Episode 213: Alternative History

Introduction

Welcome, everyone, to Reading with Libraries! This week we are discussing alternative histories – looking back and making just one or two changes to see how that might affect our present!

We are a multitype system, supporting all types of libraries. This is our book group podcast, where we discuss different genres of books each week, while we all sit in our comfy chairs and drink our beverages. You are, of course, an important part of this book group. So if you do not already have a nice beverage please go get one, so you can join the experience.

There are no “right” or “wrong” books to read and chat about for our book group – we are just here to explore all kinds of books. All of us will take away at least a title or two that we want to read at the end of our time together!

This week we welcome returning Guest Host Ariel, from St Cloud Public Library!

 

 

Beverages

We have guests, we have our genre. We just need our beverages. Fortunately, we all came prepared with something to sip while we talk about our books. Each week we like to connect the theme of our books with our beverages. Each beverage will have a recipe or a link on our episode page, so you can try them yourself!  Obviously, feel free to sip along with us with any beverage that is right for you. Just join us in celebrating books, and discussing books!

This week we are looking at cocktails with some history! Check out a great Mental Floss article, The Stories Behind 11 Famous Cocktails, for these and more:

The Bellini

This delightful wine cocktail, a blend of white peach puree and Prosecco, has a well-established origin. Giuseppe Cipriani, founder of Venice’s beloved Harry’s Bar, started mixing up the fruity tipples sometime between 1934 and 1948. The pink drink reminded him of the color of a saint’s toga in a painting by Italian Renaissance artist Giovanni Bellini, so Cipriani named his concoction in honor of the painter.

 

The Daiquiri

If you’re an American mine employee stuck working in Cuba, what do you do? In the case of intrepid engineer Jennings Cox, you start creatively mixing drinks. The mixture of rum, lime, and sugar supposedly sprang to life in 1905 when Cox and some of his fellow Americans were hanging out in a bar in Santiago, Cuba. By mixing together these handy ingredients, the Americans found a tasty tipple, and it eventually worked its way back to the states.

 

The Tom Collins

This refreshing summer drink owes its name to a 19th century hoax. In 1874, hundreds of New Yorkers heard some bad news while they were out on the town: a certain Tom Collins had been besmirching their good names. Although these people didn’t know Mr. Collins, they were outraged that he would slander them, and they often set out to find the rascal. Of course, the root of the hoax was that there wasn’t really a Tom Collins, but that didn’t keep aggrieved parties from searching him out. To deepen the joke, bartenders started making the citrus cocktail that now bears the name, so when searchers asked for Tom Collins, they could instead find a thirst-quenching long drink.

 

 

Genre Suggestions

We have our guests and our beverages; let’s talk about some resources for finding Alternative History books!

Goodreads has this to say about our genre: “Alternate history is a subgenre of speculative fiction (or science fiction) and historical fiction that is set in a world in which history has diverged from the actual history of the world. Alternate history literature asks the question, “What if history had developed differently?” Most works in this genre are based on real historical events, yet feature social, geopolitical, or industrial circumstances that developed differently than our own.”

Here are a few links Goodreads has in this genre:

It can be really interesting to read though these books, and to speculate about new ways our history may have developed. What we think of as solid and immutable did not necessarily have to develop the way it did – and even small differences at one end can make a big difference as history moves forward! Many of these deal with the outcome of wars – great, big events that have clearly distinguished opportunities for changes. Others require some understanding of the historical period to really see the differences as they develop. Either way, these can be escapist fun to enjoy! (Or, of course they can develop into a terrifying look at a new and more horrifying future! Go back to our Dystopian Fiction episode for some other ideas on scary futures!)

Some good resources to consult:

 

We give a special tip of the hat to prolific alternative history author Harry Turtledove – who not only has produced a ton of books in this genre, but has to have some sort of award for most alternative history by weight! His books are long, but generally interesting!!

Now that we have some good resources to help us all find more books, let’s share some of the books we have already enjoyed!

 

Books Discussed

  • River of Teeth by Sarah Gailey
  • Leviathan (The Leviathan Trilogy) by Scott Westerfeld
  • His Majesty’s Dragon (Temeraire, Book 1) by Naomi Novik
  • Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke

 

Here are a few more books we discussed (or meant to before we ran out of time!), along with their descriptions from Amazon.com:

Man in the High Castle, by P.K. Dick Show on Amazon Prime!! It’s America in 1962. Slavery is legal once again. The few Jews who still survive hide under assumed names. In San Francisco, the I Ching is as common as the Yellow Pages. All because some twenty years earlier the United States lost a war—and is now occupied by Nazi Germany and Japan.

 

11/22/63 by Stephen King  Life can turn on a dime—or stumble into the extraordinary, as it does for Jake Epping, a high school English teacher in Lisbon Falls, Maine. While grading essays by his GED students, Jake reads a gruesome, enthralling piece penned by janitor Harry Dunning: fifty years ago, Harry somehow survived his father’s sledgehammer slaughter of his entire family. Jake is blown away…but an even more bizarre secret comes to light when Jake’s friend Al, owner of the local diner, enlists Jake to take over the mission that has become his obsession—to prevent the Kennedy assassination. How? By stepping through a portal in the diner’s storeroom, and into the era of Ike and Elvis, of big American cars, sock hops, and cigarette smoke… Finding himself in warmhearted Jodie, Texas, Jake begins a new life. But all turns in the road lead to a troubled loner named Lee Harvey Oswald. The course of history is about to be rewritten…and become heart-stoppingly suspenseful.

 

From Time to Time (Time #2) by Jack Finney  Simon Morley, whose logic-defying trip to the New York City of the 1880s in Time and Again has enchanted readers for twenty-five years, embarks on another trip across the borders of time. This time Reuben Prien at the secret, government-sponsored Project wants Si to leave his home in the 1880s and visit New York in 1912. Si’s mission: to protect a man who is traveling across the Atlantic with vital documents that could avert World War I. So one fateful day in 1912, Si finds himself aboard the world’s most famous ship…the Titanic.

 

The Plot Against America by Philip Roth  When the renowned aviation hero and rabid isolationist Charles A. Lindbergh defeated Franklin Roosevelt by a landslide in the 1940 presidential election, fear invaded every Jewish household in America. Not only had Lindbergh, in a nationwide radio address, publicly blamed the Jews for selfishly pushing America toward a pointless war with Nazi Germany, but upon taking office as the thirty-third president of the United States, he negotiated a cordial “understanding” with Adolf Hitler, whose conquest of Europe and virulent anti-Semitic policies he appeared to accept without difficulty.

  

Kindred by Octavia E. Butler  The first science fiction written by a black woman, Kindred has become a cornerstone of black American literature. This combination of slave memoir, fantasy, and historical fiction is a novel of rich literary complexity. Having just celebrated her 26th birthday in 1976 California, Dana, an African-American woman, is suddenly and inexplicably wrenched through time into antebellum Maryland. After saving a drowning white boy there, she finds herself staring into the barrel of a shotgun and is transported back to the present just in time to save her life. During numerous such time-defying episodes with the same young man, she realizes the challenge she’s been given: to protect this young slaveholder until he can father her own great-grandmother.

 

The Guns of the South by Harry Turtledove  January 1864 –General Robert E. Lee faces defeat. The Army of Northern Virginia is ragged and ill-equpped. Gettysburg has broken the back of the Confederacy and decimated its manpower.

Then, Andries Rhoodie, a strange man with an unplaceable accent, approaches Lee with an extraordinary offer. Rhoodie demonstrates an amazing rifle: Its rate of fire is incredible, its lethal efficiency breathtaking–and Rhoodie guarantees unlimited quantities to the Confederates.

The name of the weapon is the AK-47

 

 

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter by Seth Grahame-Smith

Indiana, 1818. Moonlight falls through the dense woods that surround a one-room cabin, where a nine-year-old Abraham Lincoln kneels at his suffering mother’s bedside. She’s been stricken with something the old-timers call “Milk Sickness.”

“My baby boy…” she whispers before dying.

Only later will the grieving Abe learn that his mother’s fatal affliction was actually the work of a vampire.

When the truth becomes known to young Lincoln, he writes in his journal, “henceforth my life shall be one of rigorous study and devotion. I shall become a master of mind and body. And this mastery shall have but one purpose…” Gifted with his legendary height, strength, and skill with an ax, Abe sets out on a path of vengeance that will lead him all the way to the White House.

While Abraham Lincoln is widely lauded for saving a Union and freeing millions of slaves, his valiant fight against the forces of the undead has remained in the shadows for hundreds of years. That is, until Seth Grahame-Smith stumbled upon The Secret Journal of Abraham Lincoln, and became the first living person to lay eyes on it in more than 140 years.

Using the journal as his guide and writing in the grand biographical style of Doris Kearns Goodwin and David McCullough, Seth has reconstructed the true life story of our greatest president for the first time-all while revealing the hidden history behind the Civil War and uncovering the role vampires played in the birth, growth, and near-death of our nation.

 

 

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead In Whitehead’s ingenious conception, the Underground Railroad is no mere metaphor – engineers and conductors operate a secret network of tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil. Cora and Caesar’s first stop is South Carolina, in a city that initially seems like a haven – but the city’s placid surface masks an insidious scheme designed for its black denizens. Even worse: Ridgeway, the relentless slave catcher, is close on their heels. Forced to flee again, Cora embarks on a harrowing flight, state by state, seeking true freedom.

As Whitehead brilliantly re-creates the unique terrors for black people in the pre-Civil War era, his narrative seamlessly weaves the saga of America from the brutal importation of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present day. The Underground Railroad is at once a kinetic adventure tale of one woman’s ferocious will to escape the horrors of bondage and a shattering, powerful meditation on the history we all share.

 

Fire on the Mountain by Terry Bisson It’s 1959 in socialist Virginia. The Deep South is an independent Black nation called Nova Africa. The second Mars expedition is about to touch down on the red planet. And a pregnant scientist is climbing the Blue Ridge in search of her great-great grandfather, a teenage slave who fought with John Brown and Harriet Tubman’s guerrilla army. Long unavailable in the US, published in France as Nova Africa, FIRE ON THE MOUNTAIN is the story of what might have happened if John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry had succeeded and the Civil War had been started not by the slave owners but the abolitionists.

 

The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon For sixty years, Jewish refugees and their descendants have prospered in the Federal District of Sitka, a “temporary” safe haven created in the wake of revelations of the Holocaust and the shocking 1948 collapse of the fledgling state of Israel. Proud, grateful, and longing to be American, the Jews of the Sitka District have created their own little world in the Alaskan panhandle, a vibrant, gritty, soulful, and complex frontier city that moves to the music of Yiddish. For sixty years they have been left alone, neglected and half-forgotten in a backwater of history. Now the District is set to revert to Alaskan control, and their dream is coming to an end: once again the tides of history threaten to sweep them up and carry them off into the unknown.

 

 

Conclusion

Thank you so much for joining us this week! We will be back next week with a new genre, new books, new beverages, and all new discussion! Subscribe to us on your favorite podcast app, so you don’t miss a single moment of this book group!

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