Alternate History vs. Secret History

 I am a bit off because of world news, and that’s kind of overwhelming my mind right now but I don’t have much meaningful to contribute (well, less than usual) so that’s not going to be the subject of today’s Note.

Things at work are weird right now, and I’m in a weird headspace, so I spent a lot of Friday taking different notes as to what I should make an essay about. And I try not to repeat myself too often. So the ideas of complaining about Star Wars and Heroes of Olympus are out, I think–I bang on about those too often.

So we’re going to talk about A Declaration of the Rights of Magicians because why not?

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Alternate History vs. Secret History

Despite how much I’m going to criticize A Declaration of the Rights of Magicians I want to reiterate that I *did* like that book and I plan to read the sequel whenever I get the chance to.

When I did my Book Diary post on the novel though, one of the things I criticized was that despite it being an Alternate History in which magic is A Thing, and openly so, for whatever reason the history more or less follows the same path as it does in real life. The path of the French Revolution and the struggles against slavery in European colonies is basically the same, following the same stumbling blocks. Magic hasn’t actually changed the timeline at all. That there are magic users among the populace doesn’t seem to make a difference. And I said that this would work better as a Secret History story, rather than an Alternate History one.

So. Let’s define our terms then.

When I say “Alternate History” I generally mean that the story takes place in a timeline on Earth where there is some diversion from our timeline because of one factor or another. There are plenty of Alternate History stories that don’t contain any real fantastical elements at all (and in fact that’s what most people generally think of when they think of Alternate History, I think), like Clash of Eagles which is “What if the Roman Empire lasted a thousand years longer and also tried conquering North America?” or The Man in High Castle in which the Axis Powers won World War II. “What if the Nazis/Confederates won?” is a popular take in these types of stories, though I think those are the most boring ideas to come up with and are overused. I came up with a list of better ideas one time on Tumblr.

A lot of the Alternate History I end up reading tends to be more fantasy and science-fiction. Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell is Regency Era England but in which Britain has a history of magic. Temeraire is the Napoleonic Wars but with dragons. Baltimore starts in a World War I similar to ours but quickly goes off the rails because vampires cause a plague in the world and the war dissolves as vampires and monsters start rampaging across Europe. The Bartimaeus Trilogy is somewhat modern England if the world had magicians in the style of Prospero running all the great empires of history.

Now Secret History is a bit different. I may have made that term up, I’m not sure. It’s where we assume that history runs the way it did in real life, except behind the scenes there’s something else going on. Assassin’s Creed is a Secret History, in which history follows (mostly) the path it did in real life, but with the blood feud between Assassins and Templars spanning throughout all the big world events. Traitor to the Crown is the American Revolution, but there are witches trying to influence happenings of the war. A lot of urban fantasy tends to have Secret History going on in the background, of course– Percy Jackson and the Olympians assumes that Greek myth shenanigans have been going on throughout the past, Dresden Files and Harry Potter heavily imply that wizards had something to do with World War II, and so on and so forth.

In short: the major events seem to have gone the same as they do in real life, but there’s a secret world that’s been making it happen that way.

To be fair to Declaration of Rights of Magicians, it’s the first book in the series, and perhaps in the sequels we’ll see more divergence as the series goes on. The first Temeraire book doesn’t actually have that many divergences from real life history either, but as the series goes on we see how the world is very different with dragons–for starters, a lot of the problems of colonialism haven’t taken root, because the would-be colonized ALSO have dragons and can work with them better than European powers, which mostly see them as powerful animal weapons despite their human-level intelligence. So there is time for this series to change things, of course!

But right now it doesn’t seem like that’s where it’s going. Like Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, there is a big event in the past that makes the timeline significantly different–in this case, it’s the Vampire Wars centuries before the events of the story–but in this case the world just seems to be the same? Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, once the magic started, felt like a fundamentally different world. Declaration of Rights seemed like the magic was pushing the historical figures to act exactly like they would in real life. Instead of changing history the magic enforced it.

And so I wonder: why did you choose Alternate History at all? If the events aren’t actually changed, why not just make it a Secret History story? There are a couple of Plot points that would have to be reworked to make it function, but considering that they all contribute to making the Plot of the novel match real world history, I don’t know that it was really necessary. 

If you tell an Alternate History story, and the history in the story isn’t actually alternate… well, why are you telling an Alternate History story?

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