Writing Alternate History: Real vs Fictional Characters
- 14 hours ago
- 10 min read
By Thomas Anderson.
Alternate History fiction (or some of it at least) can be considered a specialised form of historical fiction. In particular, if one has set a story in a timeline not many years after the Point of Divergence (POD) then in theory everyone one meets in such a story should be a person who existed in real history.
Of course, in reality this is not the case, just as it isn’t in pure historical fiction which is supposedly intended to slot into the actual history we live in (Our TimeLine or OTL). Authors are inevitably going to create their own original characters and insert them into a story. There are a number of reasons to do so. A writer will likely want the creative input to be able to design their own protagonist and other main characters, rather than being reliant on the backstory and characteristics of a real person. Furthermore, this also saves them from having to do extensive research into a historical figure and avoid anything which contradicts their real characteristics, backstory or history. This is not only a significant challenge even for historically well-attested figures whom have had much written both by and about themselves (such as Winston Churchill, say) but always runs the risk that some new piece of information could be uncovered by a future biographer which contradicts the portrayal in the fictional work. You can’t win.
However, it can also be argued that historical fiction lacks a certain authenticity if real figures don’t appear at all, especially in circumstances in which one would expect them to do so. As I’ll discuss later, there are alternatives to this, but typically most historical fiction will mix in some background historical characters to lend weight to their main cast, often in positions of authority. A typical example is Bernard Cornwell’s Sharpe series in which protagonist Richard Sharpe and his crew of Chosen Men are fictional but they interact with the real Duke of Wellington, their ultimate commander. Indeed, this can sometimes lead to a sort of paradox (I cannot be the only person who has thought of this) that if the Duke of Wellington came back to life today, he would be confused that probably a decent slice of the population would only know him through his interactions with a man he’s never heard of.
This approach is probably the most mainstream one and has a venerable historical tradition in itself; for example, I am currently reading The Count of Monte Cristo, written in the 1840s but beginning set in the 1810s. The book has a fictional protagonist and antagonists, but features cameos from real people like King Louis XVIII, noticeably filtered through Alexandre Dumas’ opinions and the hindsight views from the fact he was writing during the July Monarchy after the absolutist Bourbons had been overthrown.
Another classic but more recent example of this is Ken Follett’s historical novels, such as the famous The Pillars of the Earth and its successors, following the lives of generation after generation of fictional people in a fictional Wiltshire town, Kingsbridge (though clearly based on Marlborough) from the 1200s onwards. In the process they may interact with real people, in particular authority figures like kings and nobles, but those are decidedly secondary to the narrative. There is also the inverse approach of a story focused primarily on the historical characters (say, Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, about the intrigue at the Tudor court with Thomas Cromwell, Anne Boleyn and others) in which supporting cast members are typically fictional due to the difficulties of finding information about servants or people in other more minor roles at the time. Between these two approaches, the vast majority of historical fiction on the page, the stage and the screen can be found.
However, these are not the only such approaches. Two extremes can be found in the works of James Clavell at one end of the spectrum, and The Guns of the South by Harry Turtledove at the other end. Clavell writes what is described as historical fiction, but every single character who appears (and almost every person who is even mentioned) is fictional. Many of them are deliberately fictionalised versions of historical characters with significant roles in history. For example, Tai-Pan, set in the 1840s and depicting the founding of Hong Kong, has as one of its major protagonists Dirk Struane, the director of a company known officially as Struane and Company but by reputation as the Noble House. Struane and his company are fictional but both are very obviously based on the real company Jardines and its founder. (A television adaptation of a later book in the series, Noble House, starring a terrifyingly young Pierce Brosnan, gives up trying to hide this and even uses Jardines’ real life headquarters to depict that of the Noble House!)
What is more surprising is that Tai-pan even has fictionalised stand-ins with subtly different names for people like Lord Palmerston (who never appears), the Qing dynasty official Keshen (or Qishan), and Hong Xiuquan, founder of the Taiping Rebellion (Stephen Fry take note). I think the only real person who is ever mentioned by name is Queen Victoria. It’s a fascinatingly strange approach, which starts to make more sense in Shogun. This (better-known) story is set in Japan in the year 1600 and follows an Englishman named John Blackthorne who washes ashore and eventually manages to fit into Japanese society, helping the Daimyo (feudal lord) Toranaga Yoshi against his enemies and falling in love with a Japanese Catholic convert named Toda Mariko. All three (and other characters in the book) are based on real historical figures – William Adams, Tokugawa Ieyasu and Hosokawa Gracia; Blackthorne even gets the same nickname as Adams, ‘Anjin’ meaning ‘pilot’.
So why use fictionalised versions? This frees up Clavell to not be tied to the real historical biographies of people but instead change them to fit his story. For example, Blackthorne and Mariko’s romance is a major part of the plot, but in reality Hosokawa and Adams never met. Though thus offering significant storytelling possibilities, this approach does lead to some peculiarities in the longer term. The historical events depicted in the book are major, showing a significant part of the process by which Japan shut itself off from the world under the leadership of the Tokugawa Shogunate. But in this setting, Toranaga replaces Tokugawa. Although I haven’t read it yet, I am aware that in Clavell’s later novel Gai-jin, set during the opening of Japan and the Meiji Restoration in the 1850s, Japan is depicted as being under the Toranaga Shogunate rather than Tokugawa.
This does beg the question – at what point does something stop being historical fiction and start being alternate history?
At the other end of the spectrum we have The Guns of the South. This is a work of alternate history driven by time travel, featuring an attempt by Afrikaner ethnonationalists (from the then far-off year of 2014!) travelling back to 1864 to arm the dying Confederate States of America with AK-47 automatic rifles and so create another racist state that could be an ally to apartheid South Africa.
(Incidentally, it is interesting to note that the whole history of South Africa after the 1860s was sent down a particular path by Bartle Frere wanting to try to unite all the colonies and states there after it had been done in Canada...and it was only done in Canada in response to the threat from the USA after the US Civil War...and Turtledove depicts Canada being conquered by the remnant northern US in a war in the 1860s...so it would be ironic if the Afrikaners actually butterflied away the existence of apartheid South Africa in the first place!)
Anyway, the plot is not what concerns us here, but the characters. Turtledove switches between two viewpoint characters (restraining himself from the cast of thousands his later books would be associated with), Confederate general Robert E. Lee for a high-level political view and then the sergeant and peacetime teacher Nate Caudell for a trench-level one. Lee is obviously real, but what is particularly impressive about Turtledove’s approach here is that so is Caudell – and, indeed, so is almost every person we encounter in the 19th century setting! Turtledove used documents from the regiment in which Caudell serves as a source of names and to flesh out the personalities of them, as he discusses in the afterword. For example, he found the example of Mollie ‘Melvin’ Bean, a woman who (as was not uncommon) cross-dressed to join the regiment and was later found out in OTL; finding a soldier named Billy Beddingfield who underwent rapid promotion and demotion, he interpreted him as a brave fighter on the battlefield but a troublemaker off it. And so on. While it’s possible to take this approach too far (and it necessarily focuses on people for whom records exist), it was definitely an interesting study there.
Later, as I mentioned, Turtledove would be more associated with ‘casts of thousands’. He approaches the real vs fictional angle very differently in his Worldwar series, which depicts the vast canvas of World War II as, in 1942, an alien invasion force with mostly 1990s level technology invades and all sides unite against it. Each book begins with a Dramatis Personae in which some of the human characters have names given in BLOCK CAPITALS and others in small bold text. A note tells us that the first group are real and the second group are fictional.
As one might expect, most of the protagonists are fictional to avoid the problems mentioned above about being forced to stick to the biography of a real person. One exception is Mordechai Anielewicz, a Polish Jewish resistance fighter who was a leader in risings against the Holocaust (especially the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising) but was killed in 1943 and became a symbol of resistance. Not that much is known about Anielewicz’s life, so Turtledove is able to use him effectively as a protagonist – in this timeline, he lives a full life thanks to Poles and Jews inviting the aliens into Poland to drive the Nazis out.
Otherwise, Turtledove relies on fictional characters, with a few scenes showing real-life political leaders. Usually, these two do not interact much. One exception is the character of Jens Larssen, a nuclear scientist working on the Manhattan Project; pretty much every other scientist he works with is a real person, but Larssen is not, which gives Turtledove the freedom to pull some unexpected swerves with his character later.
Disappointingly, this fine Dramatis Personae approach is not maintained into future books in that series or in Turtledove’s other series. His best-known Alternate History series is the one usually called TL-191, involving a Confederate victory in the US Civil War via General Lee’s lost Special Order 191 (hence the name) not being lost. This did remarkably confuse readers at the time, and Turtledove apparently had to repeatedly state that the first TL-191 book, How Few Remain, was not a sequel to The Guns of the South. It certainly didn’t help that his working title was Guns of the West!
How Few Remain, set in 1881, uses only historical figures as protagonists, in contrast to Worldwar, and many but not all of the people they encounter are also historical. For example, Jeb Stuart works with the Apache leader Geronimo against the northerners, we see the two sides of the legendary OK Corral gunfight getting caught up in renewed war between north and south, and Alfred von Schlieffen (author of the Schlieffen Plan), attached to the German Embassy, has discussions with Union General Rosecrans. Most notably, Abraham Lincoln (who was never shot) tours the country and has developed Socialist views, having a discussion with a (fictional) worker named Blackford who will go on to be a future president in the setting. Frederick Douglass also appears as a protagonist and he and Lincoln eventually meet near the end. Samuel Clemens a.k.a. Mark Twain is living in California, like OTL, and witnesses a British raid on San Francisco.
TL-191 then continues with the Great War trilogy, which depicts a front of the First World War taking place in North America: the United States, allied with Imperial Germany, against Canada, Hapsburg Mexico and the Confederate States. These books are very different, depicting a ‘people’s war’ in which every protagonist is an ordinary person (either a soldier or someone on the home front) and they are all fictional. Real people such as politicians and generals appear only sparingly, with a few memorable exceptions like a septuagenarian General Custer who lived long after his OTL death at the Battle of Little Bighorn. Sometimes a historical character is hinted at but not explicitly stated, as in a character named ‘Ernie’ who is implied to be Ernest Hemingway but his surname is never given.
This approach was not universally popular with fans, to say the least, many of whom found the original characters to be flat and lacking. Interestingly, at the time a number of fans asked via Steven Silver if Turtledove was planning to feature some of the fictional characters from Worldwar in the Great War books. He did not do so, and I can understand why as that would have been confusing to readers who hadn’t read Worldwar (and maybe some who had!), but I get where the fans were coming from. It would be more interesting to see how the life of a person we already vaguely know had changed in this different setting; for example, Sam Yeager and Mutt Daniels, friends and comrades from opposite sides of the Mason-Dixon Line, could have ended up fighting each other. As it is, the TL-191 characters can often be reduced to a few endlessly repeated characteristics, like Sam Carsten sunburning easily.
Turtledove is also prone to killing them off and sometimes replacing them with another character they had interacted with (an approach he also takes in his Darkness books depicting WW2 in a fantasy world). This does show the cost of war, but it also means there is even less room to build up a recognisable character we care about. The biggest problem is really that there are so many characters, and some of them are too similar; I recall one review of the Great War books stating that the reviewer hadn’t realised until halfway through that Arthur McGregor and Lucien Galtier, both Canadian farmers, were two different characters.
This has been a brief overview of some of the ways real historical and fictional characters are used in historical fiction and alternate history; what are some other approaches you have seen of this done well or badly? Discuss in the comments!
Tom Anderson is the author of multiple SLP books, including:
The Look to the West series
The Surly Bonds of Earth series
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among others.
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