If you’re not into the Super Bowl, this weekend is book reading time. The most thought-provoking book you can read this weekend is Harry Turtledove’s The Wages of Sin.
Turtledove got his moniker as “the master of alternate history” with hinge point stories. Two examples are Lee magically getting AK-47s in 1864 or winning the Battle of Antietam in 1862. This let Turtledove people his stories with real characters, like an aged Abraham Lincoln wandering the desert on a train, or Amelia Earhart fighting the Battle of Britain.
The Wages of Sin is different.
In this case the hinge point is 350 years in the past. AIDS came to Europe in 1500, so there’s no Henry VIII, no Scottish Enlightenment, and no Industrial Revolution. There are no “real people” in this story because their forebears didn’t exist.
The Story
The Tudor line continued so there’s no Church of England, and no Queen Victoria. There’s no British Empire, thus no United States. India remains independent, and there’s no cotton trade. In this ultra-Victorian England, sex outside marriage is a death sentence. Men and women are strictly segregated, the women kept bundled in something like Burqas.
The story takes place in the Wiltshire town of Salisbury, and in London. They’re just a few hours apart today, but days apart by stagecoach in this world. It’s a small, happy story of meager successes against society’s expectations. No more spoilers.
What makes the story compelling is how many millions of Americans might prefer this world to their own. Everyone in this world goes to church, and engines don’t pollute the sky. Imagine a world where all thinking outside the lines is readily suppressed, where letters remain the primary means of communication, and where progress of all kinds is measured in centuries, not years. (I see Mike Johnson smiling in the corner.)
Turtledove immerses you in this world, to the point where you forget this one for a time. It’s only when you turn the last page that you start to think about what his little world is missing, and what we’d be missing, as a result.
This makes it his most shining achievement to date.
Very engaging alt-history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_in_the_High_Castle_(TV_series)
The Man in the High Castle is an American dystopian alternate history television series created for streaming service Amazon Prime Video, depicting a parallel universe where the Axis powers of Nazi Germany and the Empire of Japan rule the world after their victory in World War II. It was created by Frank Spotnitz and produced by Amazon Studios, Ridley Scott's Scott Free Productions (with Scott serving as executive producer), Headline Pictures, Electric Shepherd Productions, and Big Light Productions.[1][2] The series is based on Philip K. Dick's 1962 novel of the same name.[1]
And unsatisfying alt-history continuation: Julia: A Retelling of George Orwell's 1984
Very inconsistent -- First third was engaging, second third was boring, last third was ghastly -- simply badly written. Bizarre word choices, overly adjectival descriptions, as though another writer picked up the story. Ultimately much too long and quite unsatisfying.
https://www.amazon.com/Julia-Novel-Sandra-Newman/dp/0063265338