In a sidetrack in the video I made with Matt Mitrovich on the topic of Male Wish Fulfilment in Alternate History, I had mentioned that I viewed Robert Sobel’s For Want of a Nail, one of the seminal works of the modern alternate history genre, as among the greatest of the genre ever written. Recently, in a forum thread, I went so far as to declare the work to be the single greatest work of alternate history, in the entirety of the genre’s several decades, ever written.
The book was written by Robert Sobel, an American economist and business historian for whom this work was his only foray into fiction (he was renowned in his academic field; I remember him being cited in a history book for my American history class in high school). It is a wonder, therefore, how a single work of fiction by an author of nonfiction shaped the genre as we currently know it.
The book itself is well known to most alternate historians; a short and incomplete synopsis is that John Burgoyne, the British general most famous in our world for being the loser of the Battle of Saratoga, receiving reinforcements at said battle and winning the “North American Rebellion,” ensuring that the Thirteen Colonies would remain British possessions. To escape from British rule, many former Patriots flee the Colonies to what we would call Texas, establishing the state of Jefferson.
Through a complex series of events, the Colonies merge into the Confederation of North America, and Jefferson intervenes into Mexico to create the United States of Mexico, led by the likes of Andrew Jackson. The book details the elaborate interplay of these two states in an elaborate tango between the two of them over the next century and a half, ending in this world’s 1971 with the faltering of global arms talks. There is revolution, dictatorship, imperialist ambition, world war, and an international corporation that deploys the first nuclear weapons.
The book is several hundred pages long, and Sobel is keen to ensure that his work is extremely detailed in its description of the political maneuvering and international conflict, as well as the economics and the technological advancement. In doing so, he chose to write the work not as a novel but as a textbook from another world, allowing unprecedented discussions of the machinations of another universe entirely.
That decision is, more than anything else, why I choose to call Sobel’s work the single greatest work of alternate history there has ever been. In writing in a supremely detailed prose that eschews traditional forms of characterization and plot, he set the standard for alternate history for decades to come. The titanic works of alternatehistory.com and other sites (such as Il Bethisad and others) follow Sobel’s model of detailed, impersonal discussions of alternate realities, and in doing so follow his vision.
This form is ‘purer’ alternate history than a novel set in an alternate world, for the reason that history fundamentally concerns itself with the broad. A novel will have characters with interactions among them, but with only so much discussion of the broader world, and is therefore ill suited to be a proper exploration of a point of divergence. A textbook style work of alternate history can further delve into implications and causality, and probe the way history can change in the same way that historians discuss why history happened as it actually did. This was nigh-revolutionary, and Sobel has codified the genre in his work. All the genre owes him for this.