Some people have a devotion to their country that can only be described as religious, as their beliefs seem immune to evidence-based critique. Others treat their national identity with a dismissiveness that implies tertiary importance.
Alternate history narratives can offer a useful platform from which to interrogate national identity, to play with the facts that created the myths. Rewriting pivotal events can expose how the events that shape national narratives are contingent, rather than the inevitabilities that are sometimes re-storied by proud nationalists.
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| Historian Robert Sobel's only work of fiction earned him a special Sidewise Award (image via Goodreads) |
This is perhaps why so much alternate history focuses on nations with particularly strong senses of historical mythology and of national destiny. The idea that George Washington might have been a mediocre general who got lucky — as suggested by Robert Sobel in his classic novel For Want of a Nail — might seem heretical to many Americans. In contrast, depicting foundational Canadian figure Sir John Alexander Macdonald as an inept and racist drunk would be greeted by most Canadians with a shrug.
The American myth is deeply ingrained, inculcated in generations of students, and often unquestioned by a majority of its disciples — which may explain why so many of the country’s political biopics (Sunrise at Campobello, Young Washington, Reagan, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, etc.) are hagiographies. In Canada, fervent patriotism is more likely to be met with bemusement.
The historicity of a national identity is dubious at best. There’s little truth to stories about about George Washington chopping down a cherry tree, Queen Victoria saying ‘we are not amused,’ or Kim Jong Il composing three operas on his third birthday… but in each of their respective countries those stories are treated as fact and valued by major portions of the population.
Alternate history has often been criticized for repeated focus on specific historical events such as the American Civil War, the American Revolution, the Space Race. It’s not lost on us that these are events that contribute significantly to the myths of countries that have a very strong senses of national consciousness.
In particular, the Second World War has a special place in English-language alternate history because the war was so important to the national identities of its victorious nations. Some of the best such alternate histories undermine the Manichean story that is spun about the conflict. Presenting a plausible counterfactual can provide a useful estrangement from patriotism fables that depict the victorious nations as incorruptibly heroic. As an example, Harry Turtledove’s Southern Victory series challenges the
assumption that the American experiment could never lead to genocidal death camps, and implicitly argues that it was always extremely possible. This is a discomforting thought, one that is viscerally rejected by proponents of a mythologized “patriotic” version of American history.
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| Alternate history about the Second World War has often been criticized as being fiction for Nazi fetishists. The best such fiction doesn’t ask “what if the Nazis won,” but rather asks a far more discomforting question: “what if fascism was always present in some part of my own national myth.” (Image via AlternateHistory.com) |
By the same token, Jo Walton’s alternate history novel Farthing upends British national myths about the country’s implacability and unwillingness to collaborate with fascism. While the “patriotic” myth is that there was a fundamental difference between the English national character and that of the French, Walton offers a compelling case that the country might easily have had its own Vichy regime led by its own quislings. Similarly, Keith Roberts’ 1972 short story “Weihnachtsabend” carefully subverts Britain’s myth of inevitable resistance by imagining the country’s elite pro-nazi cadre taking control of the country.
It should not be lost on anyone that when Sinclair Lewis wrote what is possibly the first alternate history depicting a Nazi victory in the United States, he titled the book It Can’t Happen Here. The work, in which a politician named Buzz Windrip topples American democracy, directly challenges the complacency of patriotism.
James Alasdair Henry's Pagans turns this lens on Britain’s oldest national myths. By imagining an England where the Norman Conquest never happened (although that's not the point of divergence from our history, Henry dismantles comforting stories of inevitable Britishness, revealing identity as an unstable negotiation between competing cultures, religions, and languages rather than a single, triumphant historical destiny. It is easy to see reflections on the decade of post-Brexit malaise in the book’s subversion of narratives that the country would be inherently prosperous and unified. There are uncomfortable parallels between the violent Saxon supremacists depicted in Pagans, and much of the recent politics of Great Britain.
Alternate history is extremely popular in Canada, and probably sells better per capita here than it does across the border in the South. But much of our best-known and top-selling authors publish works about points of divergence pertaining to United States history. Former Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield wrote two compelling spy novels set in an alternate history of the NASA space program, while Hugo-winning Canadian novelist Robert J. Sawyer’s contributions to the alternate history genre tackle the Manhattan project. Canadian novelist Shannon Selin’s underrated Napoleon in America plays with the history of both the United States and France -- countries that seem to have a stronger sense of national identity than their home country. There is likely a direct relationship between divergent tension and marketability.
It should not be lost on anyone that when Sinclair Lewis wrote what is possibly the first alternate history depicting a Nazi victory in the United States, he titled the book It Can’t Happen Here. The work, in which a politician named Buzz Windrip topples American democracy, directly challenges the complacency of patriotism.
James Alasdair Henry's Pagans turns this lens on Britain’s oldest national myths. By imagining an England where the Norman Conquest never happened (although that's not the point of divergence from our history, Henry dismantles comforting stories of inevitable Britishness, revealing identity as an unstable negotiation between competing cultures, religions, and languages rather than a single, triumphant historical destiny. It is easy to see reflections on the decade of post-Brexit malaise in the book’s subversion of narratives that the country would be inherently prosperous and unified. There are uncomfortable parallels between the violent Saxon supremacists depicted in Pagans, and much of the recent politics of Great Britain.
Alternate history is extremely popular in Canada, and probably sells better per capita here than it does across the border in the South. But much of our best-known and top-selling authors publish works about points of divergence pertaining to United States history. Former Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield wrote two compelling spy novels set in an alternate history of the NASA space program, while Hugo-winning Canadian novelist Robert J. Sawyer’s contributions to the alternate history genre tackle the Manhattan project. Canadian novelist Shannon Selin’s underrated Napoleon in America plays with the history of both the United States and France -- countries that seem to have a stronger sense of national identity than their home country. There is likely a direct relationship between divergent tension and marketability.
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| For many decades, there have been those in the United Kingdom who believed that their country could never be gullible enough to be swindled by a fascist conman. Believing such comforting lies might make a nation more vulnerable. (Image via Times.co.uk) |
There is, of course, an enormous value in the cognitive estrangement that counterfactuals can provide when they’re well researched and meticulously constructed. The underlying subtext is that events are contingent, chaotic, that nothing is inevitable. This is an idea in direct opposition to a fascistic idea of a national destiny.
By contrasting fictional histories with documented experience, alternate history encourages readers to question patriotic certainties and recognize national identity as a dynamic, constructed process rather than a fixed inheritance. It also forces them to consider that the privileged position of some nations might not have occurred due to divine guidance, but rather the happenstance of historical accident. Such critical reflection is rarely a bad thing, even — or perhaps especially — on national holidays.
By contrasting fictional histories with documented experience, alternate history encourages readers to question patriotic certainties and recognize national identity as a dynamic, constructed process rather than a fixed inheritance. It also forces them to consider that the privileged position of some nations might not have occurred due to divine guidance, but rather the happenstance of historical accident. Such critical reflection is rarely a bad thing, even — or perhaps especially — on national holidays.
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