f there is a game to give away about this strange, small anthology without an editor, then it's S.M. Stirling who gives the game away. "Alternate history has many uses," he suggests in his afterword to "Shikari in Galveston," the long story he contributes to the volume. "One of them"—the only one he is much interested in here—"is to revive literary worlds that time has rendered otherwise inaccessible to us," worlds created by writers like Edgar Rice Burroughs or A. Merritt or H. Rider Haggard: planetary romance worlds, secondary worlds accessed through portals, lost worlds.
These Escape Worlds—created at a time when the discovery of the planet was nearing completion, and the hegemony of the imperialist West over lesser tribes was no longer an unquestionable given—are clearly ancestral to the kind of alternate history story S.M. Stirling wishes to write, the kind of alternate history adventure in which SF journeys to lost worlds or to planets where topless girl warriors fall in love with you—or fantasy plungings through portals into lands where topless serving wenches can be mighty grateful—are replaced (they are simple paradigm shifts) by jonbar points into worlds no longer "fixed," playgrounds where adventure is still possible. (A jonbar point can be defined as a moment in history when an action or decision, like John Wilkes Booth not killing Lincoln, generates an alternate history.) "Alternate history," Stirling concludes, "can give writer and reader a breath of fresher air, of unlimited possibility. ... " So we are warned.
Stirling's is not, of course, alternate history written to illuminate real history, as Kim Stanley Robinson (for one) conceived of it in a novel like The Years of Rice and Salt. Worlds That Weren't is a set of gamelike adventure stories, tales of alternate history written to escape from real history. There are four long tales: Stirling's novella, "The Daimon" by Harry Turtledove, "The Logistics of Carthage" by Mary Gentle and "The Last Ride of German Freddie" by Walter Jon Williams. Each is original to this volume, and given how similar they are it is just possible that somebody at Roc requested a certain kind of storyline from the chosen authors. Each tale is about fighting and/or war. Two of the stories feature Fighting Philosophers (sorry—alpha males with big mouths) who are alternate versions of historical figures, and two of them feature Fighting Fillies (sorry—women of agency and purpose) who are created out of whole cloth. Three of the four protagonists engage in rip-roaring good sex; one sleeps with his wife. Both Fighting Philosophers kick their buckets; both Fighting Fillies sail past their last pages into alternate futures. The quality of product varies from tale to tale.
Harry Turtledove posits a Classic Greece, circa 400 BCE, in which Sokrates invades Sicily with Alkibiades (rather than staying home) and does gadfly work on his sybaritic chief, using the Socratic method to guide him to victory (rather than defeat) at Syracuse and elsewhere, and proves himself to be a mighty tough soldier to boot (the Socratic method helps him kill the foe), but has to drink hemlock all the same, because of his big mouth, though not before his pupil, young Aristokles (never in this world to become known as Plato), has a sudden big think:
"I can see in my mind the images—the forms, if you like—of perfect good, of perfect truth, of perfect beauty," Aristokles said. "In the world, though, they are always flawed. How do we, how can we approach them?"
But Aristokles is almost immediately killed, without either getting an answer or even having the time to write his question down, which means (I guess: Turtledove does not cue us to pay any attention to the tragic implications of Plato's death as a teenager) that Western philosophy does not get born. The tale ends with Alkibiades eyeing Persia.
But by this point, we hardly care, for the cartoon clatter of the tale has deafened us by now to higher stuff. Sokrates could have been written by Joel Chandler Harris in a Bre'r Rabbit mood; and Alkibiades is straight out of Asterix. Turtledove himself is most evident in the clarity of the descriptions of the siege of Syracuse.
Adrift in paradoxical playgrounds
Stirling's vision is quite a bit more fun. We are in northern Texas, in the alternate world created (in a previous novel) by a 19th century asteroid fall that has knocked out Europe. An alpha male officer from the Empire (now centered in India) visits the badlands to do some hunting, where he encounters an alpha male guide and a young woman who is a good knife fighter and takes no nonsense from sexist frontiersmen. The threesome gets along pretty well; the Fighting Filly sleeps with the romantic officer, and he teachers her some Eastern Sex Stuff which seems (very decorously) to involve the practice of cunnilingus (unknown to Western Heads), though later she marries the guide. In the meanwhile, the lowslung swarthy cannibals who skulk in the swamps have suddenly begun to organize themselves, and become very dangerous, though the threesome kills lots and lots and lots of them. The savage lowlifes, it turns out, are being organized by Russians who worship the dread cannibal god Tchernobog. Things look dire for civilization and Texas but—in scenes so blurringly elided one almost thinks "Shikari in Galveston" has been cut down from a novel—the cast is saved and the Empire is Warned in the Nick of Time.
The alternate history informing Mary Gentle's "Logistics" is that which gradually takes shape in (and gradually shapes) her great, giant Ash: If there is anything as straightforward as a jonbar point in the tale, it is the fact that it is Visigoths who invade North Africa in the fifth century CE, not Vandals, which leads to a Visigoth occupation of Spain and lots else, including the mise en scene of the story in question here, which is in fact pretty minor: a series of anecdotes circumambiating a small crisis involving a Christian refusal to bury a fighting woman in consecrated ground. Inter alia, the dead woman's friend, Fighting Filly Yolande, mates heartily with her soldier pal Guillaume, and eventually the two act as foster parents to a tiny tot with ashen hair.
Main problem: that Yolande is cut from very much the same cloth as Ash when she grows up, being a woman with a big mouth (everybody in alternate histories talks too much, almost certainly in order to drop the names of crossovers from our world, and to speculate—hence the Fighting Philosophers, I guess—on the intriguing, strangely hypothetical nature of the world inhabited: the world everybody is there significantly to voice) and a tough non-nonsense grunt in a fighting unit with a charismatic male commandant, etc. Second main problem: Gentle has really quite a lot of trouble riding her matter into the story bits toward the end; all the talking in this world does not conceal a certain peckishness in the substance of the thing.
Walter Jon Williams' tale of the death in a gunfight of Friedrich Nietzsche in the American West soon after the Gunfight at the OK Corral in 1881 is, for most of its length, just as Happy-Hours-in-Escape-World as its companions. And there's even a genuine goof. Williams states that his jonbar point comes when Nietzsche intervenes in the gunfight, himself shooting Wyatt Earp (the real Earp lived till 1929) and starting history on an undetermined new course; but early in the tale he has his Fighting Philosopher quote from the famous last paragraph of a book which had not, in fact, yet been written: Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn (1884), which is where the line about lighting out for the Territory first appears. ...
But in the end, which follows really good sex for the Fighting Philosopher, and a valiant death at the hands of Doc Holliday, some of the underlying burden of serious alternate histories—that burden being some argument to the effect that it means something meaningful if the world is made different—does sift into the telling. After his death, Nietzsche's Jewish girlfriend, actress Josie "Sadie" Marcus, who speaks German, acquires his notebooks and resolves to publish them, thus saving this alternate world from the anti-Semitic filth insinuated into the real Nietzsche's posthumous works by his poisonous real-life sister. There is no hint given that Hitler will not, as a consequence, prosper; but still some light glimmers at the end of the tunnel of "Last Ride," a light all the more welcome here at the close of Worlds That Weren't, a volume exceedingly parsimonious, for the most part, about casting any light at all.
