Alternate history, far out
Aug. 17th, 2025 07:57 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sunnyskywalkerI read a book recently which got me pondering the challenges of writing alternate histories set long after the point of divergence.
The book was The Dragon Waiting: A Masque of History by John M. Ford. It's set in the late 15th century (though the characters use a different dating system): a Welsh wizard, a Florentine woman doctor, the son of a would-be usurper of the Byzantine throne, and a German vampire team up to thwart a Byzantine plot against England.
There's no way to talk about this without lots of spoilers, so stop here if you'd rather read the book first. I was able to borrow an e-copy from my library easily (an anniversary edition), so that might be an option for you too if you want.
Anyway. The point of divergence is that the emperor Julian the Apostate did not die in 363, but carried on with his program of persecuting Christians and supporting traditional polytheism for years longer. It worked, and about 1,100 years later, Christianity is a tiny, mostly-underground minority religion and everyone else worships gods from the many pantheons still around in whatever combination they please, since Julian also decreed that all religions should be tolerated. (Er, after he'd suppressed the Christians, I guess?) The lack of Christians meant Islam never arose at all, which meant no Muslim armies chipping away at the Byzantine Empire's territory for centuries, which meant Byzantium remained a major power. In fact, it is now a dangerously expansionist empire, that sinister power in the east using devious stratagems and proxy wars to extend their influence over more and more of the world. (Why yes, this book was written during the Cold War.)
Our protagonists decide they might not be able to take the empire down, but they can stop them in one little corner of the world. It's all a little confusing, since I am not very good at untangling Byzantine (literally, this time) plots, and this book has characters making intuitive leaps about everyone's means and motives which they don't fully spell out for readers. But the Byzantines are interfering in England, Wales, and Scotland in various ways. For example, they made some sort of secret agreement with George, Duke of Clarence during one of his turns against his brothers, and destroying that document so it can't be used publicly is one mission. They turn Princes Edward and Richard into vampires; Edward will never be accepted as King Edward V if anyone finds out, and will be controlled by the Byzantines if the secret stays with the few Byzantine agents around the princes. (The wizard John Morton is one. I think. And Dr. Argentine?) And they pass out magical dragon amulets all over Wales which influence people to want to support Henry Tydder once he lands and tries to take the throne with Byzantine backing.
And this is where the record scratch happens for me. I can buy that a lot of things in European history happened similarly to our timeline regardless of which gods everyone was or wasn't worshipping. The Franks might have settled where they did regardless (being pagan in both timelines to start), and learned to speak the local Romano-Gallic dialect with a German accent that eventually became French. Sure. And I can more or less go along with the idea that somehow, as unlikely as it probably should be, the later Plantagenets somehow had the same cast of characters as in our timeline, because if your basic premise is "Richard III fights to keep his throne, only everyone's pagan and he's also fighting a Cold War against Byzantium," that's just something you have to accept.
But that everything should happen exactly the same way until our characters arrive on the scene? Like, the Wars of the Roses seem not to have been different in the slightest? Even when things do start happen differently, they actually don't. Clarence is still executed for treason, in a butt of Malmsey wine at his own request. The princes being turned into vampires is just a reason to have them whacked, and they disappear from the public record right on schedule. Anthony Woodville survives, but this doesn't matter until the Battle of Bosworth Field, which is like the second-to-last chapter. Hastings and Buckhingham get executed for treason more or less as they did, though this Buckingham is conspiring with the Byzantines. John Morton the not-bishop-wizard dies and so won't be telling little Thomas More any stories to write down someday, but this doesn't do anything in the present except allow him to cast a death-curse which kills Richard's only legitimate son, who died about that time in our timeline anyway. Anne is alive for some reason (I forget whether that was explained), so no one's gossiping about whether Richard might marry his niece, but this also doesn't seem to matter. It's almost close enough to be our timeline with secret explanations for why things happened as they did (vampires, a wizard did it, etc.) Even Henry Tydder's army being used to power a magical dragon construct which fights seems like something you could just about slot into our timeline and pretend everyone in later times didn't believe it and talked about the symbolism of the red dragon of Wales instead. When we finally get a major divergence--Richard defeating Henry at Bosworth Field--the book ends almost immediately after, so we don't get to see the results.
That incredibly close congruence got me asking questions I might have let slide otherwise. Questions like, might a stronger Byzantium have led to more significant differences in Europe than just a partitioned France before this late date? For that matter, how confident are we in a strong Byzantium just because Islam isn't around? It wasn't like that was their only problem; without being able to convert the pagan Slavs invading their territory and exert influence over the Rus' via the church, things might have looked very different in that direction. And maybe Persia would have become a major threat again, the way it had done so many times before. For that matter, while a major power might not have formed as quickly or with the same zeal in an Islam-less Arabian Peninsula and North Africa, that doesn't mean nothing significant would happen at all. What are the possibilities there?
Also, after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, who's going to copy all those texts in Latin and share them around Europe if there's no network of literate monks belonging to a more-or-less unified church? Just about every Roman text you look into the provenance of has "found in a monastery" in its history. Now imagine instead of monasteries full of monks devoted to learning Latin because it's necessary to read specific sacred texts, you have a bunch of small outdoor altars, sacred wells, and small temples staffed mainly by local bigwigs whose landowning duties include religious aspects, maybe with a few big enough to have full-time priests, and most of the gods don't have any sacred texts associated with them. How much motivation would anyone have for learning Latin, or being literate in any language? At the very least, I would expect some religious drift, not the Roman gods being pretty much the same as they were a thousand years earlier. Especially in England a thousand years after Roman power and influence collapsed there. Going further back, would Julian reigning for a few years longer really have been enough to put the brakes on Christianity?
I'm not saying things absolutely couldn't have developed as they did in this book. Christianity and Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries, a history by Ramsay MacMullen, makes a good case for a vibrant paganism during those centuries, to which people were very much attached, so maybe a little harsh persecution at the right moment would have been enough to set Christianity back, for example. At least it could be plausible enough for alternate history-writing purposes, even if your standards for serious historical counterfactual exercises are higher. Maybe there are circumstances which could have resulted in a strong Byzantium in the late 15th century too, and we just didn't get a full explanation because this is a novel, not a history book. Even if the full setup isn't the most likely outcome, our timeline isn't either. I can accept some unlikely-but-possible outcomes for the sake of a good story. But this scenario raised so many questions that it distracted me from the already-confusing plot. I got carried away wondering whether an earlier point of divergence might have made things even easier for a longer-reigning Julian, and what would happen if we lost most Classical texts in Latin, and how religion might develop in a still-pagan Britain next to a still-pagan Europe without a corps of literate monks running around.
And it got me thinking about how challenging it is to write a novel set in an alternate timeline more than a thousand years after the point of divergence. Obviously you don't want to lecture for pages about why things turned out the way they did, and there's only so many asides you can toss in as clues. At some point, readers just have to either go with it or stop reading. Maybe they can tell themselves that this far out, it's basically fantasy regardless of whether magic exists in the timeline, and one of probably hundreds of possible outcomes. Maybe the trick is not so much ensuring that readers can trace the timeline for a thousand years and be able to explain how we got here from there, but ensuring there aren't points that bring readers up short going, "Nope, no way, couldn't possibly happen no matter what unlikely things occurred in the past millennium." Maybe the most unlikely bits are the ones which need those asides as clues to what happened. (I also would have preferred if the divergences started causing real differences well before the end of the book, but preferences may differ there.)
This book has long-lived wizards and vampires; suppose at least a few of them preserved Latin texts and knowledge of the language for reasons of their own, and there were a few asides about some Italian city-state defeating a cabal of vampires a hundred years ago, seizing their library, and keeping a couple of vampires as prisoners who were forced to teach Latin so the city-state's rulers could then boast to the rest of Italy about their amazing new-old learning? Haha, we have The Aeneid and you don't! Oh, you want a copy of Livy's history? Well, it's going to cost you... No, it isn't terribly likely, and working in references would have been difficult. But one of the main characters is a vampire, even if his specialty is firearms and explosives, and another is Italian and BFF with Lorenzo the Magnificent, and countering Byzantium's cultural influence with "well we have rediscovered our OWN Classical learning now, so there!" could have been a thing. Probably something could have been worked in which both gave the necessary clues and advanced the present-day characters motivations and counter-schemes.
Does anyone have interesting examples of alternate histories set long after the point of divergence? What sorts of things make it feel plausible--or not--to you? Also, any speculations on other ways this particular setup could have gone, like what else might have happened with the Byzantines or what Europe without Latin-scholar monks might have been like?
Also, if someone wants to write a vampire-initiated Renaissance, that could be a lot of fun. We had a twelfth-century (literary) werewolf renaissance in real life which could be tossed in as a predecessor with real werewolves, because why not?
The book was The Dragon Waiting: A Masque of History by John M. Ford. It's set in the late 15th century (though the characters use a different dating system): a Welsh wizard, a Florentine woman doctor, the son of a would-be usurper of the Byzantine throne, and a German vampire team up to thwart a Byzantine plot against England.
There's no way to talk about this without lots of spoilers, so stop here if you'd rather read the book first. I was able to borrow an e-copy from my library easily (an anniversary edition), so that might be an option for you too if you want.
Anyway. The point of divergence is that the emperor Julian the Apostate did not die in 363, but carried on with his program of persecuting Christians and supporting traditional polytheism for years longer. It worked, and about 1,100 years later, Christianity is a tiny, mostly-underground minority religion and everyone else worships gods from the many pantheons still around in whatever combination they please, since Julian also decreed that all religions should be tolerated. (Er, after he'd suppressed the Christians, I guess?) The lack of Christians meant Islam never arose at all, which meant no Muslim armies chipping away at the Byzantine Empire's territory for centuries, which meant Byzantium remained a major power. In fact, it is now a dangerously expansionist empire, that sinister power in the east using devious stratagems and proxy wars to extend their influence over more and more of the world. (Why yes, this book was written during the Cold War.)
Our protagonists decide they might not be able to take the empire down, but they can stop them in one little corner of the world. It's all a little confusing, since I am not very good at untangling Byzantine (literally, this time) plots, and this book has characters making intuitive leaps about everyone's means and motives which they don't fully spell out for readers. But the Byzantines are interfering in England, Wales, and Scotland in various ways. For example, they made some sort of secret agreement with George, Duke of Clarence during one of his turns against his brothers, and destroying that document so it can't be used publicly is one mission. They turn Princes Edward and Richard into vampires; Edward will never be accepted as King Edward V if anyone finds out, and will be controlled by the Byzantines if the secret stays with the few Byzantine agents around the princes. (The wizard John Morton is one. I think. And Dr. Argentine?) And they pass out magical dragon amulets all over Wales which influence people to want to support Henry Tydder once he lands and tries to take the throne with Byzantine backing.
And this is where the record scratch happens for me. I can buy that a lot of things in European history happened similarly to our timeline regardless of which gods everyone was or wasn't worshipping. The Franks might have settled where they did regardless (being pagan in both timelines to start), and learned to speak the local Romano-Gallic dialect with a German accent that eventually became French. Sure. And I can more or less go along with the idea that somehow, as unlikely as it probably should be, the later Plantagenets somehow had the same cast of characters as in our timeline, because if your basic premise is "Richard III fights to keep his throne, only everyone's pagan and he's also fighting a Cold War against Byzantium," that's just something you have to accept.
But that everything should happen exactly the same way until our characters arrive on the scene? Like, the Wars of the Roses seem not to have been different in the slightest? Even when things do start happen differently, they actually don't. Clarence is still executed for treason, in a butt of Malmsey wine at his own request. The princes being turned into vampires is just a reason to have them whacked, and they disappear from the public record right on schedule. Anthony Woodville survives, but this doesn't matter until the Battle of Bosworth Field, which is like the second-to-last chapter. Hastings and Buckhingham get executed for treason more or less as they did, though this Buckingham is conspiring with the Byzantines. John Morton the not-bishop-wizard dies and so won't be telling little Thomas More any stories to write down someday, but this doesn't do anything in the present except allow him to cast a death-curse which kills Richard's only legitimate son, who died about that time in our timeline anyway. Anne is alive for some reason (I forget whether that was explained), so no one's gossiping about whether Richard might marry his niece, but this also doesn't seem to matter. It's almost close enough to be our timeline with secret explanations for why things happened as they did (vampires, a wizard did it, etc.) Even Henry Tydder's army being used to power a magical dragon construct which fights seems like something you could just about slot into our timeline and pretend everyone in later times didn't believe it and talked about the symbolism of the red dragon of Wales instead. When we finally get a major divergence--Richard defeating Henry at Bosworth Field--the book ends almost immediately after, so we don't get to see the results.
That incredibly close congruence got me asking questions I might have let slide otherwise. Questions like, might a stronger Byzantium have led to more significant differences in Europe than just a partitioned France before this late date? For that matter, how confident are we in a strong Byzantium just because Islam isn't around? It wasn't like that was their only problem; without being able to convert the pagan Slavs invading their territory and exert influence over the Rus' via the church, things might have looked very different in that direction. And maybe Persia would have become a major threat again, the way it had done so many times before. For that matter, while a major power might not have formed as quickly or with the same zeal in an Islam-less Arabian Peninsula and North Africa, that doesn't mean nothing significant would happen at all. What are the possibilities there?
Also, after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, who's going to copy all those texts in Latin and share them around Europe if there's no network of literate monks belonging to a more-or-less unified church? Just about every Roman text you look into the provenance of has "found in a monastery" in its history. Now imagine instead of monasteries full of monks devoted to learning Latin because it's necessary to read specific sacred texts, you have a bunch of small outdoor altars, sacred wells, and small temples staffed mainly by local bigwigs whose landowning duties include religious aspects, maybe with a few big enough to have full-time priests, and most of the gods don't have any sacred texts associated with them. How much motivation would anyone have for learning Latin, or being literate in any language? At the very least, I would expect some religious drift, not the Roman gods being pretty much the same as they were a thousand years earlier. Especially in England a thousand years after Roman power and influence collapsed there. Going further back, would Julian reigning for a few years longer really have been enough to put the brakes on Christianity?
I'm not saying things absolutely couldn't have developed as they did in this book. Christianity and Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries, a history by Ramsay MacMullen, makes a good case for a vibrant paganism during those centuries, to which people were very much attached, so maybe a little harsh persecution at the right moment would have been enough to set Christianity back, for example. At least it could be plausible enough for alternate history-writing purposes, even if your standards for serious historical counterfactual exercises are higher. Maybe there are circumstances which could have resulted in a strong Byzantium in the late 15th century too, and we just didn't get a full explanation because this is a novel, not a history book. Even if the full setup isn't the most likely outcome, our timeline isn't either. I can accept some unlikely-but-possible outcomes for the sake of a good story. But this scenario raised so many questions that it distracted me from the already-confusing plot. I got carried away wondering whether an earlier point of divergence might have made things even easier for a longer-reigning Julian, and what would happen if we lost most Classical texts in Latin, and how religion might develop in a still-pagan Britain next to a still-pagan Europe without a corps of literate monks running around.
And it got me thinking about how challenging it is to write a novel set in an alternate timeline more than a thousand years after the point of divergence. Obviously you don't want to lecture for pages about why things turned out the way they did, and there's only so many asides you can toss in as clues. At some point, readers just have to either go with it or stop reading. Maybe they can tell themselves that this far out, it's basically fantasy regardless of whether magic exists in the timeline, and one of probably hundreds of possible outcomes. Maybe the trick is not so much ensuring that readers can trace the timeline for a thousand years and be able to explain how we got here from there, but ensuring there aren't points that bring readers up short going, "Nope, no way, couldn't possibly happen no matter what unlikely things occurred in the past millennium." Maybe the most unlikely bits are the ones which need those asides as clues to what happened. (I also would have preferred if the divergences started causing real differences well before the end of the book, but preferences may differ there.)
This book has long-lived wizards and vampires; suppose at least a few of them preserved Latin texts and knowledge of the language for reasons of their own, and there were a few asides about some Italian city-state defeating a cabal of vampires a hundred years ago, seizing their library, and keeping a couple of vampires as prisoners who were forced to teach Latin so the city-state's rulers could then boast to the rest of Italy about their amazing new-old learning? Haha, we have The Aeneid and you don't! Oh, you want a copy of Livy's history? Well, it's going to cost you... No, it isn't terribly likely, and working in references would have been difficult. But one of the main characters is a vampire, even if his specialty is firearms and explosives, and another is Italian and BFF with Lorenzo the Magnificent, and countering Byzantium's cultural influence with "well we have rediscovered our OWN Classical learning now, so there!" could have been a thing. Probably something could have been worked in which both gave the necessary clues and advanced the present-day characters motivations and counter-schemes.
Does anyone have interesting examples of alternate histories set long after the point of divergence? What sorts of things make it feel plausible--or not--to you? Also, any speculations on other ways this particular setup could have gone, like what else might have happened with the Byzantines or what Europe without Latin-scholar monks might have been like?
Also, if someone wants to write a vampire-initiated Renaissance, that could be a lot of fun. We had a twelfth-century (literary) werewolf renaissance in real life which could be tossed in as a predecessor with real werewolves, because why not?
(no subject)
Date: 2025-08-21 01:36 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2025-08-22 12:20 am (UTC)That sounds like a fun project! Any particularly fun or interesting questions that have come up?
(no subject)
Date: 2025-08-22 12:53 am (UTC)Like, one of our divergence points is that in 670 AUC (ab urbe condita)/83BC, a mix of witches, vampires, and shapeshifters went hunting for the leaders of Rome and killed Sulla, Lucius Cornelius Scipio Asiaticus and Gaius Norbanus, Metellus Pius, Marius the Younger, and three or four others, re-sparking a new Social War and destabilizing Rome so completely that Julius Caesar never got to leave Italy proper, and it took another century and a half before Rome got its act back together and set about conquering its neighbors.
In the meantime, Jesus of Nazareth was born in the Parthian province of Judea, lived his life and died at the hands of the Parthian authorities for his teachings, and his followers spread preaching and teaching through Parthia and into Greece, not into Rome. They got to Rome, of course, eventually, but...
(no subject)
Date: 2025-08-22 01:18 am (UTC)Oh wow, trying to trace the consequences of all that that does sound maddening and amazingly fun at once. And Parthian Judea!
(no subject)
Date: 2025-08-23 03:57 pm (UTC)(which was supposed to post 2 days ago, WHOOPS)
(no subject)
Date: 2025-08-24 06:52 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2025-08-24 08:25 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2025-08-27 03:52 am (UTC)His explanation for why Europe converted to Christianity was basically, "Ausonius was a bad poet and no one liked the old gods anyway, especially not the gross and scary Irish gods." I am barely indulging in sarcastic exaggeration. He says Ausonius wrote trite, derivative poetry. Which might be true. I haven't read Ausonius, so I'll give him that one as a freebie. Anyway, he apparently thinks this is sufficient proof for readers that the intellectual climate of the 4th-century Roman Empire was subpar (probably fair), and that shows that no one really took the old gods seriously anymore or had any emotional attachment to traditional religion. I don't recall that he troubled himself to cite enough other Roman authors or even a secondary source summarizing them to show that Ausonius was representative of the literate upper classes, let alone any evidence for what the vast majority of ordinary people living in Roman territories felt about their gods.
Which is already enough to make you question, but also I had literally just read that MacMullen book which cited masses of evidence of various sorts for people actually being very invested in pagan gods and rites during this period. So I was even more annoyed that Cahill thought readers were too simple to care whether there's any academic debate or uncertainty about how much people in the fourth century liked being pagan--assuming he even knew about any of this and wasn't just assuming based on vibes he got from reading lots of poetry. He also didn't cite anything to support the idea that the Irish gods were so horrible that they frightened little children and Christianity seemed warm and welcoming by comparison, not even to assume that later Christian authors were accurately reporting how their ancestors felt a century or three earlier. Which makes you start asking questions like, how do you know they found the Irish gods worse than the possibility of eternity roasting in hell?
He also spends a huge portion of the book talking about how amazing Saint Patrick was. Which, sure, he was an impressive guy, but he still missed a couple of steps between "Saint Pat, so wow" and "therefore X is the most plausible explanation for why the Irish converted to Christianity relatively peacefully compared to other places and also here is how Patrick is a good exemplar for some other point I was trying to make about people in this time period."
This might be a good point to mention that his background was in reading Classical literature and theology, and he considered becoming a Jesuit priest.
He quotes a lot of poetry, which is cool, but a lot of the time it comes across as "I like this poem and I found a thin excuse to stick it in the book." He also includes four pages from one of Plato's dialogues (the bit about the chariot of the soul driven by mismatched horses). Four pages. I think it was meant to convince us that literally no one in the ancient world believed in the gods as anything more than philosophical exercises or had strong feelings about their religious practices (because Plato was such a perfect representative of a regular guy). He also mentioned wanting to show us how hard Plato is, as I recall. But we can get the general idea both of Plato's ideas and his writing style in one page, surely? I hate to suspect him of showing off how smart he is at reading stuff or padding out the book--but actually I don't, so let's suspect away.
And I really wonder if he doesn't cite actual evidence for how people felt about pagan gods because he genuinely thought his examples were sufficient and that anything more would just confuse the poor readers, or because he was so wrapped up in his own religious bubble that it never occurred to him that he needed evidence because surely it was so obvious to everyone already.
He also referred to the Irish as a race, said that some ancient poetry showed their national racial character hadn't changed in a couple thousand years, and briefly mentioned Dido and Cleopatra, not for any accomplishments or anything, but to offhandedly refer to them as "dusky African queens." Unfortunately that is the exact phrase he used. It did not inspire confidence in his intellectual rigor. (Or his editor.)
You might also noticed a few things missing here. Like the scribal activity of Irish monks! There was a lot of scene-setting and far less about copying Latin literature than you would expect. And it is not a long book. Which works would have been lost without the Irish monks, specifically? I think he kind of briefly touched on it, but not enough to give you a real grasp of the scope of it.
And since as I recall he did actually say in the text that this is how the Irish saved civilization--it wasn't just an editor slapping on a dramatic title--it would have been nice to have at least a couple of paragraphs about what he means by "saving civilization." Saving the record of the literary output of a civilization? Saving medieval civilization, which would have somehow been lesser without copying this literature? Saving our civilization by transmitting the works? And if that last, how so? It would be interesting to explore what would be different if we didn't have Livy and Ovid and Vergil and the rest, and I do mean that as a serious question. But he doesn't do that.
It was an extremely disappointing book.
(no subject)
Date: 2025-08-27 12:23 pm (UTC)Yeah, it's a whoooooooooole hot mess.
(no subject)
Date: 2025-08-29 03:28 am (UTC)So frustrating. If I, a random non-expert who has read a few books over the course of my life, could probably write an entire book about the problems I found in his book, surely he too could have gone to the library and checked out a few books before writing it?
(no subject)
Date: 2026-01-19 12:19 am (UTC)Reynolds, L.D. and Wilson, N.G. Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Hellene and Latin Literature. Fourth edition. Oxford University Press, 2013.
This is one I'm going to have to re-read and study properly because, while reasonably accessibly written, it is full of facts and arguments that require you to actually think about what you're reading.