There’s a joy you feel when others want to share what you love. And there was plenty of love to share for this film:
Everything Everywhere All at Once had a fantastic night, including winning Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay. It is also one of the best works done recently in alternative history (or “AltHis”) fiction, a subfield of science fiction where the story takes place with a past that was not the one we lived through.
AltHis asks us to question everything we knew as it gives us permission to reject that everything we assumed was always going to be that way as we take a fresh look at it. Whether the past was changed by an outside time traveler, or history was the result of a divergence that happened on its own where some factors that could have gone differently did, there’s a lot of rich world building that takes place as the backstory gets re-written. At some time in the past, there was a point of diversion (or “PoD”) where things went in another direction. And what the PoD was could easily be the smallest of things, as the old piece “For Want of a Nail” reminds us.
A variety of these AltHis tales include those that are set in a multiverse. We hear that term a lot these days, and it’s central to Everything Everywhere All at Once, even though the concept is actually centuries old. Setting a story in two parallel realms to contrast and compare how things differ helps highlight what changes took place, which is helpful if you are perusing a work and need a little help with remembering how history that was changed in the background. This is done especially well in Everything Everywhere All at Once, where even though most of the changes across universes are personal, they include one major evolutionary change that throws in a great homage to 2001: A Space Odyssey.
For me, it’s personally satisfying that this film got the love it did. I fell in love with AltHis since soon after I got into “adult” books, which sounds dirtier than it was, but anyways… I’m already on record in the intro to Alt Together Now as to how I got into the field, and how it led to other works down the road. What really appeals to me about AltHis is how it reminds us how fragile we and our existences are. We get reminded how it could have been so much worse, or else encouraged to make things so much better than they are now.
There’s a lot of choices for people to delve into AltHis out there, especially if you’ve only had a casual acquaintance with the subgenre. There are probably way too many written works to choose from if you’re new to the field; just choosing among the works of Harry Turtledove alone is a daunting proposition. If you’re new to this and want to find some easier entry points, there are a few to choose from:
Word O’ Warning: There’s going to be batches o’ spoilers ahead…
Based on the classic AltHis novel by Phillip K. Dick, the series has as its PoD that the Axis manage to win the Second World War. For those who want the technical details: Giuseppe Zangara succeeds in killing Franklin D. Roosevelt before he takes office, leaving the US under-prepared for war. This allows the Third Reich to develop atomic weapons first, using one on Washington DC in 1945 to force the last active ally to surrender. The book’s main focus was on the contemplation of reality, which the series as it goes along tries to tackle in between the requisite narrative that a TV series requires.
Based on Phillip Roth’s novel, the PoD here is the election of Charles Lindberg as President in 1940, where Lindberg’s America First position influences his policies, and subsequently makes it much easier for American antisemitism to flourish. One of the raison d’etre for any science fiction is to reflect on where we are right now as it vigorously pursues a train of thought, and the timing for the premiere of the miniseries during another fraught election in the US gave it considerable gravitas.
In this original series, the PoD occurred when the Soviet Union got to the moon before the US, which very nearly happened. The result of this prompts the US in the 1970s to take a good hard look at itself and recommit to going into space, this time being more inclusive as they do. The series has so far used each season to jump ahead a decade from the last season as we follow the new space race going further faster, sooner, having gotten as of this moment to a point where we see humans on Mars in the 1990s. A much changed 1990s, in fact…
Over two seasons, we get an alternative world where ODESSA was far more successful than it was in this timeline (at least that we’re aware of…). In this show set during their 1970s, Adolf Hitler survived the war and fled to Argentina, where he plots a comeback. Unlike the others listed above, this is more of a “hidden AltHis” in that things until the big reveal are pretty close to what we experienced, though a lot of that goes out the window once the world is aware of what happened. (If you’re squeamish, do take seriously the fact the Jordan Peele produced this show and leans into what he’s known for…)
This Quentin Film surprised everyone, in that before it premiered it was assumed that this was just going to be an auteur’s homage to World War II films like Where Eagles Dare and Kelly’s Heroes. The big surprise that this was an AltHis film didn’t come out until it came out, where the Nazi leadership attends a Paris movie premiere in early 1944 and get eliminated in a commando raid. This raid got everyone, from Hitler to Goebbels to Himmler on down the line. We don’t get to see much of how this changes history, as this is more of a cathartic action pic than a deep contemplation, but we can guess pretty well how the rest of the war plays out from there…
This is another subtle introduction to AltHis, where by the end of the first season the series shifts from being a pale X-Files retread into telling a tale about a war between two versions of ourselves. The other universe we’re up against, called by fans of the show the “Walterverse,” has an extensive set of changes, including never having had Andrew Jackson as president (which puts Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on the twenty dollar bill), President Kennedy was not assassinated, 9/11 destroyed the White House and the Pentagon, and the US went metric.
Another series where we discover an alternate dimension and don’t like our neighbors, this series also boasts a well-developed AltHis setting, where things between both worlds were fairly constant until 1996, when a major flu outbreak kills seven percent of the world’s population.
Boy, did that not age well…
Once Upon a Time in… Hollywood
When he started his career, no one knew that Quentin Tarantino would become such a big figure in the AltHis field, and yet! Again, we didn’t discover this until the film premiered, where the leads of the movie save Sharon Tate from the members of Manson’s family who came to visit her in the hills. Like the other movie, history changes right before the credits roll, so there’s a lot of unanswered questions we’re left with, and since Tarantino has so far resisted the urge to do a sequel to any of his movies, we may never know how this would have played out.
This one was a bit of a surprise when it made the jump from video game to drama. More than a few surprises, as unlike other works based on video games this one was actually good, but anyway… The producers decided to change the premise slightly, and have the disaster that brought about the end of the world set in September of 2003, making this an AltHis with the action taking place in our present. Which makes a lot of sense for the series, to have the world change and the US respond to the crisis with the worst possible responses at a time when the vice-president–
Sorry, must. Resist, Obvious. Comment…
This one is also a bit of a surprise, as the casual viewer might think that this is only a Regency story with expanded casting. However, there’s a scene in the episode “An Affair of Honor,” where the character of Lady Danbury notes to Simon Basset, Duke of Hastings, how society started to open up for more people thanks to Queen Charlotte being married to George III. This leans into an interesting PoD by removing any ambiguity surrounding Queen Charlotte’s ancestry, and in the process shows us an AltHis we might never have considered. (The upcoming prequel Queen Charlotte looks likely to make this point more explicitly when it comes to air.)
Speaking of surprises, this series may not be all that familiar to Western audiences. This drama takes place in a world where the Korean Empire avoided annexation by Japan in 1910 and became a constitutional monarchy in the present. The Emperor resides over a Korea that looks much like it does today, or much like South Korea in any case. We watch in this series as our titular character takes on the Imperial household, a corrupt institution rotting from the inside, waiting for someone to bring it down.
Yes, you may have already seen an AltHis before… In this cinematic institution, George Bailey makes a wish, to never have been born, and gets the honor (?) of seeing what happened as a result. Perhaps it was the circumstances of the time, as 1946 was too soon after the war, to really go for it and have the death of George’s brother Harry lead to a world where the Axis Powers were a lot more successful…
Maybe Frank Capra might have gone there, in some world with an alternative history…
James Ryan 