Tyler

Surprisingly amateurish, grating, and curmudgeonly

Revisado: 07-21-04

There is no such thing as "counterfactual history": rather there is fiction that uses history as the grist for its mill. It is thus as fiction that one should judge "What If?," and as fiction it sucks. The volume starts with a curmudgeonly gripe about the professionalization of history in the academy. The first effort in the collection is an eye-rolling fantasy about Jesus and the crucifiction. The writer meanders through a muddle of gross characterizations about religion (it is "about" interpretation, we are told), then wanders through some cardboard set-pieces about Pontius Pilot. I found myself baffled and bored. I like history and attempts to think through the challenges of writing stories about a past from an available archive. I also like historical fiction: self-conscious novelizations of sometimes familiar and often unfamiliar characters that mean to illuminate another time, place, and people. I stopped listening about 45 minutes into the volume. I deleted the selection and plan to add something better written, or at least intellectually interesting, or both. Churlish defenses of the value of this type of enterprise are unconvincing, especially if the authors are unwilling to be explicit about how it is that the fiction that spins out of the phrase "What if?" might help us to understand "what was" and, ultimately, what could be.

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