Black Gate

I wonder if elementary school children today have as inspiring a model on animated television shows as I did when I was ten years old. My hero was Penny Gadget from the syndicated series Inspector Gadget.

Why? Because somebody my age, armed with a computer (a proto-laptop disguised as a book) and an amazing wristwatch (able to fire lasers and tracers and whatever else the plot needed) was stopping a massive global criminal enterprise on a weekly basis while the adults around her achieved nothing except looking like buffoons.

Admittedly, in the long view MAD is an incompetently run Evil Secret Organization, staffed exclusively with dingbats who constantly fail to kill an opponent who can’t tell the difference between his own dog and his own dog wearing a wig. Perhaps MAD’s leader, the Blofeld-in-Steel villain Dr. Claw, has some intelligence — he has a Ph.D., apparently, although maybe it was through a diploma mill — but this “evil genius” regularly sees his world conquest plans collapse because of a ten-year-old. A ten-year-old he occasionally captures but never recognizes. Yeah, I’m going to go with “diploma mill.”

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I’ve always been fascinated by history, which is one reason why I write about it. So by extension one of the kinds of speculative fiction which has always fascinated me is the alternate history tale. Whether as a ‘pure’ alternate history tale, describing a world where things just happened to go a different way than we knew, or as a ‘warped’ history in which deliberate meddling has created some new reality, the rethinking of historical assumptions is challenging and invigorating — at least, up to a point. The changes have to make sense.

I think a lot of science fiction and fantasy requires careful attention to setting; attention in constructing a setting, attention in how the setting is communicated to the reader, and attention in working the setting and its communication smoothly into the narrative. Along, of course, with attention to how the setting affects character, and, ultimately, the language a character uses and the language in which the story is told. The alternate-history story is an extreme example of all these things. It’s the setting that makes it the story it is. And in changing history, the writer makes decisions about character, style, and — implicitly — theme and structure; as in any kind of sf, what kind of fictional world the writer creates is intimately connected with what the story’s about and how it’s told.

Which brings me around to Keith Roberts’ novel Pavane. It’s a set of linked short stories, describing a world in which Queen Elizabeth I of England was assassinated, the Spanish Armada conquered England, and Europe remained wholly Catholic. The book, first published in 1966, takes place in the late twentieth century of this other world, in which technological and social progress has been slowed by the authoritatian hand of the Church. It moves from character to character, showing developments over the course of generations as some things change and some things do not.

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