Turn a Different Corner

Science fiction writers have long had a tradition of creating works of alternative history, a subgenre telling stories based in some ‘uchronia’ – a time that doesn’t exist. The idea is simple: they take a setting or an event that we’re all (hopefully) familiar with and then twist the outcome a little so that the unexpected occurs.

But why do they write this kind of stuff and why do we, the readers, lap it up? Well all fiction begins with the simple question, ‘What if?’ and alternative reality tales ask more clearly defined ‘What if’s than most. It’s a plot device that can be used to answer big questions or show us something about ourselves and our world that we don’t (or don’t want to) usually see. Three famous examples are;

What if the Nazi’s had won World War II?
What if President Nixon hadn’t been assassinated?
What if the Apollo astronauts had found alien lifeforms already on the moon?

How would these changes in events effect regular people?  How would we have reacted in those circumstances? Would it have been how we’d like to feel we’d have acted? A good writer can hold a mirror up to us with these kind of tales while at the same time enticing us to read more with a rollicking good yarn. And that’s the kind of stuff we like. It has a built in backstory that we don’t have to go to the trouble of ploughing through chapters of prose to set up the payoff. We already know that Lee Harvey Oswald was waiting for the President in Dallas and that Neil Armstrong travelled through space in a Saturn V rocket. We don’t need much set up, we can get straight on with the story.

BBC’s Saturday teatime favourite Doctor Who has asked this kind of question for generations. In recent series they’ve had alternative histories involving the destruction of Pompeii, Charles Dickens and William Shakespeare to mention but three shows from the last few years. They make little attempt at social comment, they usually just want to entertain and tell a good story. That’s the road that I usually go down too when writing fiction. I can’t see how my social or political views are more worthy of a platform than anyone else’s, so I just try to get a good tale down.

I’ve had my own attempt at this kind of story recently. It’s my first full length novel and it’s finally available for download via Amazon. It will be available through the i-store and other online shops in a month or so and a paperback version will hopefully be out in September. Its called ‘The Happiest Workplace On Earth’ and it asks the question, What If Walt Disney hadn’t died in 1966 but had continued the work that he was planning at the time of his death? What if he had completed the utopian city that he wanted to create and had actually managed to get people living and working in it? And what if that city became a terrorist target?

It's good to finally give people the chance to read it.