One Lamp:
Alternate History Stories from
the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction

A powerful tour through the palaces of time travelers and the battlefields of wars never fought

	One Lamp: Alternate History Stories from the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
	Edited by Gordon Van Gelder
	Four Walls, Eight Windows
	Trade Paperback, Sept. 2003
	352 pages
	ISBN 1-56858-276-5
	MSRP: $15.95/$23.95 Can.

Review by A.M. Dellamonica

or readers who think alternate history begins and ends with "what-if" scenarios about the U.S. Civil War, Gordon Van Gelder's One Lamp: Alternate History Stories from the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction promises to be an education and a delight. Mixing classics by legendary writers like Alfred Bester and Poul Anderson with those of newer voices like Charles Coleman Finlay and Dana Wilde, One Lamp sweeps the imagination in dozens of different directions. Its 14 stories showcase a genre that is tough-minded, subversive and infinitely flexible.

The anthology does have Civil War stories, to be sure. Bradley Denton lands Mark Twain in the middle of an ugly incident in "The Territory," while Maureen McHugh's Hugo Award-winning "The Lincoln Train" creates an America where a harrowing retribution is visited upon the South for the shooting of Abraham Lincoln. The World War II era is also well represented. In the classic "Two Dooms" by C.M. Kornbluth, a scientist working on the Manhattan Project gets to see the shape of a future where the Bomb is never invented. In Ben Bova's "The Café Coup," well-meaning time travelers try to channel 20th-century history in a peaceful direction, with unfortunate results.

But while alternate history is a close cousin of military SF, not all of One Lamp's stories are directly concerned with war. Alfred Bester's immortal "The Men Who Murdered Mohammed" is a pure time-travel piece, one in which a cuckolded scientist becomes entangled in temporal parodoxes. "Delenda Est" is a delicious Golden Age romp through time by Poul Anderson. Paul McAuley's "The Two Dicks" is an alternate biography of SF author Philip K. Dick; meanwhile, Paul Di Filippo remakes Louis Armstrong into an SF magazine editor in "And I Think To Myself, What a Wonderful World."

A moving and multi-faceted experience

Some anthologies come together like a tapestry, their tales forming a unified impression of their common subject matter. One Lamp, on the other hand, is more of a mosaic. Its unique pieces are plastered together, never overlapping; each story has its own carefully drawn borders. The majesty of this book lies in its contrasts as well as its similarities.

Some of the individual tiles of that mosaic shine with especial brightness. Jen Lars Jensen's "The Secret History of the Ornithopter" is the awe-inspiring story of a gentleman-inventor who is determined to mechanically imitate the flight of birds. Funded by Japanese nobles, he becomes midwife to a surreal world where Japanese ornithopters fight wars against fleets of fixed-wing aeroplanes from the inventor's native Britain. Jensen's clash of Eastern and Western cultures, as shown through the microcosm of one life, is delicately portrayed and heartbreaking.

One consistency does hold sway over this book: many of the stories in One Lamp have light moments, but overall the anthology is serious in tone, sometimes leaning toward tragedy. In Harry Turtledove's chilling "The Last Article," Gandhi pits his pacifist philosophy against a Nazi occupation of India; in James Morrow's "Auspicious Eggs," global warming drives humanity into a collective psychotic break over reproductive rights. The entries by Di Filippo, Anderson and Bester do bring up the mood somewhat, but they have their sharp edges, too. Readers may want to approach each story carefully, giving it time to settle before tackling the next.

This effect is to some extent natural; alternate history does lend itself to darkness. In One Lamp, Gordon Van Gelder has thoughtfully assembled some of the most haunting visions—old and new—that this genre has created.

A great starting place for readers new to AH, One Lamp imparts a sense of its possibilities without dipping deeply into esoteric historical periods or the kind of complex extrapolation that results when the story's point of divergence is at a remove from its events. This may mean, though, that the book will be less of a challenge for hardcore AH fans. — A.M.D.

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