"Building Alternative Realities"

by ROBERT SILVERBERG

Science fiction, which is what I've been writing for the past fifty-odd  years, is sometimes described as fiction that deals with alternative realities. So it does, in certain special ways which I'll shortly describe. But, strictly speaking, all fiction is about alternative realities. That's 
what makes it fiction.  

Even the most autobiographical of novels, the books that offer  themselves as stenographic transcriptions of experienced reality, aren't quite the one-to-one equivalents of the real world that they purport to be. Such autobiographical novels as James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, D.H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers, and Thomas Wolfe's Of Time and The River come quickly to mind, and some of the best books of Saul Bellow and Philip Roth are thinly disguised autobiography, too, but in each case these great writers felt free to make things up here and there, to edit and shade, to add little touches of color, to make this character or that one a bit larger than life, for the sake of giving greater dramatic emphasis to the underlying autobiographical material they were drawing upon. So even these books, undeniably rooted as each one is in the novelist's own experiences, deliver not a pure jolt of transcribed reality but, rather, an alternative reality modulated and modified by the fictional process.

Then there are the novels that are spun entirely, or almost entirely, out of the writer's imagination: Thomas Mann's Confessions of Felix Krull, say, or William Faulkner's Sanctuary, or Franz Kafka's The Trial, or Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory. These are books about invented people and situations, in no way autobiographical except, perhaps, in the most 
far-fetched metaphorical sense. Mann was never a slippery rogue of a con man; Faulkner was never a sinister gangster given to creepy sexual practices; Kafka was never suddenly placed under arrest and put on trial before a tribunal of unknown makeup and jurisdiction; Greene was never an 
alcoholic Mexican priest. Like all writers, they drew on certain aspects of themselves, however transformed, distorted, inverted, to create these characters and situations. But those characters are very different from the writers who invented them, and what the writers are providing in their 
books is depictions of realities that never existed, alternative realities that we find convincing and plausible because of the skill of their inventors.

What makes these books convincing is that the invented aspect of reality, the fictional dimension (Felix Krull's roguery, Faulkner's gangster's creepiness) is embedded in as careful a representation of existing reality, the actual quotidian world, as the writer could create. Note that I say a representation of reality. The desk in front of me as I write this has very solid reality. It's big and bulky, and when I slap it with my hand it responds with a loud noise, and its middle drawer contains real postage stamps, paper clips, and staples. I could write long paragraphs about my 
desk, its shape, its color, the scars that time has inflicted on it, but no matter how eloquent those paragraphs were, they wouldn't constitute a desk. They'd just be clumps of words describing a desk. If I were to paint the most cunning depiction of my desk that was possible to paint, a dazzling trompe-l'oeil simulation, it would still be only a thing of two dimensions made out of pigment and canvas, useless for holding paper clips. Similarly, a map of California isn't California. A photo of Marilyn Monroe isn't Marilyn Monroe. Novelists try to construct, out of words alone, convincing imitations of the world about them, against which they set their invented 
characters and let them move through the invented situations of their plots. The novel itself isn't the world about the novelist; it's a verbal recreation of it, what the semanticists used to call a first-order abstraction. Putting imaginary characters and imaginary plot situations into it jumps us up into a second  level of abstraction, the alternative reality that all fiction, however grittily realistic it pretends to be, is delivering.

Even when we look at science fiction -- and we should, about this time, because science fiction is the subject on which I'm best qualified to discourse -- we find ourselves, usually, only one further level of abstraction up from the "realistic" novel, even though science fiction is commonly thought to be fiction about worlds that don't exist.

Consider one of the first great s-f novels, H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds. Everything about it is realistic -- it is set in the village just outside London where Wells lived, in the time when Wells was living there, and many of the characters are portraits of Wells' own actual neighbors -- except for one intrusive item of fantastic non-reality, which is the landing of an invading army from Mars in the suburban town of Woking. Woking really exists, and Wells does his best to make us see it as it was in his day, and what sort of people his neighbors were. But there aren't any Martians in the actual universe, and even if there were, they wouldn't have been anything like the ones Wells described, and they wouldn't have journeyed across space to invade Woking. That part is pure fantasy. It's what makes the novel science fiction. Wells' one big fantastic assumption, set against a background that attempts to represent our known reality, is 
what generates the story. He's openly offering us an alternative reality, one in which there are hostile Martians who might land in our midst.

My own novel, Dying Inside, uses the same technique of juxtaposing a fantastic assumption against realistic representation.  It is set in New York City in 1976 (I wrote it in 1971); the protagonist is an unhappy man of about my own age, David Selig, who lives in a seedy hotel very much like the one in which I lived myself twenty years earlier when going to school at Columbia; he earns his living by writing term papers for undergraduates, and I quote a few such papers in the book which are, in fact, term papers that I wrote in my own college days. In various other ways the life of David Selig is based on my own, too. All of that creates the texture of reality I was aiming for in the book. There's nothing bizarre or unfamiliar about the world David Selig lives in. It looks exactly like New York City of 1976 in every respect. It contains no Martians, no androids, no ray guns. But David Selig differs from you and me in one huge way, one science-fictional way, because he is capable of reading other people's thoughts as easily as you are reading these words. What makes the novel science fiction is its exhaustive examination of what it must be like to have that ability -- and Selig's telepathy is the only fantastic aspect of what is otherwise an extremely realistic novel.

Even when science fiction moves off to other worlds it derives its power from the contrast between its reality-based texture and the single fantastic assumption that intrudes on that texture. Take Ursula K. Le Guin's novel "The Left Hand of Darkness." It's set on an imaginary planet, yes, but that isn't the fantastic part of the story. Le Guin goes to great effort to construct that imaginary planet according to the laws of science as we currently know them, and it's a completely plausible imaginary planet, which, as we travel through it in the course of the book, comes to seem as real to us as Wells' Woking or my 1976 New York. What is fantastic is the nature of the people who live on that planet, who are human in every  respect, except that they are sexually metamorphic: neuter much of the time, they periodically shift into a sexual form, which could be either male or female depending on the hormonal flow of the moment. Oysters shift from one sex to another fairly easily, so I hear, but humans don't -- not "real" ones, anyway. Because Le Guin had important things to say about the nature of gender, though, she invented a variant race of humans who lack fixed sexual identities, and that is the big speculative leap that 
catapults the novel into an alternative reality and makes it a brilliant work of science fiction.

There is a particular kind of science fiction, to which I am quite partial both as a writer and as a reader, that carries the speculative process one further step: to the realistic depiction of a world that in some ways is identical to the one we all inhabit, but which in fact is quite stunningly different, because an alteration, perhaps one that seems to be quite minor, has taken place somewhere in the course of its history, and the world has gone spinning off in a direction that takes it very far from the reality we think we know. Here we have alternative realities in their most extreme form. The writer is not merely tinkering slightly with the events and details of his actual experiences, as Joyce was in Portrait of the Artist, or thrusting Martians into a realistically drawn English suburb, as Wells did in War of the Worlds, or even devising a wholly new kind of human sexuality but setting it within a recognizably human society, as Le Guin did in Left Hand of Darkness. Reality itself, our shared history, the fixed course of the stream of time, is being given a twist, something seemingly small but in fact with colossal impact on the course of events, an impact sufficient to throw it into an entirely different path. I find this kind of story one of the most exciting aspects of the great mind- game that is science fiction.

One of the earliest such tales of alternative reality that I know of is Edward Everett Hale's "Hands Off," published in Harper's Magazine in 1898. The one little twist here is the assumption that Joseph, the son of Jacob, was never sold into slavery in Egypt, but, instead, had escaped the slave traders and returned to his father's camp in the desert. Whereupon -- without the shrewd mind of Joseph to guide its government -- Egypt was conquered by Canaanite barbarians, who went on to engulf the rest of the ancient world. Judaism died out, the great culture of Greece never had a chance to emerge, Rome was crushed, and a reign of "lust, brutality, terror, cruelty, carnage, famine, agony, horror" descended on humanity, until, after a series of hideous wars, civilization perished entirely. All because Joseph, son of Jacob, had never reached the court of Pharaoh!

In 1931 an entire book of such speculative fantasies was published: If It Had Happened Otherwise, edited by J.C. Squire. This was a volume of eleven historical essays -- "lapses into imaginary history," Squire called them -- by such distinguished writers as Winston Churchill, Hilaire Belloc, G.K. Chesterton, and Andre Maurois. Each author chose a pivotal moment in history and gave it a different spin. One essay is called, "If Booth Had Missed Lincoln." Another, "If Napoleon Had Escaped to America." Churchill, characteristically, does a dizzying double switch in "If Lee Had Not Won the Battle of Gettysburg," postulating a Confederate victory in the American Civil War and then going on to speculate on what world history might have been like had the North won the war instead.

Modern science-fiction writers have made this kind of alternative-reality speculation a lively sub-species of their field.  They have given us such novels as Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle, unforgettably depicting a United States occupied by German and Japanese forces after its defeat in World War II, Keith Roberts' Pavane, showing a twentieth-century England untouched by the Industrial Revolution as the result of the assassination of Queen Elizabeth I in 1588, and L. Sprague de Camp's rollicking The Wheels of If, in which the Viking invasions of England in the ninth century had brought the British Isles permanently under Scandinavian rule and the Norsemen had gone on to establish a kingdom in North America that was still going strong in De Camp's greatly altered twentieth century.

A skilled writer can create an alternative reality even in the limited space a short story affords. H. Beam Piper's "He Walked Around the Horses" shows a world in which the American Revolution failed; Poul Anderson's "Delenda Est" give us a Rome defeated by Carthage; in Philip Jose Farmer's "Sail On! Sail On!", Columbus discovers that the world actually is flat and his fleet goes hurtling over its edge. Other stories of this genre have shown Benjamin Franklin inventing the internal-combustion engine, Napoleon dying in one of the early battles of the French Revolution, the atomic bomb being developed during the reign of Queen Victoria, and Alexander Hamilton, having surviving his duel with Aaron Burr, going on to become president.

During the course of my own career I've made use of altered history again and again to provide the impetus for a story. In "Translation Error," back in 1959, I had an emissary from another world take steps to avert World War I so that the second World War,  which would lead to the development of atomic weapons, would also not take place. My novel of 1967, The Gate of Worlds, proposed that the Black Death of 1348 had killed so many Europeans that the Ottoman Turks had been able to conquer the whole continent, leaving the New World to develop independently under Aztec and Inca ruler and Africa as a continent of black-ruled kingdoms. And in "Trips," a short story from 1975, I packed a dozen or more alternative worlds into a single 
work less than thirty pages long, in which my protagonist drifts from one reality to another: in one section, Genghis Khan has created a worldwide Mongol empire, in another, President Roosevelt's retirement in 1940 has led to American neutrality and a German victory in World War II, and in another, John F. Kennedy was never assassinated. Finally my wanderer returns to what he takes to be the real world, his own world, our world, from which he had originally departed -- only to discover that he hasn't reached home after all, for this world, too, similar as it is to the one from which he first set out, is also an alternative reality, in which another version of himself is living in the house he takes to be his own. And in a story called "Needle in a Timestack" (1983) I devised a 21st-century society in which time machines are as ubiquitous as cell phones and people are constantly scrambling other people's lives by making changes in their pasts.

My most elaborate venture into alternative reality, though, is the novel Roma Eterna (2003), which portrays, in ten sections spanning fifteen hundred years, a world in which the Roman Empire never fell apart, and is still -- in greatly altered form -- ruling the world in the twentieth century. The best way I know to show you how such visions of alternative reality are created is to describe,  step by step, the process by which I constructed that book.  What was the key factor, I asked myself, in the collapse of Imperial Rome? Isolate that factor, remove it from history, and, at least for the purposes of my story, Rome would withstand all challenge and survive through the ages.

I had been reading, just then, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the classic work of the eighteenth-century historian Edward Gibbon. It was Gibbon's thesis that the rise of Christianity, adopted as the official state religion by the fourth-century Roman Emperor Constantine, set in motion the forces that caused the crumbling of Roman power. There were other factors as well, of course -- the encroachment of barbarian tribes on the Roman borders, for example, and Rome's catastrophic decision to enlist barbarian troops in its own armies -- but Gibbon saw Christianity as a poisonous creed, preoccupied with sterile theological debate and focused on hypothetical rewards in a future existence in a supernatural world at the expense of a practical concentration on the problems of life in the here and now, and he felt that its spread had dealt the Empire its death-blow. "I have described the triumph of barbarism and religion," he said toward the end of his immense book, a famous sentence succinctly encapsulating his analysis of the Empire's decay.

Gibbon's views on Christianity were controversial in their own day, of course, and later research has shown them to be oversimplified and inadequate. For one thing, he chose not to try to explain the survival of the eastern, or Byzantine, half of the Empire for a thousand years after 
the fall of the western half, though the eastern Romans were every bit as Christian as those of the West. He  regarded the history of the eastern Empire as "a uniform tale of weakness and misery," when in truth for many centuries it rivalled or even exceeded in magnificence and power its 
counterpart of the West. For another, Gibbon lacked sufficient information about Mithraism and the other mystery cults of the Empire's Asian provinces, which had already infiltrated the Empire before the rise of Christianity and probably would have come to play the same dominant role in 
Roman spiritual life as Christianity did, had Christianity not been able to make itself the most successful creed of its kind

None of that troubled me. I was planning to write a work of speculative fiction, after all, not a history of Rome. The first question one asks oneself when setting out to invent an alternative history is, "What if -- ?" My initial "What if -- ?" question was, "What if Gibbon was right about the effects of Christianity on the stability of the Roman Empire?"

That gave me my starting assumption: remove Christianity from the historical mix, and Rome endures forever.

The easiest way for me to achieve that would have been to remove Jesus from history -- by having him die in boyhood, let us say -- but I opted for a more radical process of elimination. The concepts that Jesus was teaching in the Palestine of two thousand years ago were formed as a reaction to the rigidly conservative Judaism of the culture in which he was raised. Because Palestine, in Jesus' time, was a province of the Roman Empire, both Judaism and Jesus' modified version of that creed were able easily to travel across the Mediterranean and take root in the Roman heartland itself. Very well: eliminate not just Jesus but Judaism itself from Palestine, and Rome is likely to remain pagan forever.   I arranged this by going back twelve centuries to the Hebrew escape from Egypt -- the story told in the Book of Exodus -- and obliterating it from the time-stream. The Bible tells how the Hebrews, a nomadic tribe of the Near Eastern desert lands, had settled in Palestine in ancient times, had been carried off into slavery in Egypt, and then, under the leadership of Moses, had made their way back to Palestine to reconquer their old homeland and establish a powerful kingdom there. I found it easy enough to undo the Exodus for the purpose of creating alternative history. The science-fiction writer makes and unmakes centuries of history in five minutes at the keyboard. I saw to it that the Red Sea did not part before Moses and his people, and so the army of Pharaoh caught up with the fleeing Hebrews at the water's edge and annihilated them. Hence there was no migration into Palestine by way of Sinai, no establishment of a Jewish kingdom there, no development of monotheistic beliefs that ultimately would filter out into Rome and take permanent hold. The Jews would remain a small and stubborn tribe living in Egypt and the Romans would ultimately conquer the ancient world in the name of Jupiter.

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!