Based on the various posts here, science fiction still becomes a popular literary and film genre. Based on that, what are the lives of influential sci-fi writers like in Tl-191 below?
--Isaac Asimov (Would still be a refugee as a young child.)
--Ray Bradbury
--Edgar Rice Burroughs (John Carter of Mars won't be a Confederate veteran, that's for sure ITTL.)
--William S. Burroughs
--Arthur C. Clarke (Though British, he was highly influential in the genre, a futurist, a researcher, and was a lifelong proponent of space travel.)
--Roald Dahl (more children's fantasy but did some sci-fi)
--Hugo Gernsback
--Robert Heinlein
--Robert E. Howard (Creator of Conan the Barbarian and one of the main writers for Weird Tales. Though Southern and more horror, fantasy, and pulp fiction, he was one who also influential to the genre like Lovecraft.)
--Aldous Huxley
--L. Ron Hubbard (Does Scientology still become a thing ITTL?)
--H. P. Lovecraft (more horror but very influential to sci-fi)
--C.S. Lewis (Also wrote fantasy, most famously, along with Christian apologetics/theology. What would a TL-191 version of Narnia look like ?)
--Philip Francis Nowlan (Creator of Buck Rodgers)
--George Orwell (More political actually but very influential to spec-fic with 1984 and Animal Farm. He'd probably end up in Australia or somewhere else due to his dem-soc/anti-imperialist views. Might end up fighting in Spain for the left/moderate-leaning Monarchists [ TTL's Republicans] during their Civil War just as IOTL.)
--L. Sprague de Camp
--Theodore Sturgeon
--Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolstoy (Prominent journalist as well. Life will be markedly different with the Whites winning the 1st Russian Civil War. He was one who inspired the invention of the laser.)
--H. G. Wells (passing reference is made to "The Time Machine" in one of the "Settling Accounts" books)
--John Wyndham
--Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (Wonder how fighinting in GW2 would shape his TTL work?)
(All authors born in or before 1922)
Is sci-fi something popular that would transcend boundaries regardless of nationality throughout the 20th Cenutry?
I am going to break up my reply into several parts.
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Eric Arthur Blair, as IOTL, developed a political philosophy that was somewhat contrarian and idiosyncratic, and broadly sympathetic to the socialist left. As in our world, his experiences serving in the British colonial administration (in India in TTL, instead of Burma) were key to his political development.
The rise of the Conservative-Silver Shirt Coalition led to a turn for the worse. Blair was among those arrested during the regime’s first broad crackdown against the political left, over his writings supportive of socialist ideals, the trade union movement, and for his writings arguing in favor of reconciliation with the United States. While Blair was eventually released, it came at the cost of accepting a one way ticket to Australia; what little wealth he had to his name was confiscated by the government.
Blair struggled to find steady employment in an Australia that while still a democracy was still allied with the United Kingdom, and thus wary of any former political prisoners. Blair worked in a variety of jobs across Australia during the interwar period, while continuing to write whenever he could. These writings later formed the basis for his first successful post-SGW novel/memoir:
Up Jumped the Swagman.
Blair, struggling to survive, never fought in TTL’s Spanish Civil War. He kept his head down during the SGW, while working in an arms factory. The end of that war, and the fall of Australia’s wartime, pro-British government allowed Blair to finally see his writings published, through the office of the recently established Melbourne-based Left Book Press.
Up Jumped the Swagman proved to be a surprise bestseller in Australia after its 1946 publication. The royalties allowed Blair to focus on writing full-time.
Blair wrote several other novels during his career, most of which were satirical of the large British expatriate community in Australia, with one popular theme in several of these books being the mockery of efforts by expatriates (especially middle class expatriates) to rebuild “normal” lives in Australia transplanted unchanged from the United Kingdom. Other than
Up Jumped the Swagman, Blair’s most well known novel, as of 2021, is
DoublePlus GoodFuture, published in 1956 as a very brutal satire of utopian science fiction. The setting of
DoublePlus GoodFuture is a futuristic, meritocratic utopia that is in fact incompetently run, economically stagnant, and ruled by a viciously cruel and stupid Council of Supreme Wisdom.
(The setting of
DoublePlus GoodFuture has elements that someone from OTL would recognize from Yevgeny Zamyatin’s
We, Michael Dunlop Young’s
The Rise of the Meritocracy, and of course,
Nineteen Eighty-Four, given the presence in this novel’s setting of a restrictive “NewSpeak” language. There are also elements of this novel that wouldn’t be out of place in Terry Gilliam’s movie
Brazil, in its portrayal of a futuristic society as incompetently run to the point of ludicrousness).
Blair died in 1967, on the eve of the Fourth Pacific War. His novels, like those of other major expatriate British writers in Australia and New Zealand (such as Tolkien and Hitchcock) would not be published in the US until the 1980s.
It’s worth mentioning that In the “Filling in the Gaps” thread, an interpretation was offered of TTL’s Eric Arthur Blair going into far-right politics during the interwar period, eventually becoming a speechwriter and propagandist under the Churchill-Mosley regime, before eventually being handed over the Germans following the end of the SGW, who sentence him to life in prison. However, I decided to go in a different direction.
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Herbert George Wells, as in OTL, was one of the giants of literary science fiction. However, his writings in general were far more pessimistic, especially his turn-of-the-century works which imagined the possibilities of new military technology. Wells still came to support socialist ideals, but never came to embrace utopian beliefs in a world state.
Wells was among the first public intellectuals arrested under the Churchill-Mosley regime. He was, unfortunately, treated harshly in prison, which badly affected his health. He was eventually released, with his wealth and property having been confiscated. He was also forced to leave the country for Australia. In Australia, Wells, like other left-leaning British writers, found his ability to get anything published circumscribed. Wells continued to write, and was provided a home and resources by a circle of Australian fans of his older works. Wells’s Australian novels and short stories would be published following his death in 1945 and the lifting by the authorities of any remaining restrictions on critical or left-wing political works. Cultural historians, in analyzing Wells’s Australian science fiction, have noted its pessimism and bitterness. As one Australian historian noted in the introduction to a 1999 collection of Wells’s Australian works, “He [Wells] shows clearly in these stories, in every setting and no matter the presented conflict, one overriding theme:
This is a world that cannot be saved and does not want to be saved.”
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John Wyndham was known in TTL as John Harris. He never became a writer, and instead found a career in advertising. During the SGW, he served in the Ministry of Information, where he worked on producing wartime propaganda. He was killed in the German superbombing of London in 1944.
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CS Lewis made plans to join the British army during the FGW. However, that conflict ended in 1917, before he could complete the enlistment process. As in our world, he eventually started an academic career, where he developed a friendship with JRR Tolkien. Tolkien left Oxford and the United Kingdom after the rise of the Churchill-Mosley regime; as a practicing Catholic of German descent and specialist in the Germanic languages, Tolkien has immediately found himself under suspicion by the regime, and chose to leave for New Zealand. CS Lewis, who was not particularly well-disposed towards the regime himself, decided to follow his friend into exile.
In spite of Tolkien’s best efforts, Lewis never reengaged with Christian religious practices, although this did not ultimately affect their friendship. As Lewis never came to embrace Christian religious beliefs, he never wrote anything analogous in TTL to the
Narnia series or
The Screwtape Letters.
Lewis was horrified upon receiving news of the German superbombings of London, Brighton, and Norwich, as well as learning of the Destruction in the former CSA.
The best known work by CS Lewis in TTL is his
Mercenary saga, written in 1946-1952 as a trilogy of novels, and followed up in subsequent years, until his death in 1963, in a number of short stories. The setting of the
Mercenary saga is a world of anthropomorphic animals: the main character and titular mercenary is Scorpius, a fox inspired heavily by the older character of Reynard (although Lewis’s character is not portrayed nearly as evil as Reynard). The main trilogy of novels,
The Mercenary and the King,
The Mercenary and the Hunt, and
The Mercenary and the War, is an allegory for both Britain and France under their respective interwar and wartime dictatorial regimes.
The
Mercenary trilogy was published in Australia and New Zealand in 1954-1957, to immediate popular and critical acclaim. They would later become the first novels by a British author to find an enthusiastic US audience, upon their publication there in the 1960s.
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Arthur C. Clarke’s analogue in TTL was Charles Clarke. During the SGW, he served in the Royal Air Force as a technical specialist. After the end of the war, he was recruited by an Australian representative to serve in the Australian military in a similar capacity. He retired from military service in 1960, and went on to earn advanced degrees in mathematics and paleontology. Clarke never became a writer of fiction, but did enjoy a successful career in paleontology. In TTL, he became known for excavating at a number of fossil sites throughout Australia.
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Roald Dahl does not exist in TTL.
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An early point of divergence for TTL’s analogue to Aldous Huxley was his not contracting an eye disease. In TTL, the avoidance of problems with his vision led to him volunteering successfully for the British army. He served in the Western Front, and returned home after the end of war. Huxley decided to pursue his old dream of becoming a doctor. By the time of the Churchill-Mosley regime coming to power, Huxley was practicing medicine full-time.
Huxley lost his position as a medical practitioner soon after the new regime came into power, due to an unofficial blacklist used by the authorities to target anyone with suspect political beliefs, but who were not considered enough of a threat to arrest. Huxley, whose experiences during the FGW has cemented a pacifist worldview, found himself forced into exile. Fortunately, as it turned out, medical doctors were among those being enthusiastically recruited for immigration by Australian poachers in London. Huxley and his family eventually settled in Sydney, where they became popular members of the local British expatriate community. However, he never became a writer.
