Robert Cowley (ed.),
More What If?: Eminent Historians Imagine What Might Have Been
Pan Macmillan, 2003, pp448, £7.99, ISBN 0330487256

For anyone interested in literature and history this means that readers have to supply their own knowledge. Unlike the first volume the only tribute to counter-factual speculation found in this one lies in the second essay - four hundred years ago Pascal wondered if Cleopatra's nose had been shorter then might world history have been different. Josiah Ober's "Not By A Nose" considers what would have happened if Anthony and Cleopatra had defeated Octavian in 31 BCE, rather than Octavian winning to become the first Emperor, Augustus. I know of no alternate history which takes this as its point of divergence but it seems one with many implications - might the Roman republic have been re-confirmed, or might eastern autocracy have gained wider reign? And equally the classically-read reader can reconsider Shakespeare's Anthony and Cleopatra or Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra in the light of these other implications.

Alternately, the modern blockbuster reader can take a late essay, David Kahn's "Enigma Uncracked", and reconsider Robert Harris's ENIGMA. What if all that bleakness at Bletchley Park was for nothing? Would it mean that the war was for nothing, or would it mean that the war would be fought in a different way? According to David Kahn it would have meant a different and perhaps more exciting geography for the war, but it would not have mattered in the long run.

Whether by chance or by intention, another late essay in the book, Richard B. Frank's "No Bomb, No End", about the failure to drop the atomic bomb on Japan, principally considers Japan's dependence on food imports. Allied mastery of the air could have brought starvation quickly to Japan, since the population lived on islands separate to those which grew their daily rice, but the Japanese soldiers of the Greater Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere had proved that they could live on very little. Which means that, isolated though Japan might be, it would not submit to absolute surrender. This then links to the final essay of the book, William H. McNeill's "What if Pizarro Had Not Found Potatoes in Peru?", which considers the role this staple food has provided in world (mainly European, actually) history. There is a good chance that there might have been no Hitler, because there would have been no Prussia which survived the Seven Years War on its potatoes. Prussia, though, discovered the potato late compared to Ireland, and southern Ireland had the potato long before the rest of the British isles.

Ireland had the potato because it had been left on return journeys from the Grand Banks by Basque fisherman who lived in the only part of Spain in which the potato could thrive. It was Francis Drake, of course, who brought the potato to England. However, it was not the same potato, at least not the same variety, as that grown in Ireland; not something that would matter for more than two hundred years until, in the 1840s, the Lumper variety in Ireland was wiped out by disease causing the consequent Irish famine, while the varieties in Britain survived. A bigot could claim that the Catholics starved because of their catholic potato.

"Fascinating", I thought. However, then I wondered, what happened to the Basques? Were they so reliant on the potato as the southern Irish, did their antipathy to the Madrid government grow because of a similar famine? McNeill does not say. Equally, he does not consider another famine, equally bad but now forgotten, whose disappearance provokes more thought about what makes history and what fails to do so. In the 1690s the harvest failed every year in Scotland. There would have been even less government aid than the poor law provided in Ireland in the 1840s and proportionately a greater number of people must have starved to death, but today not even the Scots remember it. However, the Scots would not have received newspaper coverage - it was not mature enough - while Ireland had its disaster in a time of media growth. None of Cowley's contributors consider it, but a large element of history is not that events are written down, nor by whom they are recorded, but how much and how often events are written down. Frederick Pohl and C M Kornbluth once wrote a novel saying as much.

So there are many lessons for would-be SF authors in a volume like this. I have my doubts, though, whether so many authors who still want to write about Space Emperors and gubernatorial races in the galaxy, who hang themselves on the "Grand Man Theory of History", can exploit all the inferences to be found in these essays. That is also a criticism of the authors of this collection who are inadequate in drawing out the implications of the events they discuss.