Eric Flint

(continued)

Interview by Alyce Wilson

Was it…I don't want to use the term "fun" because that makes it sound a little trivial, but did you welcome the chance to go back and… you were studying history when you were in college, working towards a PhD. I know you have a master's in it, African history. What was it like for you to go back to that?

It wasn't really going back. I kept it up.

No? You'd always been doing that?

I always kept studying and reading history all the way through my life. In fact, the truth is, technically and officially, I've written about 25-26 novels, and I think of those, not quite half are altered history. Actually, the majority are not, but if you look a little bit beneath the surface, most of my novels — not all but most of them — are really kind of altered history. Let's take Mother of Demons as an example. OK? Really, it's an altered history of the Bronze Age. The only thing is I made it an alien Bronze Age. But if you read the book, the historical concepts and knowledge is all through it. I just made it science fiction. Basically, it's almost a time-travel story, except it's [written] as a space-travel story. A group of human beings [...] crash lands, and then they find themselves stranded in a society that's in the Bronze Age, and they're aliens. But the issues they have to deal with are still those of the Bronze Age society.

Likewise, The Course of Empire is a science-fiction novel set in the future; posits an Earth conquered by an alien species, but the actual, historical model for it is the Roman Conquest of the Greeks and what happened after, the complexity of the relationships between the Roman and Greeks. That's the model. Or part of that's the model, and another part of the model is the conquest of China and how that unfolded afterwards. Basically, I wanted to illustrate that conquest is a lot more complex than it was, and it's usually a two-way street, especially if you have two societies that are reasonably equal in terms of their level of social and cultural development.

Is that kind of what you meant when you said [in a Philcon panel] that people aren't interested in [just small] details being different in altered history, it had to be more significant?

No, no. I think it's… I don't think too many people in history can… I don't know how to put it. There's a way you can do altered history kind of like a video game or board game, and especially it's easy to do if you're doing it in a military sense, military history. You know, "What if Napoleon had lost at Austerwitz? What if this, what if that?" And you'll see the different things unfolding. But unless some really important, broad [...] social/ethical issue is involved, what's really the interest for most readers? And the answer is, not much. It's all abstract in a larger sense; there's nothing really at stake in it.

What are you striving to do with your alternate histories, then? What appeals to you about writing that sort of book?

I can illustrate certain things to people. Mother of Demons for instance, once you get beneath the level of the adventure and hoopla and the fun of the story, it's a kind of disquisition on my part of how I think people ought to look at human history. Is it a pile of errors and misery that sort of has no purpose? Is there a pattern to it? What emotional attitude should you have toward human history? That's really what that book is about.

The 1632 series doesn't have an endpoint but is designed to illustrate [...] what is democracy exactly and what's involved in it? What's important about it? How does it interact with other people? That's really what that whole series is about.

The series I started, the first two books I posted with Del Rey, and I'm going to continue with Baen, started with 1812: Rivers of War and 1824: The Arkansas War is a study of American history. In a way it's actually an altered history of the Civil War, but I'm doing it the opposite way most people do it, or anyone's done, as far as I know, which is I don't start with the Civil War and have a change and see what happens. What I do is start it half a century earlier, make a change there. What I'm really trying to do in that series is just demonstrate that it's important to remember, I think, even within the limits of what people understood at the time — it's unrealistic to expect people to live outside their own times, but given what was real and people understood and knew at the time — all kinds of issues involving race, slavery, could have been handled much better than they were.

Actually Steve Sterling wrote a nice review of it. He said, "What Eric is doing is unusual. He's not showing how it could have gotten worse; he's saying this is about how it could have gotten better." Which is not the way most altered histories work.

Well, you're interested in learning from history.

Yes. I think the advantage to altered history — it's entertaining, of course. You can never forget that the first thing a novel has to be is entertaining, because that's why people are buying it, and that's why nobody likes didactic, preachy books. Believe me. I try at least — some books I just do for the fun of it, but I try to make there be at least a point to it. The nice thing about altered history — let's put it this way — there's a real huge disadvantage that all the historical sciences have, and I'm including not just history, but history, geology, much of biology, all the historical sciences, even astronomy. They have the great disadvantage over other sciences: that it's impossible to do controlled experiments. You just can't.

There's too many variables.

Therefore you — typically the way the historical sciences work is they do it by — they substitute comparative ones. That's how astronomy works. We don't live long enough to actually study the evolution of a star. What astronomers do is they compare millions of stars with each other to see what patterns they can see. It's the same thing biologists do when they study evolution. Nobody can sit back and watch the evolution of trilobites. What they can do, which is what evolution does, is a lot of comparative studies. The problem you have with human history is it's too damn short. There aren't that many comparisons you can make. There's just not.

Our history is 5-6,000 years long, as opposed to 500 million years of multi-cell life or billions of years, if you're talking about astronomy. So it's very hard to come up with actual comparative examples. It really limits science, with the extent to which history can be a historical science. That's why there's so much guesswork in history, because you really don't have that many things you can match it up against. It's hard to know how much of what happened in American history is due to the fact that people [did what they wanted to] or how much, if we had many other societies like that and we could say, "Well this happens in all of them, or most of them."

Now what alternate history is, therefore, is an experiment in a way. It's what happens if someone artificially and fictionally creates an alternate America so you can see and measure, here's what happened in this alternate — this being the United States or wherever, compared to what really happened, and is there any kind of lessons or things that could be illuminated out of it? And I think there are.

Now how well, how accurately, of course, depends on how well you do it and how much people agree that your perceptions are correct.

But then it can open up a discussion.

It can open up discussions, yes. So in that respect, I think I take alternate history seriously. I don't think it's just entertainment. But again, if you're going to write novels, especially if you intend to be a commercial writer and make a living at it, as I do, then you've always got to make sure you make it entertaining.