The Appeal of Alternate History

I have a guest post up on the blog at Five Rivers Publishing, wherein I describe some of the alt-historical background of A Poisoned Prayer and the forthcoming A Tangled Weave. I have thought a lot about alternate history and about why it might appeal to some people. People like me, for instance.

Not this French flag...

A huge appeal, for me at least, is the pleasure I get from catching a twisted historical reference (understanding why a common object has a different name in the alternate timeline, identifying a minor character as being a very different version of someone from OTL), without the author having to bludgeon me over the head with it.

...and definitely not this one...

So I have made something of a practise, whenever I write alternate history, of dropping in this sort of prize from time to time. (You could call it a batch of Easter eggs, I suppose.) They say you should write the sort of thing you want to read, and I definitely like the ego-appeal of catching something the author has provided but not explained.

So, for example, the reference in A Poisoned Prayer to the King of Navarre is for some readers just a nice little bit of background to Lise's character, explaining the origins of her family. But some readers will know that Henri IV, the first Bourbon King of France, was originally King of Navarre. In the timeline in which I'm writing, the Bourbon family still occupies that role.

But probably a variant of THIS French
flag (all images from Wikimedia)

And instead of a French king we have a French emperor... drawn from the family of the old Dukes of Burgundy. Which will lead some readers to think that perhaps I've allowed Charles the Bold to be not quite so stupidly bold in my timeline, and usurp the crown from the Valois, who in the period of the Hundred Years War had some scions who were not among the best and brightest.

Not that I consider either A Poisoned Prayer nor A Tangled Weave to be true alternate-history novels. As I wrote for Five Rivers, in a true alt-history story the world's as much a character as the protagonist. If the timeline in these novels is a character, it's a walk-on role. I intend to have more to say about this in the new year*.

*This post, the one on the Five Rivers blog, and the promised posts to come, are based on notes I made for a panel appearance at When Words Collide in August 2018.