An Interview With Jeffrey Evan Brooks, Author Of 'Shattered Nation'
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Politics and Activism

An Interview With Jeffrey Evan Brooks, Author Of 'Shattered Nation'

The creator of a world of a different American Civil War.

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An Interview With Jeffrey Evan Brooks, Author Of 'Shattered Nation'
Jeffrey Evan Brooks

Jeffrey Evan Brooks is the author of "Shattered Nation," a novel about an alternate American Civil War. His Amazon page can be found here, and his blog is here.

Wallace: What made you start writing?

Brooks: I'm not really sure. I feel like I've been writing as long as I've been able to read, and I don't remember when I could not read. I was writing short stories and efforts at novels as early as middle school, although naturally they were absolutely atrocious. It takes one a long time to learn to write well. Whether my writing is good or not is up to my readers, but it certainly has gotten better over time.

As to why I write about history, it's simply because I love it so much. I don't think there's a person in the world who loves history as much as I do. Carl Sagan once said that he worked to popularize science because he loved science and, when you're in love, you want to share it with the world. Well, I love history and I want to share that love with the world. I always have, and so I've been writing historical fiction for pretty much all of my life.

Wallace: What got you into alternate history?

Brooks: No one who is interested in history can help but ask "what if?" I've been fascinated with history since I was a little boy, and reading history and biography has been the way I spend most of my free time for most of my life. This inevitably caused me to ask counterfactual questions. What if Napoleon had won the Battle of Waterloo? What if Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon had had a son rather than a daughter? What if Cortez and his men had been slaughtered by the Aztecs? A lot of academic historians pooh-pooh the idea of alternate history, but they ask the same questions as everybody else, even if they don't admit it.

Moreover, I think that thinking counterfactually helps you put real history into a proper perspective. Right now, I'm writing "House of the Proud," the sequel to "Shattered Nation." One of the major characters will be Senator Charles Sumner. Imagining him in an alternate timeline in which the South won the Civil War has been a fascinating experience and allowed me to better understand the man. The same has been true of other historical figures who appear. So, I think that alternate history has a practical use in helping us understand real history.

More importantly, though, I think that reading alternate history is useful purely because it shows us how easily history could have been different. Lots of people would tell you the way history unfolded is the way it inevitably had to unfold, and that's simply not the case. Nothing in history is inevitable, and changes of unimaginable magnitude could have been caused by seemingly trivial alternations to the historical timeline. If Tsarevich Alexei had not had hemophilia, or if Franz Ferdinand's driver hadn't taken a wrong turn, the world in 2016 would be completely unrecognizable.

Wallace: "Shattered Nation"concerns the American Civil War. Why did you select this time period?

Brooks: The war was such an enormous event in the history of our country. I think it was Shelby Foote who said that it was to America what the "Iliad"and "Odyssey" were to ancient Greece. You can see it in the care we take in preserving the battlefields and the monuments to men and events with which we have decorated our landscape. And it took place on such a vast scale, with armies numbering in the hundreds of thousands fighting it over thousands of square miles, on terrain as varied as the deserts of New Mexico, the hills of Tennessee and Kentucky, the swamps of Louisiana and Mississippi, along the rivers of Virginia and into the farmland of Pennsylvania. And what a cast of characters you have, with the likes of Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, Ulysses Grant and William Sherman. If a novelist invented a fictional character exactly like Jeb Stuart or George Custer, they would be dismissed as silly clichés. Yet these were living, breathing people.

Of course, most historical fiction about the Civil War, including alternate history, focuses on the Eastern Theater. I wanted to set my story in the Western Theater, which has not been as deeply explored by writers. I think the Atlanta Campaign was truly the decisive event of the war, rather than Gettysburg or Vicksburg, and by fixing the plot around the 1864 election, it allowed me to make the novel into a political thriller as well as a military story. And I really wanted to make Patrick Cleburne a central character, because he's so amazingly interesting.

Wallace: Are there any other time periods or geographical eras that interest you?

Brooks: I don't think there are any periods of history that don't interest me. I have a deep fascination with both the political and military aspects of the American Revolution and the early American republic; in fact, my interest in that time period probably exceeds my interest in the American Civil War. I am fascinated with the British Empire and devour stories of the British colonial military campaigns during the Victorian Era. I have a very deep interest in Mesoamerica, Russia during the age of Peter the Great, Tudor England, the Republic of Venice, Florence in the age of the Renaissance, the Napoleonic Era, and in both World Wars. More than anything else, however, I would say that ancient Greece and Rome engage my imagination more than anything else. I love reading the ancient historians: Herodotus, Thucydides, Livy, Tacitus and the rest of them. Above all, I love reading Plutarch, which I recommend to everyone and anyone.

I don't plan on limiting my writing to the American Civil War. I've written a few chapters of an alternate history novel about the American Revolution, but I may abandon it as I don't really like where it's going. I have outlines for alternate history novels dealing with World War II and the last years of the Roman Republic. I'm toying with the idea of a novel set in the 1930s in a world where Franz Ferdinand was not assassinated. But, of course, there will be lots of "Shattered Nations" books. "House of the Proud" will hopefully be published this fall or winter. I have outlines for three additional sequels, which take place respectively in the 1890s, the 1920s and the 1960s. And I also have plans for "sidequels" depicting events that take place during the war in 1864 in other parts of the country, including one set in the Shenandoah Valley and another set in and around Charleston.

Wallace: What gave you the idea for "Shattered Nation's"point of divergence?

Brooks: When I was a young boy, I devoured the "American Heritage Picture History of the Civil War," by Bruce Catton. I don't have a copy of the book in front of me, but I recall him mentioning the "danger that McClellan would win the presidential election of 1864" and agree to a negotiated peace with the Confederacy, stating that, "No one understood this better than Joseph Johnston" (or words to that effect), which he said was why Johnston was simply trying to hold Atlanta until after the election was over. I actually don't agree with Catton on this point, as Johnston does not seem to have given too much thought to the political situation in the North, but the bug of this point of divergence was planted in my mind very early. Had Jefferson Davis not replaced Joseph Johnston with John Bell Hood, the entire outcome of the war might have been different.

I wrote and rewrote versions of "Shattered Nation" starting in my early college years. Honestly, until I started the final version in October 2009, they were absolutely wretched. One version had a point of divergence in which Johnston is removed from command, but replaced by James Longstreet rather than Hood. In that same version, the fictional "everyman" character was a Kentuckian in the Orphan Brigade rather than a Texan in Granbury's Brigade. It was only in the fall of 2009, after much prodding by my wife, that I deleted everything I had written up to that point and started from scratch.

Wallace: Did researching your novel pose any difficulty?

Brooks: It posed enormous difficulty. I wanted the novel to be perfectly plausible and to have absolutely no errors. If an infantry regiment is specifically named, there had to be a reasonable reason for it to have been where I said it was. Almost all of the characters, even the very minor ones, are real people who might have been where I placed. In fact, aside from James McFadden himself, every member of Granbury's Texas Brigade depicted in the story has the name of a real person who served in that unit, although their personalities are entirely my invention. I remember how much work went into relatively short scenes, such as what Manton Marble sees out his window in a Chicago hotel room.

Months after the publication of "Shattered Nation," I realized that I had made a serious error: Abraham Lincoln and his cabinet received word of the victory at Mobile Bay earlier than would have been realistically possible. It was not a major plot point, yet I was distraught. I seriously considered rewriting that entire chapter and releasing the book over again, before my wife knocked some sense into me. Perfect is the enemy of the good. But one of the most satisfying aspects of writing these books is how many reviewers have pointed out how well researched they are. It makes me think that all those long hours of research were not in vain.

Speaking of research, a scene in "House of the Proud" will feature the British officer, Garnet Wolseley (a man I have always found fascinating), having dinner with the officers of the Royal Welch Fusiliers, one of Britain's elite infantry regiments. The level of protocol and etiquette involved in a dinner at a British officers' mess in the Victorian Era reaches the level of the absurd, and it took me many hours of deep research to get it all right. Even so, I'm sure I made some mistakes.

Wallace: Were there any problems with working out the plausibility of the plot?

Brooks: Not as much as one might think. History is filled with implausible events, after all. The political situation in the North in the summer of 1864 was balanced on a knife's edge in own our history. How much more chaotic might it have been if a major Confederate victory had been won outside Atlanta that July? After that, it's like a set of dominoes tumbling over, with every event naturally morphing into each subsequent event. In a very real sense, I didn't even really write the book. I just placed the characters in my counterfactual scenario and watched what happened to them. While writing one scene, in which a major perspective character is killed, I myself had no idea that the character was going to die until a few paragraphs before the death took place. The book writes itself.

Wallace: You're a member of alternatehistory.com and have been there a while. Did that community play any role in the development of your novel?

Brooks: In the acknowledgements section of my novella "Blessed Are The Peacemakers," I made a point to express thanks for the feedback I have received from the posters at alternatehistory.com. I often tossed out ideas about my writing into the forum to see what people would say about them. I would say that their biggest contribution has been to reinforce the idea that the plots of my stories had to be plausible and, within the framework of the fictional alternate reality I created, correct. If it wasn't, somebody would spot it and would ruthlessly expose it.

Wallace: You've written work for alternatehistory.com. Is there a significant difference between writing a story on that site and work for publication?

Brooks: If you write for publication, it has to be perfect. The same standard doesn't apply with writings posted on an Internet forum. You can goof off and have more fun with it, but then you don't get paid for it.

Wallace: What advice do you have for aspiring writers?

Brooks: Follow Jack London's rule of writing: one thousand words a day, no exceptions. In this day of e-readers and print-on-demand publishing, it's easier than ever to get your books out before the public. If you write well, people will be there to read what you write.

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This article has not been reviewed by Odyssey HQ and solely reflects the ideas and opinions of the creator.
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