IGMS Issue 10 Read online

  TURTLEDOVE: Everything is "Why, of course" -- in retrospect. The question is, does it happen cause it's railroad time, as Charles Fort said, or because somebody's foxier than all his neighbors? And the answer, from here, is, I dunno. Both, I suspect. Sometimes the timing is crucial, as when the Spaniards hit the Incas in the midst of the latter's dynastic strife. Of course, one of the things that occasioned the strife was the advent of smallpox, brought from places where the Spaniards had been before. As you say, there is a web, even if the ways the strands connect can be hard to trace.

  SCHWEITZER:As for Great Men, my own guess is that in the real world it's a combination of both. There has to be a great man and the correct timing. The revolutions of 1848 were just right to produce another Napoleon, , a Lenin, or a Hitler, but didn't. The point of the Benet story (which is in his standard Selected Works and also in Thirteen O'Clock) is that if the times are not right, the Great Man comes to naught, even though he may have a feeling he ought to have been a Great Man.

  TURTLEDOVE: "And He Walked Around the Horses" is of similar import. I do wonder if Piper saw the Benet and did a different take on it.

  SCHWEITZER: But to pick a couple examples from history: what if Mohammed had been killed by a stray arrow during one of his early battles? Now the rise of Islam could be attributed to a massive and deep groundswell of Semitic rejection of Hellenism, but if there had been no Prophet to focus this, would it have gotten anywhere? Or if Constantine the Great had been hit by an arrow at the Milvian Bridge. What he was doing seems to have been the product of his own personal vision (in more than one sense) and his own personal decisions. No other Roman emperor or pretender was so inclined. No Persian king was so inclined, though there were also Christians in Persia. So if Constantine had not survived, would Christianity have established itself as more than a minority sect?

  TURTLEDOVE: Well, as you probably know (always the excuse for an expository lump), I've done a series of stories collected as Agent of Byzantium, in which Muhammad converted to Christianity on a trading run up into Syria and Islam never happened. The book came out about the same time as Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, but I escaped a fatwa, for which I'm duly grateful. What you may not know is that I palmed a card. There was another prophet, Musaylimah, active in southeastern Arabia around Muhammad's time and also preaching a monotheistic faith -- not Islam, but a monotheistic faith. Had Muhammad not been around, who knows? If it was railroad time, the broad outlines of political history might not took too different after all. If it wasn't, they would. But we can't do the experiment and see. In the real world, Abu Bakr, the first caliph, suppressed Musaylimah and his faith right after Muhammad's death.

  I don't know what Christianity's fate in an Islamless Iran would have been. Zoroastrianism was well organized, and Christianity was suspect, on the grounds that its followers often favored the Roman Empire. I suspect it would have remained in the minority and been persecuted, as the Manichees were farther west.

  SCHWEITZER: Of course here we are back to war and religion, the two great engines for change in history.

  But, moving right along, Are you the sort of writer who makes elaborate outlines and takes a lot Of notes? What are your writing methods like?

  TURTLEDOVE: No, I like telling myself the story, too. I usually know where I'm going, but not how I'm going to get there. I do first drafts in longhand, which seems to make my style tighter. It's a habit I picked up while still working on a typewriter -- I'm old enough to go back that far. Typewriters, for those who don't recall, are anything but user-friendly. I started working through hard parts in longhand, then transcribing. After a while, I thought, This is trying to tell me something. So I've done it ever since.

  SCHWEITZER: And: what are you working on now and what do you have coming up in the near future?

  TURTLEDOVE: The United States of Atlantis will be out this December, and Give Me Back My Legions!, a straight historical about the battle that kept the Romans from annexing Germany. It'll be just in time for the 2000th anniversary of the battle.

  SCHWEITZER: Thanks, Harry.

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