[Vignette] Those Tired Old Cliches

In the bar of Sydney’s FantastiCon, a man and woman – one white, one Asian, one Melbourne, one Brisbane, one in a SILHOUET T-shirt and so was the other one – studied, respectively, a press release and their drink.

Union, depicting the events leading up to a North American intervention in the Rape of Europe, will take place in an alternative timeline in which the United States defeated the Confederacy, “giving rise to a conflicted nation in which slavery has been abolished but powerful interests are trying to prevent full equality”.

“Oh look, someone finally merged The Northern States Win and The Nazis Lose into one story. Two, two! Two clichés in one!”

“Don’t watch it then.”

“It’s the principle of the thing.” Mohammed Gillard held up three fat fingers. “There’s three clichés that squat on the whole bloody genre of alternative history. One: the Confederacy wins the United States Civil War. Two:” The middle finger flipped down to leave the V sign. “The Nazis don’t conquer Europe. Three:” The V flipped down and the middle finger went up. “China stayed a unified nation in the last century and is now a big power. So I bet the Chinese show up in this one.”

Gwen Nguyen – her middle name rather than first but she’d been stuck with the school playground rhyme too long to bother fighting – stared at his finger until, finally, it lowered. After that, she added, “You’re leaving out the Brisbane Line.”

“That’s just us in Oz that care about the Line.”

“No, no, you wanted to talk clichés, I grew up watching The Warwick Line just as you did, all plucky Sydney kids evading sinister Japs, and my uncle was in it because the only way to fill out the occupying hordes was with the ‘Line Babies’ even though none of us are Japanese. That’s a cliché.”

Gillard shrugged, literally with his body and figuratively to remove the weight of history. “Right, okay, but my point is, that’s just us – the Big Three are the clichés for the entire Anglophone, not to mention the bloody Chinese and the Latams and Europe. What’s up with that?”

“Your new book didn’t sell?”

Up went the fingers. “It just all ends up being the same,” he said. “The South loses, the US is the 20th century superpower instead of the Latams and all diverse and there’s one big country instead of four. The Nazis lose, Europe becomes a really nice democratic place and heroic Brits march into Berlin. Heroic Russians, sometimes. I bet it’ll be heroic Yanks now but – I can see this clearly – one will be black, yeah, and the other will be white, and wait, no, the white one will be from Alabama because in this world there’s still an Alabama and white people where Jerusalem is. That’d be dead clever. I know the Jerusalemites hate this sort of thing too, the last good South Loses book was The Rising Smoke by Baldwin, where the slaves revolt during the war and a version of Jerusalem becomes a US state. That’s different. ‘Look a southern President!’ is bunk. Almost as bunk as all those Petain Saves France ones or that moron Churchill being a big figure in Britain’s politics. It’s all a big blur.”

“It’s the bits of history every punter knows. Your New Holland book, great stuff, but you kept having to explain all about the Dutch explorers and Dutch imperial practices and so on – no, let me finish, Mo – nerds like us like that, but the average bloke wants something easier. So it’s the same events, places, and people. Every genre does this.”

“And every genre is full of boring hacks, Gwen, I know this.”

“You’re also forgetting the other reason because, and I’m going to have to be rude, you can’t get it,” she said, quietly this time. “Australia has done well over the decades, we’re a regional power. The worst thing that happened to us was the brief occupation of the north, which ended with us winning anyway. We’ve met our potential. Latin America has reached theirs, which is why their approach to a unified United States is fear that they wouldn’t have reached it. But China, North America, Europe, they had reached their potential and they lost it. They fell. And they are never getting back up again, not the way they could have. China and North America have been fragmented too long. Texas and the United States can dream of unification but won’t do it, and Jerusalem won’t, and Mexico won’t give its reclaimed land back. TV shows, that’s it for them.

“And Europe, nothing from Flanders to Siberia is capable of being anything anymore. It’s all fragmented nations and old graves. You don’t think people would want to imagine that they’d remained better, that people in the southern states hadn’t refused to change or the German Empire hadn’t been bitter that they weren’t getting their assumed due and pissed away all they had and washed away so many others?

“God, why do you think we had the bloody Warwick Line as a story for kids? Victory turns occupation and oppression and unmarked corpse pits into a bit of fun. No, your chosen genre’s never going to stop being a wistful plea for what might have been instead of the grim horrors those continents got. You can complain because we didn’t suffer enough.”

There was a muggy silence until, tentatively, Nguyen changed the subject to the newest Indonesian sci-fi film but the talk did not last much longer.

In the end, Gillard was right about the Brandenburg scene and wrong about China.
 
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