If an idea’s success can be measured by its ability to repeat itself, then the alternative world subgenre is a paradigm. The idea was tackled extensively in the 1960s and 1970s in novels such as Keith Laumer’s WORLDS OF THE IMPERIUM (Dobson), Richard Meredith’s TIMELINER trilogy (Arrow) and H Beam Piper’s PARATIME (Ace); the mainstream was also inspired and gave us the much trumpeted “original” idea of Len Deighton’s SS-GB (Anchor).
By the 1990s, alternative Earths were appearing regularly in Benford and Greenberg’s WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN (Bantam), in Mike Resnick’s ALTERNATIVE PRESIDENTS and KENNEDYS (both Tor) and in several prominent novels, most obviously Gibson and Sterling’s THE DIFFERENCE ENGINE (Gollancz; see CW#31), but also James Blaylock’s HOMUNCULUS (Grafton) and John Crowley’s vivid GREAT WORK OF TIME (Bantam). Outside of the genre, there was a return to Nazi-dominated Europe with Richard Harris’ similarly “original” FATHERLAND (Arrow).
1990s alternative worlds enter ground already mapped out three decades ago, and for some the popularity of the subgenre represents an increasing inability of writers to invent and fully texture the future — or, as Constance Penly argues in CLOSE ENCOUNTERS (University of Minnesota Press), our “cultural incapacity to imagine the future”. While parallel universes offer an easy escape for some authors from the demands of extrapolating into the future, more inventive authors expend just as much imagination extrapolating sideways into their richly woven parallel histories. But the question remains as to why the alternative world genre, so thoroughly explored in the ’60s and ’70s, is back in vogue today.
The answer is arguably that sf, more than any other genre, draws from the period it was written in. In the ’80s, with its economic boom and small-but-deadly wars in the Falklands and Grenada, science fiction envisioned consumerism at its extreme, with William Gibson’s cyberpunk. The ’90s shake-up of East-West relations and the current global recession has encouraged a culture of historical re-examination and ’90s sf can draw a lead from the ’60s counterculture and its rejection of commonly held beliefs.
The redrawing of the past in alternative worlds has taken three principle forms. As Richard Harris’ FATHERLAND indicates, the Nazi superstate proved a popular subject matter in both eras. Two other tropes that recur in the ’90s are Imperial Britains which stretch into the 21st century, such as John Crowley’s and Gibson & Sterling’s works, and Americas where the South won the Civil War, as with George Alec Effinger’s “Everything But Honour” (WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN) and Lois Tilton’s “A Just and Lasting Peace” (FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION, 1991).
Most of these works follow a similar narrative convention. The alternative pathways they travel are often the wrong ones, creating parallel Earths with a lower technological standard than that of our present day, equally often languishing in the steam-age typified by 1962’s WORLDS OF THE IMPERIUM.
Against this background comes Christopher Evans’ AZTEC CENTURY. Here there are no Nazis and no civil war for the South to win, whilst his British Empire, though mightier than in our world, is destroyed in the opening line. It is the Aztecs who hold sway.
The texture and substance of the novel is royalty and technology. Appositely to most alternative sf, Evans’ imperial characters comfortably coexist beside laserdisks, artificial intelligences and high-speed aircraft.
This altered, Aztec history relies on two key events. In the 16th century, Cortez sided with Motechuhzoma to produce a unified Central America worshipping both Catholicism and pagan gods; the Aztecs then outpaced Europe in the following century, when the Spanish returned home and spread the highly contagious “New Indies Pox” across the continent, delaying its Imperial growth. This particular world change offers a more credible background than a single “moment of change”, and like most of Evans’ details, the background is developed smoothly but without expository depth. The world-construction never jars the reader with lumps of exposition, but tends to tantalise rather than inform.
The Aztecs quickly conquer the European nations, leaving Russia and America’s Indian lands and “New England” till last, despite the fact that they are both the Aztecs’ closest and weakest neighbours. This structure, whilst unlikely, serves as a convenient narrative device to place British and Aztec characters together against a background of world war.
Evans’ alternative 20th century retains Britain’s subservience to American popular culture, couching it in the in-jokes of blockbuster “Acapulco” movies (standing in for Hollywood), “Cola Cocao” soft drinks and the ubiquitous golden arches of “Mex Taco” fast food. The potential these jokes have for disrupting the novel is avoided by Evans through his seamless description; his liquid prose produces a narrative which smoothly matches the goals he set himself.
The Aztec dictatorship gripping Britain is boldly cast as benign, and subsequently less dynamic than if the Aztecs were more fascistic or national resistance were stronger. In this regard the novel is similar to SS-GB, which also deals with those characters closest to its new order: collaborators and Nazi officials.
Like Deighton, Evans faces the challenge of relying on his prose style rather than action to sustain his readers’ interest. AZTEC CENTURY centres on the enforced passivity of his central protagonist, the privileged, guilty-feeling Princess Catherine Marlborough. Evans explores her female point of view without drawing attention to himself and Catherine successfully combines the nuances and complexities of a woman used to authority yet remaining unspoilt by it and acutely conscious of her “national responsibility”.
As her only means of resistance, Catherine enters a cultural resistance to the Aztec court; she also begins an emotional struggle with the heir to the Aztec Empire, the charismatic Governor Extepan. The novel’s early chapters follow Catherine on carefully guarded tours of the nation, a device for a montage of complacent and defeated Britons. England, like the southern hemisphere in our universe, is underdeveloped and unable to feed itself — and, to Cathrerine’s horror, even the “New Indies Pox” has returned. The scenes which follow establish the Aztec-British relationship, tantalisingly warped by the alternative history; at Windsor castle, a banquet for the Aztecs adheres to aristocratic hospitality but is held in the castle’s “Louisiana Chamber”: “With its portraits of Wellington, Napoleon and Andrew Jackson, it was a monument to the great victory of the colonial Anglo-French armies over the forces of the tlatoani Cozcatezcatl at New Orleans in 1815 which had halted Aztec expansion into the
Mississippi Valley for over half a century.
Catherine then attends a cricket match between the English and the South African Azanians, expecting to die from a bomb she discovers has been planted; the plot is thwarted, but Catherine’s avowedly apolitical and hedonistic sister, Victoria, is implicated and exiled to Occupied China. With Victoria banished, Catherine is reduced to one ally, the working-class Welshman, Bevan; forever “hoisting up his trousers” and sarcastic, he is a humorous and supportive figure, but his past and motives are shadowy and Catherine is never sure whom to trust. The Aztecs and their minions surround her and they, she is informed, “love intrigue”.
The central portion of the novel is taken up by the Aztecs’ fight with Imperial Russia and the reinforcement of their presence in Britain. They build pyramids along the Thames, filled with computer systems, auianime prostitutes endorsed by a compliant Catholic church and tier-gardens of “flowers bio-modified to thrive in the British climate”.
This England must be very different to have sustained its empire, then to have united Napoleon, Wellington and Jackson, and to finally be covered by Aztec pyramids. But it remains clearly recognisable. This makes the book both easily digestible and frustrating; with such a gradual pace, Evans had the scope to radically alter British society rather than spinning his web of Machiavellian intrigue.
The novel’s pace does accelerate once the characters move outside of England. Catherine acts as an individual rather than the nation’s figurehead, indicating that Evans felt less constrained in these passages by his readers’ expectations of the daily routines of an English princess.
In the Russian warzone, on an unlikely errand to inform Extepan his wife has died, Catherine discovers a grim motif of ritual sacrifice. In a church at midnight, she finds a murdered Russian soldier, his heart burning in his own helmet beneath the mixed symbols of Spanish Catholicism and Huitzilopochtli, or “some other unforgiving deity of the old Aztec pantheon”. The Aztecs have murdered him as an omen for victory and Catherine becomes more terrified of them than the retreating Russians — and also more aware of how little she understands them.
The wider picture of the Russian war is only partially revealed and the complexity of Catherine’s position — a British royal and Russian sympathiser protected by her Aztec enemies — is both emotionally diluted and underexplored. Evans instead opts for an unexpected plot twist: the Russians explode a nuclear warhead over one of their own cities, destroying it to save it; Extepan then reveals that the Aztecs have not only had their own nuclear arsenal since the (inevitably) parallel date of 1945, but have superseded it with a Star Wars-type orbital laser.
Evans sidesteps the intricacies of perfecting this technology entirely in secret for 50 years and its use is less dramatic than the ritual sacrifice, painting a less lasting picture. Evans is more successful when he relates these devices to the Aztecs’ culture. The warheads and laser have gone unused for so long because the Aztecs believe it is dishonourable to outgun their enemies too heavily. But after the Russians detonate their warhead, the Aztecs immediately react; without qualms, they vaporize two entire cities to force unconditional surrender.
The Aztecs fight by standards of honour and ruthlessness drawn from their preChristian past. Equally crucial to their culture is their obsession with intrigue; it is this feature which forms the answer to the implicit question of the novel: how would Aztec culture have evolved by the 20th century?
Evans explores this query through Extepan’s romancing of Catherine. He loves her, but as an Aztec would, and there is an uncrossable cultural divide between them that stretches back thousands of years. After asking Catherine to marry him, Extepan takes her to meet Motecuhzoma, the tenth life Emperor, in Tenochtitlan (modern Mexico City). The Aztec capital has been restored to its original preChristian plans and is emblematic of Catherine’s voyage of discovery; it is only at the heart of the empire, in a city returned to a likeness from before Cortez’s arrival and the parallel worlds divided, that she is able to reach the Aztecs’ inner selves.
Bevan, who accompanies the couple, reveals to Catherine that her dead husband Alex is actually alive and living in Tenochtitlan; not only has he collaborated with the Aztecs, but he is living as man and wife with Catherine’s sister, Victoria. Reeling from these betrayals, Catherine is finally in a position to fight back, seducing Alex and defiling Extepan’s marriage plans. After this catharsis, the novel again picks up speed and Evans dextrously mixes pagan ritual with pure sf to mask the plot’s more unlikely moments. Why, for example, do the Aztecs manoeuvre Catherine with so many deceptions when she is the powerless head of a conquered territory?
By way of acknowledging these flaws, Catherine awkwardly suggests “It all sounds rather convoluted to me”, a case of literary “You can’t fire me, I quit”, or what John Kessel describes as “As if by anticipating the reader’s objections the author had somehow answered them” (Lew Shiner’s “The Turkey City Lexicon”, NEW PATHWAYS, July 1990). The only answer to Catherine and the reader is Alex’s observation that the Aztecs “love intrigue”.
The consequences of Catherine’s defiance are particularly harsh, culminating in insanity and cannibalism as Catherine, her sister and Alex are ceremonially punished in the feast of Xipe Totec, the Flayed One. But Evans is still not finished and continues to slide new ideas and plot trajectories on to the very last page. Extepan reveals the Aztecs are able to travel across the dimensions and the novel widens to encompass our universe.
This trope is, of course, common to the subgenre in both the ’60s and ’90s. In THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE (Penguin), GREAT WORK OF TIME (Spectra) and RUN, COME SEE JERUSALEM (Arrow), Philip K Dick, John Crowley and Richard Meredith all confront their characters with an Earth that is no better for being ours. Whilst Evans’ characters join this convention, they are the first to enter an Earth with a “Greenhouse Effect” and what is, for them, a backward level of technology.
Catherine is not only exiled from her home but also made acutely aware that in our world, the royal Marlborough line has died out. “What,” she reflects, “could be more cruel than to inhabit a world which knows nothing of you?”
Her closing moments are spent in isolation, writing the account we have just read, in the secluded Welsh valley the Aztecs first took her from — or rather, not that valley, but its distant mirror. We are left with the thought that the Aztecs live by conquest and have now beaten all the enemies in their world, but none of those in ours: “They will come in their shining ships to conquer and destroy, barbarians of gold and feathers, and serpents of fire” (page 354).
Continuing to invest in Catherine’s innermost conflicts, Evans relates the coming invasion to her unique perspective; her final words are “Every evening I watch and wait with fear and longing”. She is lost in our world, awaiting the Aztecs with both desire and dread.
AZTEC CENTURY combines the familiarity of Britain with the alternative world subgenre atypically and vividly. The Aztecs are a vibrant and multilayered culture seen through a fresh and intimate point of view. The novel succeeds as an animated re-examination of Europe’s conquest of America — if not, ultimately, an argument for its reversal.
Christopher Evans’ AZTEC CENTURY is published in UK paperback by VGSF, price £4.99.
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