Seriously, how many books can people make on at least one of three premises for divergence to take place?

My work here is now done. ::happy sigh::

That’s a good point, and I agree with you. But subgenre classifications within SF have orthodox as well as liberal adherents, and the most orthodox SF fans have always been nitpicky about things like the forehead aliens and the handwaving of consequences past that “point” of logic. The Mundane SF group? movement? has absolute hissyfits about the idea of FTL travel, for example — and they have some good points. If you’re trying to write about the future and yet you patently ignore what you know isn’t possible, are you really writing about the future? A fanfic writer would say, “Who cares?” But an orthodox SF fan would care a great deal.

So my review is aimed mostly at the orthodox alternate history fans. I’ve seen other alternate history that ignores the “rules” as Novik does, but it’s never counted as alternate history, and I figure there’s a reason for that. (Great example is Wen Spencer’s A Brother’s Price, also a kind of alternate history where the divergence is evolutionary — for inexplicable reasons, in her world the gender ratio is 1 male for about 30 females. So men are sheltered, perfumed chattel, and her story is a Regency romance. Cracktastic and great fun, though it’s never clear if this is Earth. If it is, this is another Novikian AH.)

– Hmm. I wonder if there’s something in the fact that the only writers I see taking the liberal approach to alternate history are female, and the writers who seem to take the orthodox approach are male…

Ah. Oops. Sorry!

My “that said” is that I’m afraid I still don’t see this sort of imaginative acceptance as something unique to fanfic, although I can accept it may be a more dominant force there. Is the sort of disbelief-suspension I need to engage in to accept Novik’s world really different to the sort I need to engage in to accept the human-like-but-not-actually-human citizens of Iain Bank’s Culture? Or, for that matter, the many bumpy foreheads of Star Trek? It doesn’t feel very different. To my mind, an awful lot of worldbuilding is about the logical consequences of something to a point.

I was being facetious about needing new terminology; I think plain vanilla fantasy suits it just fine. =)

That said, I’m a great fan of worldbuilding in speculative fiction, and I can’t ignore the fact that a point of divergence which occurred millions of years ago could not possibly result in a world as similar to or own as Novik has depicted. She handwaves the very obvious changes that our planet would undergo if we weren’t the sole sentient species on it. Imagine how every species would’ve evolved if dragons, rather than big cats, etc., were the apex predator of the planet (and in the Novikverse it’s only the “domesticated” dragons that have an aversion to eating people; the ferals don’t do it because humans aren’t enough meat to be worth the effort, but they clearly don’t have a problem with the idea of it). Would we have eyes in the front of our heads, or higher up on top? Would we have developed aerial weapons sooner? Would we have bothered with animal husbandry if owning a herd meant attracting hungry dragons? In hunting cultures, wouldn’t a mark of bravery/manhood have meant killing a dragon — and wouldn’t this have triggered reprisals as the dragons probably wouldn’t take kindly to this? Somewhere in the history of Novik’s world, there should be dragon-human wars. There should be whole swaths of the planet where either dragons, or humans, have been wiped out. We should have religions which worship dragons, and those which paint dragons as the devil, and so on.

This is why I hesitate to apply “alternate history” to this — because most alternate history acknowledges the dangers in putting the point of divergence too far back (and avoids doing so, because of the danger). But then, ignoring this kind of problem is also one of the common characteristics of AU fanfiction. Sure, it would be better worldbuilding if she took the presence of dragons to its logical conclusions… but would it be half as much fun? =)

That said, I do agree with you that practically speaking, the most useful box for the series is probably fantasy (along with other historical fantasies such as Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell and the Light Ages).