Musings on “As you know, Bob…”
“As you know, Bob…” is a label for the most clumsy method of explaining the background of your story – whether it is the alternate history behind a work of AH fiction, or some other kind of background. In this method, one character spontaneously decides to lecture another character on some background element that they both know already, and which has little to do with the current situation. It’s the kind of conversation that you don’t actually see outside of a history department, introduced by a writer who hasn’t bothered to think of a less jarring way to get background information across. The use of this particular lecture tactic is particularly common in AH fiction, and it doesn’t take long for it to become very annoying. The aspiring AH writer should avoid it at all costs. I have the following suggestions about how to let the reader know about the background of your AH in subtler, more entertaining ways.
1. Don’t be afraid to be indirect.
If your ATL is different from our own world in three major ways, don’t spend your time looking for ways to bring each of them up directly and then explain them. The readers aren’t complete idiots, and many of them will actually enjoy piecing together clues if it’s not too hard to do so. If you’ve created a rigorous timeline, don’t try to put all the major events directly into the story. Figure out ways that the differences in major events would create noticeable differences in minor events, especially ones relevant to the characters, and put in those. This takes effort, because you actually have to think about how relatively minor things might be changed – especially in ways that give clues about the differing history. It adds color to a story if, instead of having a generic tale with some big obvious differences pasted in, you spend some time thinking up details that you can “casually” drop here and there that are just everyday life to the people in the ATL, but indicate a very different world.
Even details that don’t have a heck of a lot to do with any major divergence can serve to highlight the fact that a world has been going in a different direction for a while. Most readers are much more familiar with popular culture than they are with history, so they’ll be quick to pick up on fashions, trends, or conventions that don’t exist in OTL even if you just mention them in passing. One way to make an alternate world more interesting is to describe, quite casually and indirectly, a world where modern fashions and conventions are no more similar to ours than the 60s are to present. Mention the endless staccato of French music played by the kids on the subways, the flashes of red scarves in the crowds on the street indicating the supporters of the Syndicalists, the rarity (or ubiquity) of smoking, point out many characters with fashionably braided hair (men, women, or both), and so on.
2. Try news reports.
Modern-style news reports, especially on TV, tend to assume that the viewers are ignoramuses and have to cover a fair bit of background in short, easily-digestible (and, of course, oversimplified) form. It’s plausible that the characters might actually read or watch the news every so often, and this can give the opportunity to put in some short bytes about things that are happening “off-stage” or in the background of the AH world. People in actual conversation don’t tend to do the “so Bob, how about that Soviet-Chinese war thirty years ago?” but they may encounter it in the news.
One way to provide more interest with this tactic would be to provide one modern crisis or major event that is both interesting in itself, and provides some excuse for people in the story to be keeping track of it and learning about the associated background. If you’ve got late 20th century style media in your AH, this works particularly well – every so often there’s a Gulf War, a Tiananmen Square, a fall of the Berlin wall, or some other major event that not only prompts everyone to keep track of it, and provides a good view of how the modern AH world works, but also gives the excuse to delve into a bit of historical background that is relevant to the crisis but unknown to most people.
Heck, you could ever have someone flip through the AH version of the History Channel – and then keep on flipping because it was just yet another retrospective of some battle in the Sino-Soviet War. Anything to make the presentation of AH details interesting and to avoid blatant “as you know, Bob” syndrome. Don’t take time out from the story to go into a history lecture. If you’re going to have anything resembling a lecture, find a way to have it make some sense in context – and then use that context to cover more than just history. In the example I just cited, you could use the spectacle of someone spotting something about the history of a major recent war, and then moving on out of boredom, to quickly establish: what the conflict was, some colourful details, that the conflict was a big deal, and that the world has long since moved on and beaten the relevant history to death so that the characters know all about it and aren’t particularly interested in discussing it.
3. Use political disagreements.
People in AH books have an annoying tendency to start debating history, especially history which they are all well aware of and which they would, realistically, consider to be of little relevance to the current situation. Real people do, however, tend to bring up history when it is relevant to disagreements about politics. Real people disagree about politics a fair bit of the time, and if you can make a political disagreement relevant to the story (or plausible as a topic of casual conversation – which means you have to arrange a situation where people might tend to talk politics), then you can raise history as a part of it. Do not make it an “as you know, Bob” type of affair – references to history are most common in discussions or arguments among people who disagree with each other, and are bringing up something relevant to the disagreement. Try and think of some interesting bits of history that are both interesting, and linked to some kind of political controversy. And remember that when real people bring up history in the context of politics, they may assume a fair bit of common background and will typically present it in a biased manner. Their biases and differences of opinion are an opportunity to reveal their individual perspectives, and to show what the common biases in the ATL are.
To get a sense of what I’m talking about, think of when typical modern-day Americans are likely to talk about history – very seldom, unless it is relevant to a political issue. What political issues are especially likely to bring up history? Just about any issue where the role of the government in religion, or lack thereof, is brought up can generate references to the founding of the US – time to mention that it was a “Christian” nation, but inhabited by many religious dissidents, and founded as a republic by a group of rebels who disliked persecution and enshrined religious freedoms in a constitution. You could bring up an indirect reference to McCarthyism with a short mention that it has only been “one nation under god” since religion became an anti-Communist badge during the Red Scare. In fact, just about any issue relevant to the constitution can serve as an opportunity to bring up the basics of Revolutionary-era history. Xenophobic or militaristic ideas can generate a sarcastic reference that “the Cold War is over”, which an AH author could elaborate on somewhat. I’m sure you can all also think of discussions that might cause someone to bring up WW2 in various contexts, from “my grandfather didn’t give his life fighting the Nazis so you could turn around and do blah blah blah” to “I don’t know why those bastards don’t just start singing Deutschland Uber Alles and go invade Europe… they were born half a century too late”.
Of course, for an ATL, you could do the AH equivalent of one of these, or something along similar lines. The key is to look at your ATL and try and determine what historical events would be both well known, and related to modern political controversies. Keeping mind, of course, that people can make some pretty screwy arguments from history so that you can often be flexible in exactly what context something is brought up in, so long as you manage to twist the presentation to reflect the worldview of the speaker.
For example, let’s say that you’ve written a story set in an ATL where a very different US Civil War resulted in a permanent North-South split, and the South became a relative backwater where blacks were enslaved until the 1920s. The Confederacy lost a war with the US in 1932 when the US intervened in a Confederacy-Mexico struggle (started by a reactionary Confederate government that took control of a nation on the verge of chaos due to erupting racial tension, and tried to use nationalist bluster to unite the nation against the dastardly Mexicans who kept harbouring Negro rebels and trying to control the Caribbean). Now it’s the present day, the world at large is quite a different place, and the former Confederacy is still politically separate from the US, only recently having become particularly stable after occupation, and decades of chaos and social unrest. Let’s say that your story takes place in the US, with the differing civil war being background that doesn’t lead to the primary focus of the story (which is more directly about the results of relatively recent differences).
The issue here is how to let the readers know about the chronology of the alternate Southern history when it’s not directly related to the events in the story, but is still an important bit of background? There are plenty of clumsy ways to do it, but it shouldn’t be too hard to think of ways that such a differing US history could be relevant to disagreements in everyday life. You could do something obvious like replace OTL comments about cheap Korean labor threatening the American automobile manufacturer with the Confederate equivalent, and create a short conversation with references to the fact that the blacks are still poor 80 years after the end of slavery. Then have someone accuse the US government of doing too little (or too much) in the occupation in the 30s – I can see it now, “supposedly we fought them to stop the oppression of the black man rather than to protect Corporate America’s interests in Mexico, but sixty more years of oppression are OK as long as it’s our businesses profiting from it”. (It would be so interesting if someone wrote a civil war AH novel like this and barely mentioned the details of the civil war itself because everyone in the ATL cared about much more recent things).
4. Use an “inside a character’s head” perspective.
It never ceases to amaze me how many authors, who tell the story from a perspective where they frequently look inside characters heads to tell the audience what they are thinking, will always come up with a lump of out-of-place expository conversation when they want to describe a historical event. Under many circumstances, it’s more plausible for a character to think about a bit of history than it is for them to decide to talk it over with someone else. Many events will trigger a flash of memory that someone isn’t about to turn into a conversation. The technique of having characters “remember” a bit of history or current affairs for a paragraph or two, because some relevant event prompts them to think about it, can be perfectly useful if you don’t overuse it. You can even use the voice of the narrator to supply short bits of background or context that are relevant to a scene but not directly mentioned in it if you find it occasionally useful to do so.
When you’re writing an alternate history story, you may want to choose your writing technique or narrative perspective based on the fact that you want to cover a nontrivial bit of background that is well known to all of the characters, and interesting to the reader, but which would not be very apparent to the outside observer. Fitting background and historical “clues” into conversations, events, and scene descriptions is important but it is not the only technique available. Bringing up historical details using thoughts, or the narrative voice, may seem like cheating but moderate amounts of it won’t necessarily stick out as much as big lumps of exposition, overly contrived conversations, and so on. Of course, if you want to make sure these techniques don’t stick out themselves, it is helpful to write from a perspective where seeing inside peoples’ heads is not uncommon, and descriptions are sometimes provided in a “narrative voice” rather than being solidly tied to the perceptions of the current viewpoint character.
5. Use narrative interludes, fake quotes, chapter headings or similar techniques.
Sometimes, it can help to just plain step outside of the story to set the stage. The most direct and least sophisticated way to do this is to put background details in appendices, but this is to be avoided because you do not want the reader to have to go through these to understand anything. If you really have trouble getting in some important details, though, be consistent and do it in an “acceptable” way. Put in a prologue to the story that is designed so as to set the stage with some important background details (just try and make sure that you have background that is meaningful to the actual story, not just a general description of the ATL). If the POD itself is directly important to the story and not terribly complicated, you could describe the POD itself in the prologue.
It’s not all that uncommon for authors to put interesting or relevant quotations at the start of each chapter of a book – so for an ATL which diverged some time before the story was told, you can try making up fake quotations. That isn’t necessarily easy, though – they have to say something about the ATL, while remaining interesting in themselves and looking like an actual “pithy quote from someone important”. I think that Steve Stirling used this technique at least once, but tended to take the lazy route of putting in fact-filled quotations from fake history books. You could do that too, of course, but the faked AH equivalent of “We will fight on the battlefields… -British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, 1940” could be more interesting.
For a novel with a sufficiently interesting and divergent background, you could ditch “quotes” and put a page from a fake history book at the beginning of each chapter. You’ve got to be darn careful to make these interesting and readable, though, or it will be too jarring. It can be fairly difficult to contrive something that actually looks like a passage from a much larger book, but is still interesting and informative in itself. If you’re going to use this technique, it’s probably a good idea to be somewhat indirect in the choice of subject matter (and to keep the fragments down to under, say, one page in twenty – your readers are looking for a story with some background color, not big chunks of history lesson). Don’t just blatantly explain the major events of the ATL, go for variety and detail and touch on the major events while providing colourful details about some specific bit of history. If you want a page that lets the reader know that Britain seized most of the Oregon Territory in 1845, don’t write all about the details of how they did this, just mention it in a passage about (for example) the culture clash between Americans moving to the Pacific coast in the wake of the gold rush and the Royal Victorian Mounted Police.
If you get desperate you can even put in “narrative interludes”, where the narration breaks away from the main story for a short period of time to tell about something happening elsewhere. This only really works if the narrator is describing an event rather than giving a broad history lecture, though. If you’re writing a story in which any kind of significant world events are playing a role, you can break away from the main narration every so often to discuss them. In fact, this isn’t an uncommon technique in techno thrillers, where narration will sometimes switch to a description of an important event elsewhere in the world. You still have to keep things specific and describe the events as they happen in an interesting way, though – don’t let the narration become too broad, too abstract, or too much like a lecture. You can set up some relevant background if you make sure to describe it concisely, but you want the main focus to be on events which are described, in detail, as they happen. You can flash back in time somewhat, but it works best to show what’s going on right as the main plotline is evolving. Don’t do this to describe events which would be considered “history”.
6. Use actual flashbacks or plotlines that happen at different times.
For all that the past is in general more relevant to an AH story than to a typical work of fiction, flashbacks or switching between plots taking place at different times doesn’t seem to be all that common. These are valid techniques, although you definitely have to make the effort to come up with a story where you can switch between different time periods while maintaining interest and suspense, and keeping them both relevant to the plot. If you can do that, though, the ability to tell a story in multiple time periods could be uncommonly useful to show how an ATL is changing relative to OTL. You could switch back to the POD itself, or to a major event in the ATLs history that explains a lot about the present state of the OTL. You could even just use any two time periods in the ATL that are separated enough so that major changes between them will show how the ATL is evolving along its own path.
7. Use a “foreign” character.
Just for completeness, I have to mention the obvious technique of introducing an OTL character, who will thus learn about the ATL while the reader looks over their shoulder. This is a very common technique, and in my opinion is sometimes used in timelines that are interesting enough in their own right that putting in a crosstime traveller isn’t really necessary. There are some rarer variations on the idea, though. For example, you could have people travelling between one ATL and another ATL, which would give plenty of opportunity to reflect on historical differences and details without OTL being involved at all.
You could also have someone interacting with a culture that is seriously foreign to him (in the same ATL), giving them some excuse to contemplate historical differences and learn some basic stuff about the origins and development of the other culture (learning that they