Alternate history has many uses. One of them is to revive literary worlds that time has rendered otherwise inaccessible to us. Writers like Edgar Rice Burroughs or A.A. Merritt could, with some small degree of initial plausibility, litter the remoter sections of the world with lost races and lost cities; their models, writing a generation earlier, had a broader canvas to work with, as exploration wasn’t nearly so complete.
By the 1930s, Burroughs was taking his heroes to other planets and to a putative world within the hollow core of ours, and the last lost races were tribes in the interior of New Guinea. Even Mars and Venus were taken from us a little later, their six-armed green men, canals, and dinosaurs replaced with a boring snowball of rust and a sulphuric-acid hell…although alternatives to that are another story, one which I hope to tell someday.
Likewise, the supply of exploits available to a dashing young cavalry officer became sadly limited after 1914. Being machine-gunned at the Somme just isn’t up to the standards of the sort of exploit conveyed by Kipling, Henty, or (in nonfiction) the young Winston Churchill, who participated in one of the last quasi-successful charges by British lancers in 1898, against the Mahdists at Omdurman. Dervish fanatics tend to use plastique these days, rather than swords. Pirates are rather ho-hum Third World extortionists and sneak thieves, rather than characters like Henry Morgan-who was sent home in chains and ended up as governor of Jamaica, after a private audience with Charles II!
In short, by the second decade of the last century the gorgeous, multicolored, infinite-possibility world that opened up with the great voyages of discovery of the sixteenth century was coming to an end. So was the fictional penumbra that accompanied, mirrored, and even inspired it-for the Spanish conquistadors were themselves quite consciously emulating the feats of literary heroes, of the knights of the Chanson du Roland or the fantastic adventures of Amadis of Gaul.
From a literary point of view, this was a terrible misfortune. It’s often forgotten in these degenerate times how close to the world of the pulp adventurers the real world could be in those days.
Allan Quatermain, of H. Rider Haggard’s She and King Solomon’s Mines, was based fairly closely (fantasy elements like immortal princesses aside) on the exploits of Frederick Selous, explorer and frontiersman.
What writer could come up unaided with a character like Richard Francis Burton, the devilish, swashbuckling swordsman-adventurer who fought wild Somalis saber-to-spear, once escaped certain death on an African safari when he ran six miles with a spear through his face, snuck into at least two “forbidden” cities (Mecca and Medina) in native disguise, and translated the Thousand and One Nights to boot, after writing a firsthand account of the red-light district of Karachi?
Or Mary Kingsley, who went singlehanded into the jungles of Gabon and did the first field enthnography among the cannibal Fang. In her books, she recommended from personal experience a nice thick set of petticoats, which was exactly what was needed when falling into a pit lined with pointed stakes, and noted that said skirts should contain a convenient pocket for a revolver, “which is rarely needed, but when needed is needed very badly.”
Who could devise adventures more unlikely and fantastic than the real life of Harry Brooks in the 1830s, who sailed off to the East Indies in a leaky schooner with a few friends, fought pirates and headhunters, and made himself independent raja of Sarawak? And he was at the tail end of a tradition that began with Cortes and Pizzaro setting off on private-enterprise quests to overthrow empires at ten thousand-to-one odds.
That world is still available to us through historical fiction, of course, but that is sadly limiting in some respects; the “end” of the larger story is fixed and we know how it comes out. The Western Front and the Welfare State are waiting down at the end of the road.
Like many another, I imprinted on the literature of faraway places and strange-sounding names at an early age, and never lost the taste for it-or for the real-world history and archaeology to which it led. Fortunately, I also discovered alternate history, a genre within the larger field of speculative fiction, which allows a rigorous yet limitless ringing of changes.
Alternate history can give writer and reader a breath of fresher air, of unlimited possibility, of that world where horizons are infinite and nothing is fixed in stone; where beyond the last blue horizon waits the lost city, the people of marvels, the silver-belled caravan to Shamballah and the vacant throne…
“Shikari in Galveston” springs from the backbone of my novel The Peshawar Lancers. The universe of The Peshawar Lancers stems from an alteration in the history of the nineteenth century: a catastrophic strike by a series of high-velocity heavenly bodies. We know that this sort of thing actually happens, and that a similar (though larger) impact ended the dinosaurian era 65 million years ago.
Being fictional, my impacts could be precisely controlled by authorial fiat, within the boundaries of the physically possible. What they did was to derail “progress” by taking out the most technologically advanced part of the world, and by drastically reducing the world’s overall population.
And so the twentieth and twenty-first centuries see a world where the most advanced regions are only just surpassing the Victorian level of technology and social development, and much remains sparsely inhabited by a wild variety of cultures at a very low level of technology.
In other words, a world larger and better suited to the classic adventure story than ours.
The Peshawar Lancers took place mostly in India, the center of the British Empire and the most advanced state of its day; “Shikari in Galveston” is set on the Imperial frontiers, in the wilds of a re-barbarized Texas. Both put people in situations that suit the definition of “adventure”: somebody else in very bad trouble, very far away.
I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it!
S. M. Stirling was born in Metz, France, in 1953; his father was an officer in the RCAF, from Newfoundland, and his English-born mother grew up in Lima, Peru. He has lived in Europe, North America, and East Africa, and traveled extensively elsewhere. After taking a history BA, he attended law school at Osgoode Hall, Toronto, but decided not to practice and had his dorsal fin surgically removed. After the usual period of poverty and odd jobs, his first book sold in 1984 (Snow-brother, from Signet), and he became a full-time writer in 1988. That was the same year he was married to Janet Cathryn Stirling (nee Moore), also a writer, whom he met at a World Fantasy convention in the mid-1980s.
His works since then include the Draka alternate history trilogy (currently issued in a combined volume under the title The Domination), the Nantucket series (Island in the Sea of Time, Against the Tide of Years, and On the Oceans of Eternity), The Peshawar Lancers, and Conquistador.
He and Janet and the obligatory authorial cats currently live in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He’s currently working on a new alternate history novel, Dies the Fire, which will be published by Roc.
Steve Stirling’s hobbies include anthropology, archaeology, history in general, travel, cooking, and the martial arts.