Robert Knepper, the villain of Martin's pilot, produced for ABC's Fall 1993 schedule by Columbia Television.

Martin acknowledged that he would likely have been constrained in his universe-building efforts by production costs. "I do think the occasional truly wild alternate would help keep this series fresh however, so from time to time, I wanted to throw in an overtly fantastic universe, and perhaps a bizarre STFnal one".

Martin screened the pilot for various SF conventions. "I showed it at the World Science Fiction Convention and in Los Angeles", he said. It was a rough cut, noted Martin, but the response was enthusiastic. "When asked how they'd rate the program, we got 12 excellents, 33 goods, three fain and zero poor".

Though long ignored by screen and TV, the alternate history theme has enjoyed a long and distinguished history in literature. In 1836, Louis-Napoleon Geoffroy-Chateau published the first known example of alternative history: Napoleon and the Conquest of the World, 1812-1823. Its premise was that the great French emperor had in fact not made the fatal mistake of wintering his troops in Moscow.

Nearly a century later, in 1931, a number of noteworthy historians and social commentators, including A.J.P.Taylor, G.K.Chesterton and Winston Churchill, tried their hands at alternative history in a book of essays called If, or History Rewritten. Thirty years later, Look Magazine published two memorable essays: If the South Had Won the Civil War, by MacKinlay Kantor and If Hitler Had Won World War II, by acclaimed journalist William Shirer. The game was afoot.

Its appeal, moreover, has extended to a wide gamut of writers. Within the so-called literary mainstream, writers like Britain's Ronald Clark titillated the English literati with books like Queen Victoria's Bomb, exploring the consequences of somewhat premature nuclear proliferation. In 1976 Kingsley Amis published The Alteration, about a modern day Europe under Catholic domination, while in 1991 his son Martin Amis published Time's Arrow, about the moral implications of a universe in which time runs backward. Len Deighton, Thomas Berger, Vladimir Nabokov, and John Hersey have each tried their hands at remaking the present by tinkering with the past.

It was not long, however, before science fiction writers tried, with varying degrees of success, to make the game their own. In 1953, Ward Moore wrote Bring the Jubilee, also about a Confederate victory. The best of the "Hitler Victorious" books (there have been so many such stories written that they now fill an entire anthology under that name) was Philip K. Dick's award-winning 1952 novel, The Man in the High Castle. The plot line, which unraveled in an America divided between the Germans and the Japanese, was purportedly established with the help of the Book of I-Ching.

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 605