alternatehistory.com

Couldn't sleep, so I decided to jot down some thoughts of mine regarding the butterfly effect. They might not make sense, given how tired I am, but I am posting them here in the hope that they wil spark an interesting discussion. I hope this is the right place to put them.

Anyway. We all know about the butterfly effect: How, in a system as complex as the historical process, small changes in one place (such as those brought about by any point of divergence) can result in large and unpredictable changes in other parts of the system further down the line. This phenomena is often referred to in alternate history. The consensus view of the board is that it is a useful way of summarizing the small changes that ripple out from a divergence, and should be used as an excuse for including mini-PODs in the timeline.

I completely reject this. There are, to my mind, two reasons to be interested in AH: the literary or artistic motivation, which uses an alternate world as a backdrop, or as a means of producing interesting or appealing effects, and the historical motivation, which seeks to use counterfactuals as a tool for better understanding the underlying causality of our own history. You could, if you wished, call these the evocative and extrapolative approaches, bearing in mind that the best work will be a blend of both (evocative works need to pay some attention to causality, otherwise the effect will be weakened, while extrapolative work will generally include some evocative effects). Use of butterflies is unnecessary in the first, which will always end up as the author intended, while it is counterproductive in the second, where it will occlude the results of the inquiry.

The first case is self-explanatory. When an author creates a fictional world to serve as an element in a story, he is constrained by the other elements of the story, and, unless restraining himself, free to modify the course of history to fit with those elements. He can use any number of divergences, and set their outcomes to whatever works best for the story. If a few unlikely accidents and coincidences are needed to get his Byzantine Zeppelins fighting Nazis, or whatever, so be it.

The second case is likely to be more contentious. How can using the butterfly effect be counterproductive? Doesn't it simply add more realism, while broadening the possibilities of what can happen?

Firstly, realism. I would say that this is a hopeless task for any counterfactual historian. We have no way of knowing what a real alternate history would look like, and the task is too complex for any realistic simulation, even if we had enough data. Consider the weather. If a butterfly flapping its wings can cause a hurricane, then what impact would the differing movements of hundreds or thousands of people have? Consider fashion, which already defies rational explanation. And consider the vast number of people born each year, with various talents and abilities that are highly dependent on the circumstances of their conception. Given how altering the destiny of one or two men can change the course of history, how can you hope to alter that of thousands without making the world quickly and unpredictably unrecognisable?

The answer is that you don't. AH is a fundamentally fantastical exercise, designed to fulfil one of the purposes outlined above. Its goal is to either amuse or instruct. With the first, you can do more or less what you want, provided you create the intended effect. With the second, you need to restrict yourself to working out the logical implications of the divergence, with a certain fudge factor to account for your own areas of ignorance, while making the assumption that all else is equal.

Which brings us on to possibility. Using the butterfly effect as a means of expanding the range of possible outcomes is equivalent to saying anything can happen. It means that you have abandoned the constraints of causality, and so cannot say anything about the underlying mechanisms of history. Which means, in turn, abandoning half the reason AH is worth pursuing.

To sum up: Butterflies are either unnecessary or harmful. They would exist in a real, living alternate world, but we have established that creating such a thing is more or less impossible. Creating an alternate history should involve either a focus on creating certain desired emotional or intellectual effects (with an appropriate level of verisimilitude), or a rigorous extrapolation from a single point of divergence. The latter of course requires a certain number of fudge factors, which are often wrongly and annoyingly referred to as butterflies, but these function completely differently. Therefore, people should stop using the term “Butterfly effect,” and focus on the logical implications of their chosen POD.
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