You are about to read “The Original,” the Godfather of them all and it is an honor that the publisher asked me to provide the foreword.
Alternate histories obviously intrigue you the reader because you have picked this book up and are even taking time to read this foreword before jumping in. Alternate, or “speculative” history has been standard fare since the beginnings of modern science fiction with H.G. Wells and at times even appeared in popular mainstream fiction, but until the publication of this book it was most definitely not the playing field of truly “serious” historians. “Real” historians would turn their nose up with a sniff, for after all the past is the past, unchangeable. In private a professor might toss out some speculative questions to students and peers, but publication of a piece offering opinion on a “what if ” and building a scenario out of it? Most definitely not the path to surviving a tenure review! At best, such an historian might draw the smiling sarcasm of a department chair asking, “are we a real historian or are you going to continue to write this sci-fi stuff?”
I know because I was caught in that trap. I was a graduate student in history when this book was first published and had already published half a dozen novels prior to returning to school for a Ph.D. in history. Only a few of my professors viewed my “sci-fi” alter ego with interest, or at least benign bemusement. Most lectured sternly that it was time to drop my childish speculations and buckle down to write some real history with titles such as: “Class, Gender and Ethnicity: the Intermarrying of Transgender Mennonites to Upper Class Hopi Indians 1850–1852,” (titles like that got you high marks at conferences and tenure reviews!)
Then along came Professor Harold Deutsch. Professor Deutsch was indeed a “Godfather” in the field of “serious” history. He was the mentor for two of my mentors in graduate school, so I can claim at least some indirect lineage from him (as was Professor Dennis Showalter, one of the contributors to this work).
With this book, for the first time we have an anthology of trained, professional historians, bringing to bear all their skills to what are indeed the great “what if” questions of history. Of course the past cannot be changed but there was a time when the past was indeed the present. The future at that moment was a fog-shrouded field, filled with perils. That at such a moment a hundred different paths laid open, each path leading off into unknowns concealed within that fog. Some paths might lead to “broad sun-lit uplands,” others to a “thousand years of darkness.” Consider that more than a few of those would have meant that you and I would not even now exist.
Such speculation cannot help but intrigue. Think of our own lives in such a context. Do we not all harbor at least one wish, one speculation, that if only we could return to a certain moment, perhaps only to say yes instead of no to someone, how different our lives would now be.
It enables us to seriously contemplate how, at times, the decision of but one person can change the world, impacting our lives for better or worst— if indeed we would have a life at all.
Across the more than two decades since publication of this book, “alternate” or “speculative” history has evolved into a remarkably rich field in which trained historians take delight. Some works, to remain nameless, are absurd, many are just darn good entertainment and some are the foundation for serious thought and inquiry when near parallel decisions and realities are faced today.
For this author, the efforts of respected historians such as Deutsch and Showalter gave me “breathing room,” that I could indeed be a serious historian, and then have the leeway to apply that training to “what ifs,” write about them, and not face that tenure committee with dread.
For the general public I would say thank heavens! You are about to get a look at what some truly great historians speculate about. They will take you into a living past where the future, our present is yet to be. Imagine them as diamond cutters, gazing into an as yet untouched gem, asking us to consider how different that gem, (meaning our world today) would be if but one “cut,” yet to be made, was different. Might that gem, our world, have remained the same, might it have perhaps glowed far more brightly with stunning radiance, or instead have been shattered into broken shards lost in darkness.
You most certainly will enjoy this crystal gazing and as you do so, consider the alternate realities of your own life with but a single change in the past and know that ahead of you, as with all of us, how paths taken or not taken shall shape the days to come, not just for us but for all the generations that will follow.
William R. Forstchen, Ph.D. 2010