Jack Dann on Alternate History

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Look what came in the mail yesterday!

Jack Dann, who lives in Australia where summer is winter and people walk upside-down on their hands, some time back decided to get an advanced degree in literature. God knows why. It's not his job to write academic analysis of other writers. It's academics' job to write academic analysis of his work.

But never mind that.

An offshoot of that quixotic literary enterprise is this book. I haven't read all of it yet. But I did, with the aid of its index, read every bit of it touching upon me.

I'm a modest man, but human nevertheless.

The heart of this book is a long virtual interview Jack did with a number of writers he quite reasonably thought would have worthwhile thoughts about the literature of alternate history.

And so we did. I'm going back immediately after posting this to read Jack's synopsis of the whole. But the richest parts of this fruitcake, it seems to me is in the clash of opinions as to exactly what alternate history is and should be . The opinions are vivid and expressed without self-censorship.   Sometimes the juxtaposition of voices is actively comic. As here: 

Michael Swanwick: Speaking only for my own work, not anybody else's, I feel strongly that the deviance from actual history should be both colorful and comprehensible to the reader. As familiarity with history declines not only in America but around the world, this last becomes increasingly more difficult to achieve.

Harry Turtledove: Thou shalt not bore the reader.

Ouch. 

(Although if you have to be one-upped on this particular subject, having it be by the King of Alternate History takes some of the sting out.)

Literary theory is my guilty pleasure. So I'm going to enjoy the heck out of this book. It's possible you will too. You already know which side of this particular fence you're on..

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