Why I Edited... AlloAmericana
- cepmurphywrites
- Jul 4
- 5 min read
By Alexander Wallace.
It is very odd for me to think that I have been a published author for three years – that is, someone who makes money (not a lot of money, to be clear) from published writing. I have six short stories published, three of which I make money from, all published through Sea Lion Press (the other three are in charity anthologies, two for Ukrainians and one for Palestinians). I worked on AlloAmericana: Myths and Legends from Other Americas, my first anthology and containing my first published story, for several months, corresponding with authors about getting stories in, after soliciting for them in the first place. Some came from the Sea Lion Press forum, and many more from Facebook. Three of them are people I know in person, and two of those I went to college with. I never really expected my initial query to Sea Lion Press to be answered, but Tom Black said he was interested, and off I went.
I will be perfectly candid with the readership here that my initial interest in the project was for self-interested reasons. I wanted to put my foot in the door of published AH, even from a small press, and I wanted to have some of my fiction published. The actual premise for the anthology was a riff on a book David Flin, late of this parish and former blog editor, had published about AH versions of British myths (one tale now available on its own). Being American, allohistorical versions of American folklore struck me as an obvious next step.
As I wrote my story, and later as I edited the stories, certain themes came to me that drew my interest. In my thinking about the anthology I came to think about how the United States is a relatively ‘new’ nation compared to those of Europe (eliding, of course, how nationalism in its current sense is a very modern phenomenon). It is a country founded by businessmen at Jamestown and religious nutjobs in Plymouth in the 17th century, in what historians call the Early Modern Period, and its independence did not come about until the Enlightenment. By European standards it is a country without ‘deep history’ – there is no American equivalent to The Song of Roland or El Cid, an imagining of the country from before modernity, as there is no ‘America’ in any recognizable sense before modernity. Nevertheless, America has a wide tradition of folklore that its people have woven into myths and tall tales as bold, as audacious, and as human as anything from Europe or indeed the rest of the world. It was a juxtaposition that I found to be dramatically compelling.
One thing that I think alternate history writers could play with is the Buddhist concept of anatta, or anatman, meaning “non-essence” or “non-self,” which holds that there is no phenomenon in the entire universe that has a fixed essence. All things are temporary, all things are in flux, all things are ultimately the product of circumstances rather than anything written into the law of the universe; it is also the reason why Buddhists argue that there is no such thing as the human self. It is an idea whose use to alternate history writers is clear; no society is fixed, no nation is of one character, no regime will last forever.
Although I was working on AlloAmericana before I really started studying Buddhism, I was investigating a similar concept. If America the nation is different, it is because the factors that made it are different, and as such Americans would tell themselves different stories. Folklore can feel distant, higher up, unchanging, especially as it is turned into hallowed national myth, but consider: El Cid would never have existed had Tariq ibn-Ziyad had not led Umayyad armies into the Iberian peninsula, and neither would have the Song of Roland.
I’m not sure I had the language for it at the time, but I was definitely playing with such themes in the story I wrote for the anthology, Honest and Loyal. It is a take on the old story of George Washington and the cherry tree (which never happened and is first attested in a biography of Washington written by Parson Weems in 1806 – the sixth edition of said biography!) inflected through a world where Washington sided with the British instead. Washington was not fated to be a revolutionary, and many writers have explored ways he could have become a loyalist. As such, a man who is revered by Americans as a hero could easily have taken the route of Benedict Arnold had the circumstances aligned. And that is where anatta rears its head: nothing about this was foreordained. All of this could have changed, and left our world unrecognizable, a world with none of us in it.
There’s a scene in the 2008 PC game Command and Conquer: Red Alert 3 where the Emperor of Japan, portrayed with great gusto and bombast by George Takei, finds out his timeline, where Japan is on the march towards world domination, was created by time travel. He is stunned that the past can change, that there is no divine destiny, that the past is ‘malleable.’ In doing so, the Emperor was exactly the sort of person denounced by George Orwell in his essay Notes on Nationalism, where he famously writes the following:
“Every nationalist is haunted by the belief that the past can be altered. He spends part of his time in a fantasy world in which things happen as they should – in which, for example, the Spanish Armada was a success or the Russian Revolution was crushed in 1918 – and he will transfer fragments of this world to the history books whenever possible. Much of the propagandist writing of our time amounts to plain forgery. Material facts are suppressed, dates altered, quotations removed from their context and doctored so as to change their meaning. Events which, it is felt, ought not to have happened are left unmentioned and ultimately denied.”
And if you look at contingency, you can begin to think about other ways history can be remembered, even if you do not change it. And if you look at contingency, you can begin to think about other ways history can be remembered, even if you do not change it. Such is the premise of one story in the anthology, A Proclamation of Our Manifest Destiny in the Philippine Islands by Ferdison Cayetano, the second-to-last in the anthology. One could argue the story goes against the theme of the anthology, but its inclusion, I thought, enhanced the argument about non-essence; it is set in the Philippines as the American military rampages through the island, ordered to sail there from Hong Kong by Theodore Roosevelt. Folk tales are often about heroes and nations all too often embody themselves as heroes. Having a counterpoint to that trend in the anthology struck me as something very welcome, and Cayetano’s story is very unnerving to boot!
The experience of AlloAmericana is something I will have to revisit soon. I figured it is a good time as any to announce that that I am currently working with Syllble, a writer’s collective headed by my good friend Fabrice Guerrier (also a contributor to AlloAmericana), on the Unchained Century project, a collaborative alternate history project with a point of divergence during the Spanish Civil War (on the team is also Arturo Serrano, who has been interviewed twice on this blog). Fabrice has tapped me to edit the first anthology of the project, its collaborative nature inspired by the 1632 universe, and I will see what I can do to improve on what I did with AlloAmericana. (Also - if anyone is interested in possibly taking part - DM me!) It was certainly a rewarding experience.
コメント