Everything Old Is New Again

“Tomorrow is only what the past dragged in.” -- Jez Lowe

I write about a freshly, intensely globalized world. A world of booming commerce and growing wealth inequality. Religious extremists demand that the government help them fight a mysterious homosexual agenda. Investment fraud and shady lending has caused economic upheaval. Colonial powers struggle over the ill-gotten fruits of violent conquest-- the bodies and labor of Black men and women, indigenous land and goods, and grand European cities built on stolen labor and stolen gold. Crime is rising, propelled in part by a harsh criminal justice system that does not distinguish murder from petty theft when it comes to metting out punnishment. New media has brought news and entertainment to the masses, and reactionaries are loudly lamenting the time before printing became cheap and novels and newspapers rotted everyones’ brains. 

If you stopped short at “printing”, it’s because although I’m talking about the 18th century, there is a striking familiarity to what I have described. On some level, I don’t think this is a coincidence. The economic systems created in the early and middle 18th century are still with us, as are the political and social hierarchies required to maintain such systems. The scars of land theft and chattel slavery are still unhealed: Indigenous people around the world are still fighting for our right to exist as ourselves, and Black Americans are still pleading to be valued as human beings.Reverend Bray, shouting about the “gangs” of gay men who were allegedly “invading” London in 1708 and causing all manner of social ills, sounds remarkably like the rhetoric from the current religious right. The sins of the 18th century have been carried, largely unquestioned in Western society, directly into the 21st. 

I find that writing about another century gives the sort of insight that can only be gained by distance. Patterns that seem impossibly tangled and too complicated to describe when you are inside them become clear when viewed from afar.  It’s impossible, of course, to detach myself from these stories. On some level, I’m writing about my ancestors’ experiences, experiences that in many ways affect my life today. However, being outside of the experience, being able to see what came before and after in the broad sweep of history, is invaluable for understanding.

Alternative history, in particular, provides a particular way to challenge the idea of historical inevitability and the resulting claim that this is, in fact, the best of all possible worlds. The twin narratives of inevitability and progress obscure both the tiny, uncontrollable coincidences upon which so much of history turns, and the deliberate choices-- by individuals and by institutions-- to take a particular path when others were available. Seeing the past as a series of unstoppable events too large for any one person to change paralyzes us in the present. For me, writing fiction is as much about seeing the potential in the present as studying the past.