#alternate present

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Pennacchio Argentato - Alternate Present (2021)

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109. Pagans by James Alistair Henry

A very satisfying hard-boiled murder mystery set in an alternate modern Saxon London. The vast majority of my writing here is free to read and will remain so, but if you enjoy these sorts of posts, your support on Patreon or as a paying subscriber through WordPress is what subsidises me to write more of them. You can also find me on BlueSky. If you enjoy reading this, please share it! Cover art…

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Please send cakes, high-altitude balloons, plaudits and so on to Ayize Jama-Everett to celebrate the publication of his latest novel, the fourth and final Liminal novel, Heroes of an Unknown World. We asked some writers for their thoughts on the book and they summer the books up better than I can: “The Liminal Books deserve

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Future Alternate History Fic:

A story in which Trump is elected President, and the Second Vermont Republic (which actually exists) secedes under the leadership of President Sanders.

I suggest the name “The Year of Three Presidents”

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A Different Take On "Medieval" Africa

Sebastian Gromann is a concept artist who works at Karakter, a German studio whose Game of Thrones stuff we’ve featured here before.

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Solarpunk

Going a slightly different direction today in that, for once, this has little to do with politics and nation-states and more to do with the historical basis for a nascent genre.

Solarpunk is a fairly recent development. I first became aware of it perhaps a year ago, thought it was cool, and didn’t give it much more thought, but in the last few months it seems to be picking up steam. As far as I know, there isn’t much art or literature in this genre yet (please recommend anything to me that you know of! I’d love to see it); it’s more like a movement and set of guidelines. This is unusual, since usually a punk genre forms around a nucleus of influential work: compare steampunk, which coalesced around The Difference Engine, The Anubis Gates, and Victorian speculative literature, and then had guidelines and a subculture applied to it.

What is solarpunk? Unlike most of the other punks, it isn’t so much an alternate past as a possible present and future. While steampunk and dieselpunk revolve in large part around highly aestheticized machinery and dystopia, solarpunk is more about ecology and optimism. Steampunk has gears, tentacle beasts, and airship-monitored empires; solarpunk has natural fibers, algae lamps, and a nearly anarchist streak. Despite its name, it isn’t dependent on solar technology (at least not the way steampunk is dependent on steam); it’s about powering our technology through whatever makes sense for a given area. In stormy areas, windmills; near rivers, hydroelectric power; in the desert, solar panels. It’s about coexisting with nature rather than using it. It looks at technology and says, “how sustainable can we make this”, not “how powerful can we make this”. It looks at scientists as innovators and heroes, not potential madmen. If you lived in a solarpunk city, you’d recycle almost everything. You’d know how to fix your own phone. You’d have autographed posters of biochemists on your wall. And you’d have a kick-ass Art Nouveau aesthetic, because solarpunk is elves.

So now that we’ve defined solarpunk, inasmuch as one can, let’s look at its historical basis, because, like the other punks, solarpunk has its share of might-have-beens.

First of all, a huge component of solarpunk is what one might call mindful architecture: windows made of glass that generates electricity, wind scoops, rooftop gardens, etc. This kind of architecture has some pretty strong historical fact behind it—also science, because science is awesome and is older than our word for it.

The Mediterranean peoples knew an awful lot about how to deal with the sun, because they lived in the northern hemisphere, where in winter the sun moves to the south, while in summer it’s right overhead or slightly to the north. So they built their houses with huge windows and doors to the south to warm the space in winter, and they put few or no openings on the north, so the summer sun would reflect off the roof and winter winds couldn’t get in. This meant they had to burn very little fuel in the winter, and in the summer they had cooling breezes. Entire cities had this north-south orientation. It was so important that the Romans even passed laws ensuring that every building had access to the winter sun. And in Egypt and neighboring Western Asia, windcatchers were built on roofs to direct air currents into the interior. This form of air conditioning is incredibly ancient and still in use today. 

And solar machinery? People have toyed with it off and on throughout the centuries. The closest anyone really came to running machines on solar power before the advent of the solar panel was Augustin Mouchot, a nineteenth-century Frenchman who used a system of reflectors and boilers to drive a steam engine (not a train, just an engine). His machine was a bit cumbersome but could have been developed into practicality, but coal prices went down in France and the government decided it was not economical to invest in solar research. Others tried after him, and solar-powered pumps and ovens were available for quite a while (still are, probably, but this is about history), especially in the southwest of the United States. During the Edwardian era, people got so excited about solar power that there were even plans to build huge energy plants in Egypt in 1914, but an insignificant war began in Europe that directed funding elsewhere.

Every time the world faces a fossil fuel shortage, the scientific community looks back at solar power and thinks “huh, yeah, we should give this another go”. In the twenties and thirties, as the ideals of the Bauhaus (which included solar architecture) spread over the world, people tried solar water heaters, south-facing windows, and just about everything else, but as more and more oil fields were found and fossil fuels dropped in price or became easier to procure, these were put on the back burner.

The “problem” with solar power is that it requires a significant initial expense: you have to retrofit or specially design your house, or you have to buy a bunch of solar panels, or you have to spend money on a lot of mirrors. But after that, the system requires no power input (you don’t have to keep buying gas or coal) and very little maintenance (just send someone out with a rag and some Windex every now and then). This, in fact, is one of the most infuriating things about the history of solar power. It’s always on the verge of being realized, and then someone says “this smoky poisonous stuff is cheaper, let’s do that”. It’s also one of the most inspiring things about solarpunk. We can achieve it—as they say, we have the technology.

In fact, we might soon be forced to achieve it.

Image: “Fruit”, Alfons Mucha, 1897. Source: Wikimedia Commons

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The Union of Kalmar

Are you tired of hearing about Sweden yet? Do you want me to take a biased and prejudiced look at Scandinavian history? Yes? Good.

What happened: The shifting borders and unions that occupied Scandinavia for centuries are absurdly complex and are usually about who is hating whom at any given time. Sometimes people were kings of Sweden, sometimes they were kings of Norway and a bit of Sweden, sometimes they were kings of Norway, Sweden, and Finland, and Denmark got in the mix there too, and really it's just a nightmare. Wouldn't it be easier to unify the whole shebang under one banner and not have to worry about changing the maps every time some guy died?

Margaret I of Denmark thought so. We would have gotten along, because she was a powerful fourteenth-century woman who liked Scandinavia. But she was also Danish, so there's that. Nobody's perfect.

Margaret was the daughter of Denmark's King Valdemar IV, because sometimes history is indistinguishable from high fantasy, and she was married to Haakon VI, king of Norway and, later, Sweden. She sweet-talked Valdemar into making her son Olaf (of course his name was Olaf) heir to the throne of Denmark. Valdemar and Haakon conveniently died, leaving Olaf a minor and Margaret as the most powerful woman in the area. After some trouble with Sweden (naturally), she got the three countries to recognize her as regent, making her the de facto queen of a new union. 

In 1397, a treaty was signed at the castle of Kalmar, formalizing the union of the three countries under a common crown. For a modern example, look at Australia and Great Britain: they have separate governments and foreign policies but they are under the rule of Queen Elizabeth II. The Union was fairly stable at first, because all three countries had a common enemy in the Hanseatic League. The League, which was kind of the Spacing Guild of its day, controlled powerful cities along the Baltic and German coasts and, as a maritime trading power, exerted a great deal of influence on the Scandinavian economy. Margaret wasn't wild about this, and neither were the countries under her rule, so as long as the League remained powerful, the Union maintained an equal degree of stability, kind of like how you stop fighting with your sister and unite when someone outside the family makes fun of her. Then you call that person a dweeb and run away, because that's as far as you can take interpersonal conflict. And then your sister forgets about that and ungratefully cuts off one of your eyebrows a year later.

Exactly like that, but with countries and crowns. Danes, Swedes, and Norwegians would remain united as long as there was a single monarch and an enemy to fight, but when the monarch died, there was no legal process for recognizing his or her successor, so the Union would fall apart every so often until a single person could resume control. Each country had its own interests (read: wars to pursue) and each country resented having to deal with the problems of the other. Eventually, under the House of Vasa, the Swedes got the heck out of there in 1523 and embarked on their conquest of the Swedish Empire. Denmark unilaterally decided that Norway was their province, up to and including its overseas possessions, which is why today Greenland belongs to Denmark.

More stuff happened with borders and takeovers, which is not germane to our discussion of the Kalmar Union, since it had formally ended. Much later, in the nineteenth century, a pan-Scandinavian movement began agitating for the Union's resumption, or at least something like it, but that never came to fruition. The Nordic countries now have a council in which they talk about issues and feelings and probably the herring catch or something, but the closest they've come to reuniting has been joining the European Union. Which isn't, y'know, exactly the same.

What didn't happen: Margaret, Margaret, Margaret. What a fascinating person. She was never officially queen regnant, but boyyy did she function as one, and it was mostly due to her maneuvering and political smarts that the Union began at all, and she held it together despite internal strife and external war until her death.

There are a lot of ways the Union could have survived. Margaret had some troublesome relatives she could have killed (the Danes weren't exactly averse to bloodbaths, after all). She and her successors could have tried harder to unify the kingdoms economically. Culturally and politically, a closer association would have taken time, but money talks and even, under the right circumstances, sings like a canary. Once the kingdoms relied on each other for trade, it would be a small step to complete political unification. Look at what happened to Scotland and England, after all. Mutual defense also works as an excuse.

And then later, during the various European wars, the Union of Kalmar would have been a huge and unstoppable power, especially if Gustavus Adolphus had taken the throne and pushed the Union the way he did Sweden. The Union would have been a serious rival to the Holy Roman Empire and, as a Protestant power, would have seriously altered the political and religious landscape. The various pressures and alliances and wars that created modern Europe would be unimaginably different, for one thing. An expansionist Union would prevent the rise of Russia—Sweden did not get on well at all with one of Slavic states that eventually became part of the Russian Empire—so no Soviet Union, no Cold War. Colonizing the New World might have become a priority, so some of us might be speaking Swedish now. And the two world wars would either not have happened or would be unrecognizable to us. 

Also, since Margaret was so cool and set a good example, maybe we'd have seen more queens in the north. Maybe they'd be buddies with Elizabeth I and Mary II and Anne! Northern matriarchy for everyone!

Lastly, on a weirder note, a large Union of Kalmar lurking in the North would mean more people believing in the existence of elves and trolls, which can only be a good thing. And since the Brothers Grimm had their book become so popular because they were living in a powerful, prosperous empire at the time, a similar work could have come out in the Union. Instead of Cinderella and Rapunzel, our cultural vocabulary would contain Tatterhood and Katie Woodencloak. And the movie Trollhunter would be much more popular than it is, which can only be a good thing.