Why I Wrote... Reid in Braid
- cepmurphywrites
- Jun 3
- 7 min read
By Ryan Fleming.
The writing of Reid in Braid was ultimately inspired by seeing the 2003 German film Good Bye, Lenin! for the first time as a Scot in the mid-2010s. More specifically, seeing an exploration of East German national identity upon reunification, at a time when one was inundated with discussion of Scottish national identity in politics. Reid in Braid’s format was inspired by one of my favourite alternate history works, also about a Communist regime in a country that did not see one in our own history.
For anyone who has not seen it, I cannot recommend Good Bye, Lenin! enough as a wonderful tragic comedy film. A son (Daniel Brühl) attempts to keep the recent fall of the German Democratic Republic from his mother (Katrin Sass), who spent the Peaceful Revolution in a coma, for fear the shock will kill her.
So many of the cultural things shown that give East Germans a sense of identity distinct from the West were easily understood. Their own international football team, and its victory over West Germany in the 1974 World Cup being a defining point in the memories of those who saw it, brought to mind the Scottish victory over England in 1967. That England team had been undefeated since winning the 1966 World Cup (hardly ever brought up since), with the loss leading to a joke that Scotland were ‘Unofficial World Champions’. This sense of national identity focused on sports teams could apply to many countries, of course, and the connection I made might have just been based on my own nationality, but then there came something in the film that seemed almost too directly targeted.
It is an overstated myth that businesses in England will refuse to accept Scottish banknotes. (If anything, I think Northern Irish banknotes are more likely to be refused.) I’ve certainly never had any trouble handing them over and the only time I think I’ve ever had someone refused to accept notes in England were Bank of England £50s. However, it is a known thing despite how overblown it may be in my experience. There comes a scene in Good Bye, Lenin! where the characters try to exchange their old East German marks for West German ones, only to be refused because the deadline for exchanges had passed. This prompts an angry rant from Brühl’s character against the ‘Wessi’ clerk, saying that their money is not worth anything.
These and other aspects of Good Bye, Lenin! convinced me that as much as it was about East and West Germany, it was also applicable in an odd way to Scotland and the rest of the UK, respectively. It’s not a neat fit, of course — East Germany was formed mostly from old Prussia, so if being like-for-like was important it might make the most sense to base your Communist dictatorship in the Home Counties — but what was more interesting for me was how the split impacted the way those on either side of the divide saw themselves. How it might introduce cultural differences or entrench those that were already present.
By the time Good Bye, Lenin! finished, the idea was already beginning to take hold. Scotland separated from the rest of the UK at some point in the past and becoming a Communist, one-party, totalitarian state.
I had where I wanted to get to and had to work back to figure out how history arrived at that point. It is perhaps not the best way to go about ‘pure’ alternate history speculation, but it works well with me to tell the story I want to tell.
Whilst the idea was forming, I did not have to look far for material. Scottish independence was the defining issue of the 2010s, even after the 2014 referendum. So much so that it felt during the 2016 European Union referendum that it was just the rest of the UK remaking the debates from two years prior. (At least they changed the ending so as to not totally plagiarise.) The irony was, as much discussion as there was around currency, international membership, defence, and myriad other issues, it seemed far easier to become an independent state 100 years prior at the height of imperialism than it did to apply to join sovereign nations post-globalisation. There were many examples from Europe, including in the UK, of countries becoming independent post the First World War. It was simple, it was inelegant, but I decided that flipping the outcome of that war in favour of the Central Powers would create the instability into which the UK might break apart.
The events of the Great War and the subsequent dissolution I kept deliberately vague. Those were not the stories I wanted to tell in great detail. Sketched out was Scotland going from a constituent kingdom to a ‘Free State’, with a re-established Scottish parliament and a ‘Governor-Steward’ as head of state, to the socialist Scottish Democratic Republic following a civil war, eventually rechristened the Scots Democratic Republic. The rest of the world sort of revolved around this sketch. Since the Central Powers won the First World War that meant the path that led to East Germany was out, so instead I took some inspiration from Spain with its Popular Front election and subsequent civil war, albeit ending the latter in favour of the Republicans. Then it became populating that sketch with historical figures and events.
The 2010s offered a lot of inspiration for big political characters that might appear in the SDR. I think if I was to do it again, however, I’d probably stick with fictional or heavily, heavily fictionalised characters for chapters set contemporarily to our own time. I would save the real-life figures in an alternate history for the past but would use fictional ones as the main characters exclusively. This is just a way my writing of alternate history has evolved since writing Reid in Braid. The Red Clydeside era provided plenty of historical characters that could play a part in the formation of the SDR, though I did resist the temptation to have reference to followers of John Maclean as ‘Die Hards’. There were plenty of socialist and nationalist politicians to fill this history with some I knew about, some I discovered through research. I passed a bust of Hugh MacDiarmid in Edinburgh every day whilst I worked in that city, and the man seen as too Communist for the Nationalists, too Nationalist for the Communists fit the world like a glove. Cunningham Graham, who I have as ‘Governor-Steward’ was a revelation whose presence I regret being limited to a couple mentions.
There was now the idea, the history was sketched out, there were historic personalities that would drive that history. All that remained was to tell the story that might make this alternate history feel more alive.
In the end, it wound up being stories rather than a story. It started out with a single short story, set around the time of writing in the alternate history. Subsequently, whether unconsciously or consciously, I began to ape some of the format of one of my favourite alternate history works.
The first Reid in Braid story was a very early effort from me. The idea had more scope for a single story, I knew, but I was so keen to write it that I just had to get some of it out rather than keep thinking about a longer form work that I would never start. That was the trend for a lot of my grander ideas; still is, to an extent. I took great pleasure in writing that first story, remaking Glasgow into the capital of a socialist ‘paradise’ where Buchanan Street (as in Andrew) has been 'renamed' Buchanan Street (as in George) and the bronze statue of Wellington usually adorned with a traffic cone replaced by one of Marx, albeit still with the traffic cone. The latter became my defining image of the work and wonderfully brought to life by Jack Tindale on the cover.
Subsequent stories did not seem to come as direct follow-ups to the first. Instead, I wanted to go back and fill in the gaps of how we arrived at the state of affairs portrayed in the first. I later realised how much of that was influenced by Eugene Byrne and Kim Newman’s Back in the USSA, a similar collection of alternate history short stories, about a United States that experiences a Communist revolution. The opening story of that is whilst the USSA is on its last legs, with subsequent ones all taking place prior, except for the last. By the time I realised this, making the last story more of a follow-up to the first seemed like a nice way to bookend Reid in Braid itself.
What I enjoyed about writing in that format was the freedom it gave me to explore different aspects of the world. A grander tale would not allow me some of the asides I wanted to delve into Highland gulags, the sectarianism that would have dominated any civil war in Glasgow, or Scottish infiltration of the UK government. Or, if I did, would be bound to tying them into a single era, locale, or small group of characters. To that extent I really feel that fix-up novels are a great way of telling alternate history or indeed any work whose setting is of great import to the overall feeling. Fix-ups used to be a staple of science fiction novels, and should really be used more there, in fantasy fiction, and in alternate history since they allow you all the freedom of the short story to explore diverse concepts, places, and people whilst having the scope of a novel.
The downside is, of course, that it’s easy to write a single story in the setting and then move on to other stories, as I’ve found with many subsequent attempts to tell a novel-length alternate history story through a collection of short stories.
Reid in Braid started out trying to portray East and West Germany as Scotland and the rest of the UK inspired by Good Bye, Lenin! and wound up a broader work inspired by Back in the USSA. Though I hope my writing has grown since then it still informs a lot of what I like to write with the emphasis on short stories creating more intimate, episodic tales that can be combined to give a broader picture of a very different world.
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