The Rise of Alternate History
Philip Roth has a new book forthcoming, The Plot Against America, which imagines the course of history had Charles Lindbergh become President in 1940. Naturally, as with any new Roth book, The Plot Against America is garnering plenty of attention; Roth himself has an essay on his new title in the New York Times (both NYT links require registration). I was struck by a single sentence in Roth's essay:
This is true only so far as one is blinkered by snobbery. Alternate history, as a genre has been around for decades. Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle (for my money the best alternate history novel ever written) was published in 1962, becoming the first of many novels depicting a different course WWII might have taken. Robert Harris had a best-seller in 1992 with Fatherland, another reimagining of WWII; that same year Harry Turtledove's The Guns of the South was published. Guns of the South deals with the Civil War, another popular topic for alternate history writers. Turtledove has gone on to arguably become the Stephen King of alternate history, pushing out title after title in the genre. If you scan the stacks of any Barnes & Noble or Borders you'll come across a plethora of alternate history themed titles; plug in the search box 'alternate history' at Amazon.com and thousands up thousands of results pop up.
So there are plenty of examples - models - of different ways in which different authors have reimagined the historical past. My guess at the reasoning behind Roth's statement above is simply that Roth, and other members of the literary establishment, either don't consider such books literature and therefore worthy of consideration as models, or are simply unaware of the vast body of work out there because they'd never read genre fiction in the first place. The Man in the High Castle won the Hugo Award, and Fatherland was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Prize, but many would consider them less than respectable, since both works can be easily shoved into the genre pigeonholes of 'science fiction' and 'thriller' and safely ignored by writers and critics who pride themselves on only dealing with what they deem as literature.
The pending publication of The Plot.. has drawn some attention to fiction of alternate history. Laura Miller has a brief essay in The New York Times several weeks ago, which managed to acknowledge the longevity of the genre and condescend to it...
She then goes on to note the following:
She seems to insinuate that the genre of alternate history, usually a mere subset of science fiction, is made critically acceptable when a celebrated novelist works within it's conventions. To me this begs at least two questions: if an acknowledged literary giant such as Roth can gentrify the ghetto address of a certain genre by writing a novel in that genre, why shouldn't the work of an author who writes primarily in a genre such as science fiction, crime fiction and the like, be worthy of the appellation of literature? Why should genre be considered at all when deciding what is and is not literature?
I had no literary models for reimagining the historical past.
This is true only so far as one is blinkered by snobbery. Alternate history, as a genre has been around for decades. Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle (for my money the best alternate history novel ever written) was published in 1962, becoming the first of many novels depicting a different course WWII might have taken. Robert Harris had a best-seller in 1992 with Fatherland, another reimagining of WWII; that same year Harry Turtledove's The Guns of the South was published. Guns of the South deals with the Civil War, another popular topic for alternate history writers. Turtledove has gone on to arguably become the Stephen King of alternate history, pushing out title after title in the genre. If you scan the stacks of any Barnes & Noble or Borders you'll come across a plethora of alternate history themed titles; plug in the search box 'alternate history' at Amazon.com and thousands up thousands of results pop up.
So there are plenty of examples - models - of different ways in which different authors have reimagined the historical past. My guess at the reasoning behind Roth's statement above is simply that Roth, and other members of the literary establishment, either don't consider such books literature and therefore worthy of consideration as models, or are simply unaware of the vast body of work out there because they'd never read genre fiction in the first place. The Man in the High Castle won the Hugo Award, and Fatherland was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Prize, but many would consider them less than respectable, since both works can be easily shoved into the genre pigeonholes of 'science fiction' and 'thriller' and safely ignored by writers and critics who pride themselves on only dealing with what they deem as literature.
The pending publication of The Plot.. has drawn some attention to fiction of alternate history. Laura Miller has a brief essay in The New York Times several weeks ago, which managed to acknowledge the longevity of the genre and condescend to it...
History is a discipline wedded to cold fact but constantly accused of dallying with opinion. Counterfactual scenarios hint at the amount of guesswork in many books of conventional history. To some, they are at best parlor games, and at worst shameless indulgences in fiction that undermine the whole profession.
Fiction writers apparently have no shame, since in novels and short stories alternative history has been a booming popular form for many decades now.
She then goes on to note the following:
Usually it is considered a subset of science fiction, but this fall the celebrated novelist Philip Roth joins the ranks of alternative historians with The Plot Against America, the pseudo-autobiographical account of what happens to the Roth family of Newark when Charles Lindbergh defeats Roosevelt in the 1940 presidential election and establishes friendly diplomatic relations with Nazi Germany.
She seems to insinuate that the genre of alternate history, usually a mere subset of science fiction, is made critically acceptable when a celebrated novelist works within it's conventions. To me this begs at least two questions: if an acknowledged literary giant such as Roth can gentrify the ghetto address of a certain genre by writing a novel in that genre, why shouldn't the work of an author who writes primarily in a genre such as science fiction, crime fiction and the like, be worthy of the appellation of literature? Why should genre be considered at all when deciding what is and is not literature?
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