edited by Niall Ferguson

Picador, Papermac £10.00, ISBN 0-333-64728-9

History at school tends to seem lifeless and dry and much of this can be attributed to the fixed nature of the subject. The chances of being creative within history are few and far between. After all everything is fixed, in the past, dates, people, battles - why bother.

One way of lending a gloss of creativity and imagination is to ponder the result if a historical event had turned out differently. Not only does this allow vigorous debate as a veritable can of worms will be opened but it may even be useful in predicting future events. Of course this process has been successfully used in fiction for years, both in sf and the mainstream, with Len Deighton’s SS-GB and The Alteration and others which, though character driven plots, are set in worlds created by a different turn of a card somewhere in the past.

Historically, if you excuse the term, historians steer well clear of such debate and fix themselves firmly to the facts and interpretation of them. In Virtual History a number of eminent historians look at a phase of history and predict what would have happened if a 50/50 situation had gone the other way. What would happen if Cromwell had never attained prominence because Charles I never had to restart parliament because he beat the Scots in 1639. Or if there was no American war of Independence, or Home Rule had been enacted in Ireland in 1912, or if Britain had ‘stood aside’ in August 1914, or if Hitler had invaded Britain, or if the Nazis had defeated Russia, or if the Cold War had been avoided, what if John F. Kennedy had lived, or Communism had not collapsed this century?

So how well have these debated been handled in this book? For a start, the collected essays actually only take up about half of the length of the book’s 548 pages, with a massive introduction by the editor justifying the existence of the book, and the afterword and notes at the end. Of the essays themselves, their intended audience seems to be students of history or other historians, though they are understandable to the layman with a smattering of historical knowledge they are written with the historian’s logical progression of argument leading to the possible events a year or two after the changed event. The different authors obviously have different styles and some are more readable than others with the editor, Nial Ferguson, being one of the more readable.

This book is not sf and although it gives a few clues to budding sf writers on alternative histories, they do not venture any speculation on how the change would affect the present day. The arguments that history could have been different seems to be enough for a historian.

In terms of illuminating history, the essays are interesting but perhaps more to the historian and history student than the laymen.

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