What If Eleanor Roosevelt Could Fly?

I did a panel on alternative history at Worldcon. I wanted to talk about it's so popular right now. The panel moderator and the people in the audience wanted to talk about, what would have happened if the South had had semi-automatic weapons during the Civil War? This reminded me of Saturday Night Live's great parody of a what-if historical discussion, "What if Eleanor Roosevelt could fly?" which ended with images of Mrs. Roosevelt leading bombers over Germany during WWII.

I can think of one alternative history I really like: Terry Bisson's Fire on the Mountain. It gives a genuinely different vision of the past and future, where the struggle to end slavery in the US takes a different course and the end result is a better and more humane society.

The idea that history is contingent and changeable is useful. It gives us hope. We are not doomed to the awful mess that appears to be impending right now.

But often this message gets lost in alternative histories -- in the details of, what if Napoleon had died early in his career? Or Julius Caesar had not been stabbed?

Tery Bisson knows about the broad social issues that underlay Harper's Ferry. He can talk for hours about John Brown and Bloody Kansas. A lot the people who obsess about alternative history do not seem to know context. Their idea of history comes down to key events and great men.

I don't know where I'm going with this. Thinking about the Convergence panel, of course.

I wonder if I could write an alternative history about real change? About humanity reaching the bifurcation in the trousers of time, to use Terry's Pratchett's image, and actually taking the other leg.