The Collected What If? - Robert Cowley

    2001; 827 pages.  New Authors? : Yes.  Full Title: The Collected What If?  Eminent Historians Imagine What Might Have Been.  Edited by Robert Cowley.  Genres : Essays; World History; Speculative History; Non-Fiction.  Overall Rating : 9½*/10.

 

    I remember the first Alternate History book I ever read.  Its title was If the South Had Won the Civil War, and Wikipedia lists its author as MacKinlay Kantor and that it was first published in 1961.  The book was short, there were some neat pictures in it, and I still recall a lot of the plot details.

 

    I’m guessing it was a Weekly Reader offering, meaning the target audience was Juveniles.  It sparked a lifelong love of the Alt History genre in me; I still read the genre quite frequently.

 

    Which means Robert Cowley’s opus, The Collected What If, was a personal must-read.  Forty-five essays, penned by all sorts of historians, each one examining a pivotal point in history and speculating as to what would happen if things went differently.

 

    Me reading it was a match made in Alternate History heaven, and the three alternate timeline scenarios for the Civil War brought back fond YA reading memories.

 

What’s To Like...

    The Collected What If is a compilation of two of Robert Cowley’s collections of “counterfactual” essays that contains 20 (plus 14 sidebars) and 25 entries (no sidebars) respectively.  The entries are arranged chronologically in both volumes.  Volume One was strictly military what-ifs; Volume 2’s contents were broadened to include some non-military topics, such as what the USA would’ve been like if Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, and John F. Kennedy had never made it to the White House.

 

    Despite the titular “What If” motif, there is a lot of factual history covered here.  That’s logical, since you can’t discuss alternatives until you’ve presented what really occurred.  In fact, a majority of the essays spend much more time on the actual historical events than on what might have been.  The introduction also points out that the book’s content deliberately avoids “frivolous counterfactuals”.  Musing about what Hannibal could have done if he had an H-Bomb, or Napoleon with a stealth bomber, is just plain silly.  The counterfactual has to be plausible.

 

    Personally, I found the actual history accounts just as fascinating as the counterfactuals.  The British could have easily won the Revolutionary War, and Lincoln’s famous Emancipation Proclamation was more a clever political ploy than a great moral step forward.  My favorite essays were mostly those that dealt with ancient history (such as what if the Persian armies had won the Battle of Salamis), but that’s probably a reflection of my personal tastes of reading history books.

 

    The essays are replete with trivial tidbits.  I learned that the concepts of “freedom” and “citizen” did not exist until the Greeks came along.  The etymology of the word “slave” was interesting, and there’s a good reason why George Washington never wrote any memoirs.  It was neat to see two of my heroes, Vercingetorix and Wilfred Owen, getting some ink, and the eerie circumstances and timing around the 1948 deaths of Lawrence Duggan and Harry Dexter White makes me wonder what really goes on in the higher echelons of American national security.

 

    There are some helpful counterfactual maps and illustrations scattered throughout the book.  The longest essay was 34 pages long; the shortest was a mere 9 pages.  Each essay has a catchy title and subtitle to go with it.  For example: “Napoleon’s Invasion of North America: Aedes aegypti takes a holiday”, which should whet the literary appetite of any alt-history reader.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon:  4.4/5 based on 76 ratings and 35 reviews.

    Goodreads: 3.82/5 based on 603 ratings and 77 reviews.

 

Kewlest New Word ...

Diapason (n.) : a grand swelling burst of harmony.

Others: Auto da-fe (n.); Legerdemain (n.); Irrupted (v.).

 

Excerpts...

    Only eleven [German U-boats] were delivered in 1914.  But (. . .) attrition remained very low, since the Royal Navy had little in the way of defenses.

    The initial English efforts against the submarine bordered on the laughable.  Picketboats armed with blacksmiths’ hammers were sent out to smash periscopes; attempts were made to catch submarines with nets like cod; sea lions were even trained to seek out unwanted submerged intruders—none of which met more than the slightest degree of success.  (pg. 602)

 

    But for the potato, what different roads history might have taken?  Would Spain have become such a vast Imperial power, presiding over the first empire in history on which the sun never set?  (Its wealth would be rooted in a mound of silver mined by potato-fed conscript laborers.)  Would Frederick the Great’s Prussia have survived without the potato in the Seven Years’ War (1756-63), paving the way, ultimately, for the ascension of Germany?  . . .  How many crises of the Cold War, one wonders, were fueled by potato-based vodka?  And would we now, in a rare interval of relative peace, be appreciating van Gogh’s first major, and truly memorable, painting, The Potato Eaters?  (pg. 813)

 

Pascal suggested (in his Pensées) that if Cleopatra had been born with a somewhat larger nose, Mark Antony would have defeated Octavian at Actium.  (pg. 429)

    Unsurprisingly, profanity is sparse in The Collected What If; I spotted just ten instances in the entire 827 pages; and those were mostly in direct quotes of historical figures.  One of those was an f-bomb.

 

    There also were a few typos, such as: cause/caused; want/wont; lead/led; and the bizarre enchiphered/enciphered.  How spellchecker missed that last one mystifies me.

 

    Some readers were understandably disappointed in the factual/counterfactual ratio.  That didn’t bother me, but I love reading about history, no matter whether it's actual or speculative.  Also, keep in mind this is an 827-page, full-sized, hardcover book; reading it will be a significant investment of time.  It took me a full month to get through it.

 

    For me, The Collected What If was a great history read, both the real and the imagined parts.  As memorable as MacKinlay Kantor’s book was, it was neat to see what a bunch of historians can do to make the genre a reading delight for adult audiences as well.

 

    9½ Stars.  We would be remiss if we didn’t mention the final entry in the book, and the only one that violated the chronological order system: “What if Pizarro had not found potatoes in Peru: The humble roots of history”.  The second excerpt above, is from it.  It borders of being whimsical, but was actually food for thought.  Pun intended.