Why I Wrote… Chamberlain Resigns, And Other Things That Did Not Happen
- cepmurphywrites
- 42 minutes ago
- 5 min read
By Charles E.P. Murphy
It was the internet’s fault.
I’d been into history as a general interest since I was a kid, and alternate history was introduced to me through a barrage of sci-fi stories, most especially Sliders on BBC2. It was the internet that turned this mild interest in AH, “oh yeah that’s a fun source of stories”, into a bigger thing because the internet was where fanfiction writers had long written “What If Character X Was Like Y”, “What If Bad Guy Won”, “What If Property But In Completely Different Setting” etc. The internet was also where alternate history fans lurked in forums and websites, doing in-depth worldbuilding and mad little ideas that no sane big publisher would accept. I can’t remember exactly what dark corner of the internet grabbed me, but I found myself sucked in.
Once I was in, I ended up finding Sea Lion Press’s books and forum. A whole publishing line just for AH! A whole world of short stories! Most importantly, a place you could pitch a book and potentially get accepted. Other people had done it, why not me? All I needed was an actual idea.
Where that idea came from goes back to two places: Philip K Dick and Biteback.
Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, which is about a world where the Axis won, pivots around the writer of an alternate history book called The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, which is about a world where the Axis lost. But it’s not our world he’s imagined. He doesn’t know that President Roosevelt would have stayed longer than four terms, for example, and his world sees Pearl Harbor as the first blow of Japan’s march to victory, so he’s written how the next president after FDR cleverly prevents Pearl Harbor. This ‘double blind’ AH is an intriguing idea. What can we learn about our world, and our assumptions, and another world and its assumptions, if we look at it what someone thinks would plausibly have happened and gets it all wrong?
Biteback, meanwhile, are a publisher who have run AH anthologies every so often, predominantly about political outcomes. These books are a mix of serious essays, short stories, and playful theorising, and their writers can be journalists, academics, or politicians… and sometimes politicians and former staffers writing ‘what if things were utterly brilliant because everyone did what we wanted all along’.
And to grab attention, Biteback’s anthologies are always titled “Prime Minister [famous person who was never PM], and other things that did not happen”. (This backfired on one years later, when Boris Johnson actually became PM)
Together, these influences told me what I wanted to write: I wanted to write a Biteback-style anthology about alternate history but ‘written by’ fictional people from an alternate history, where we learn what their world is like from seeing them argue how this is the right way things work & here are the only logical ways it could be different. I wanted to have serious figures and more jovial ones. I wanted even the fake author bios to tell you something about this world, where you could look at their previous work or potentially their name and get clues.
So now I just needed the “Prime Minister [not a PM]” hook to go with it.
Neville Chamberlain sprung to mind early on. The one thing everyone knows about Chamberlain is that he appeased Hitler, it failed, and he had to hand the war over to Churchill. That image of Chamberlain with the letter from Hitler is iconic, a symbol of failure. The popular history is that Churchill was the man for the moment and kept us going. “Chamberlain” and “Munich” are terms you never want associated with your political career, while “a Churchill moment” is something good (or an insult, if people think you’re desperate for one). “Speak for England”, as Arthur Greenwood told Leo Amery to do in parliament when the latter bollocked Churchill, is a rallying cry.
So, what if Chamberlain resigning is one of the things that did not happen? What if World War Two ended early with an Allied victory? What if Chamberlain winning changes how we see him? Maybe we see him as a brilliant Prime Minister, a principled man who wanted to avoid war but, when it could not be avoided, was not found wanting.
This determined the rest of the story. Britain and France had to defeat Germany early. However, they had to win it after Germany had invaded France because it was narratively important that an alternate historian was proposing “ha ha what if Chamberlain was pushed to resign and Churchill took over?”, which meant there had to be a point close enough to our timeline where things could have turned out similar. From there, I needed to think of what I could change to give me a plausible-enough-for-this victory for the Allies. In working it out, I also hit on using the Franco-British Union – the proposal that both countries would merge into one political union to better fight Germany, a proposal given when France was invaded in the hope of boosting their morale and keeping them in the fight. It’s a good, meaty AH idea to work with, and once I had that, I had something to work with later, “how long does the Union last?”
And if Hitler falls early, what happens to Germany? What, if any, role does America have? What happens with British culture and our views of the war if Germany falls before the Blitz? What happens when the Soviet Union invaded Poland alongside Hitler and never is itself invaded by him, but Italy and Japan never got around to joining the Axis? (A subconscious influence on “what if Stalin is seen as part of the Axis and not the Allies” was 1940’s How Superman Would Win the War, where his creators Siegel and Schuster drew a fantasy of Superman dragging Hitler and Stalin off to the League of Nations)
From there I was plotting out decades of British and global history so I could have my ‘authors’ refer to it, both in saying How Things Turned Out and in thinking of How Things Could Be Different. I could also figure out things that turned out the same but are remembered differently in this world. Post-war Britain fought multiple bloody conflicts to hold onto its colonies or crush communist movements in them, but over the years this has been downplayed in British memories of the past (and there had been an idea the empire was ‘given away’) while France’s unsuccessful war to hold Vietnam and its loss of Algeria remain well-known. What if Britain remembers its own conflicts in the same way? Why would this world do so when we don’t? And what reason would they give for the wars?
My favourite little detail was including a fake copyright for this book – not from Sea Lion Press, for few people would care about Germany’s pie-in-the-sky Operation Sea Lion and silly dreams of invading Britain, but from Operation Green Press, after the (real) obscure plan to invade Ireland. That’s the Nazi plot everyone has heard of in this world!
Six years on, was there anything I’d do differently? Quite likely, for six years means that both the target audience’s assumptions of history have changed, and our own world’s events & famous people have changed as well – more stuff to play around with! Who knows what might be worth doing in six more years?