, all of us wonder about the road not taken. ![]() As a result, I’ve been thinking about how alternate history works, and what techniques apply to the sub-genre. AD 3240 it encountered an alien species on the other side of the Orion Nebula which had also taken "the road less traveled".For the past several months, I’ve been having a lot of fun reading recent alternate histories and historical fantasies ( I’ve reviewed a couple in earlier posts). The Loki Salvage Service was created to continue this work and c.a. Some 1200 years after the first contact with an alien species, a few human colonies, including Loki, had regained most of the technological knowledge of the Terran Confederacy, both by rediscovery and by scavenging ruins. It became impossible to administer and so collapsed. However, this expansion was too quick and too extensive. With other technology far in advance of other species, humanity quickly expanded to other stars conquering the native populations and forming an empire called the Terran Confederacy. While set in the same universe as "The Road Not Taken", it has not been reprinted.Īfter the failed Roxolan invasion, Earth gained knowledge of hyperdrive and contragrav. It was originally published in Analog, October, 1984, and reprinted in Imperial Stars I: The Stars at War, edited by Jerry Pournelle & John F. "Herbig-Haro" is a short story by Harry Turtledove, published under his pen name Eric Iverson. I had to look that one up, here are the research results:įrom the article on the Harry Turtledove Wikia. Radar, radio, computers, fission and fusion - no wonder we spent the next two hundred years conquering." With a chuckle, Chang said, "We must have seemed like angry gods when we finally got the hyperdrive and burst off Terra. And those have much broader applications - the others are only really good for moving things from here to there in a hurry." With attention focused on them, too, work on other things, like electricity and atomics, never gets started. "But trying to explain contragrav and the hyperdrive skews an unsophisticated, developing physics out of shape. What's that race that flew bronze ships because they couldn't smelt iron? And every species we know that reached what the old Terrans would have called a seventeenth-century technological level did what was needed - except us." "No idea - in hindsight they're obvious enough. It was a rude shock when they found that a couple of simple experiments could have given them the key to contragrav and the hyperdrive three, four, even five centuries earlier." (ed note: in the 1500's.) "Back then, on Terra, they knew FTL travel was impossible forever. Know any others? Message #scifi and let your friendly mods know! Imaginary Mindscapes - The Art of Imagination.The Orville (Star Trek Comparisons NOT allowed).The Orville (Star Trek Comparisons allowed).Ghost in the Shell and Ghost_in_the_Shell.Previously interviewed authors in the Ask an SF Author series: To write spoilers in comments, use the following method: (/s "Darth Vader is Yoda's father")Īward Winning SF author Nancy Kress answers questions from the Reddit Scifi Community If you see a title with a spoiler in it, downvote it as hard as you can and then message the moderators. PLEASE DO NOT POST SPOILERS IN YOUR SUBMISSION TITLE. New Rule: This rule was stupid and it's gone.Science Fiction, or Speculative Fiction if you prefer.
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