Conqueror Fantastic [Paperback]

Very few alternate history tales herein. The few in which history turns into another track tend to address the turning point rather than the result ("The Lion Hunt").

Dann, Jack: "Good Deeds" Portrayal of Robert Kennedy slumming in New York City, indulging in low company, ethnic slurs, police brutality in the company of people he trusts because he can buy them. Strains the definition of "conqueror" and isn't alternate history but interpretation.

Dedman, Stephen: "Twilight of Idols" A woman whose father was determined to find historical truth behind the Norse legends as Schliemann did for Homer's tales hired a half-failed set designer - Adolf Hitler - to help find Fafnir's lair. One who bathes in Fafnir's blood is said to become invincible...

Di Filippo, Paul: "Observable Things" (Robert Howard's Solomon Kane) Told in 1st person, old fashioned diarist style (a lot of odd capitalization for emphasis), by a Puritan reminiscing about his youth, when he trailed after Kane.

Effinger, George Alec: "Walking Gods" Saladin narrates his own story, beginning with his youth as an officer under his uncle, their campaigns together, and how he came to be vizier of Egypt. But the main thrust of the story is how Saladin and his army came to the rescue of another alternate history - the rescue of Xenophon, more than 1500 years before. Story worth reading.

Johnson, Kij: "The Empress Jingu Fishes" She is a seer, cursed in that to her there is little to choose between matters past, present, and future. Her only cold comfort is to force the gods to give her omens - such as allowing her to catch trout with a needle - before she does what they command.

Malzberg, Barry N.; Pronzini, Bill: "Intensified Transmogrification" The opening will get one's attention: "Let me remind you of the way it was before he tried to seize absolute power, declare a state of national emergency, enact martial law, create nuclear holocaust." Narrated by an unnamed aide close to Lyndon Johnson, but from memory in an unusual style: the dialogue isn't given in quotations, and emphasizes the narrator's opinions of Johnson's mental state. "I was Lyndon's closest advisor then. Such being an inaccurate description, since Mr. President took no advice from anyone..."

Morrow, James: "Martyrs of the Upshot Knothole" - codename for a certain series of 1950s atmospheric nuclear tests. The narrator replaces Agnes Moorehead, who played John Wayne's mother in THE CONQUEROR, arguably his worst film, and predeceased him by several years. Her current flame has spotted a connection between several cases of cancer and the location shooting in 1956. [OK, but the truth needed no embellishment by imaginary characters or extreme F/SF elements.]

Roessner, Michaela: "Del Norte" Claims to be based on a true story. (The author herself discourses a little on the topic of 'truth' at the end.) Joan Grau, one of Cortez' companions, brought back a bride from the strange lands across the sea - and the children of the village were overjoyed. If a princess could really live here, *anything* could happen...(Mostly from her viewpoint, though, as a stranger in a strange land remembering fallen Tenochtitlan.)

Sargent, Pamela: The protagonist Jamukha is the "Spirit Brother" of the man he once knew as Temujin: Genghis Khan. Having broken his dying oath to watch over Temujin - intended half as revenge for his own death - he falls into the power of Temujin's chief shaman, who seeks a tool in his own quest for political power. Jamukha here is portrayed as both spurned ex-lover and boyhood friend.

Watson, Ian: "An Appeal to Adolf", unlike most of the other stories herein, contains explicit sex and strong language thanks to the Nazi narrator's preoccupation with concealing his sexual relationship with a fellow soldier in the force invading Britain by sea in this alternate history. Very disturbing viewpoint character coupled with way-out "science" (powered aircraft don't exist).

Webb, Janeen: Philip of Macedon and his son Alexander ride out on "The Lion Hunt", wherein an assassin with a poisoned lance proves how fragile history can be.

West, Michelle: "To the Gods Their Due" Alexander, narrating his own story of growing alienation from his other half, his best friend Hephaestion, who chooses not to follow Alexander too deeply on his journey from first-among-equals ruler of Macedon to a god-king of Egypt.

Zebrowski, George: "Nappy" (Napoleon) opens in the voice of an historical scholar, discoursing on the Virtual Dark Age - in which it is artfully made clear that humanity become so fascinated with virtual reality scenarios that attempts at achievements in the *real* world were let slide. (The tone is *so* realistically academic, in fact, that it risks losing readers who don't care to slog through scholarly tomes.) Then the story discusses the innocent beginnings of that age: one historian's fascination with the character of a virtual reality reconstruction of Napoleon, an AI aware of his hopeless situation, endlessly experiencing scenarios without true victory - the world never becoming what he'd hoped for when he set out to conquer. (Also contains a bit of philosophical speculation on the nature of conquerors.)

I picked this up thinking it was a collection of original alternate history stories, but it's not quite that. Many of the stories do involve "what-if" plot points, but they're rooted in fantasy -- but not of the Tolkienesque variety, either. In Stephen Dedman's "Twilight of Idols," for instance, Adolf Hitler kills a dragon straight out of the Niebelungen, making him more or less invulnerable (how do you think he escaped injury from that bomb?), but the rest of his career fits more into the "secret history" category. Michelle West's "To the Gods Their Due" is a cautionary tale about Alexander and the price to be paid for quasi-immortality, and while it's a well-written story, there's nothing especially "fantastic" about it. (I don't think access to a soothsayer counts.) "Intensified Transmogrification," by Barry Malzberg and Bill Pronzini, is a brief alternate history about LBJ with no fantasy element that I can discern. (Schizophrenia is not fantasy.) And so on. There's some pretty good writing in this volume, but not much thematic consistency.

These stories are generally not what I would consider to be alternate history. I would expect a story in that genre to start with a change from history as we know it, and then posit what might be different because of that change. In one of these stories, for example, the conqueror dies young, and so never embarks on his conquests. The problem is that element should have been the beginning of the story, not the end.

Many of the other stories are what I would call fantasy secret histories or alternate realities, rather then alternate histories. That is, the exact same things happen as happened in real history, it is just that there is an underlying fantasy explanation which may or may not have been apparent to observers. In one case, a real war is fought using magic, but the same people still win. An alternate history would be that the loser in real history won, and the consequences that would flow from that. In another, aircraft hasn't been invented by the time of World War II, but it's only a minor element in the story. Some are not even fantasies, just things that could have happened. "Good Deeds", a story about a thoroughly corrupt Robert F. Kennedy spending a sordid evening with his cronies misses on all points not being about a conqueror, and not being a fantasy or an alternate history, and being dismally pointless as a story.

Several of the stories are excellent, even if they are not alternate history: "The Empress Jingu Fishes" relates that thoughts of a shaman-Empress as her mind moves between the fishing that she is doing in the present, her memories, and the future that she already knows in detail. "Observable Things" involves Robert E. Howard's Solomon Kane fighting King Philip's War. I also enjoyed "Del Norte", based on a true story of an Aztec princess who moved to Spain with her conquistador husband, and parts of "Martyrs of the Upshot Knothole", about the afflictions of the cast and crew of the dreadful movie Conqueror [VHS], which was filmed on an atomic test site. On the other hand, I found several of the stories rather dull, or simply not particularly intriguing, so overall it wasn't a strong anthology, even without the question of how well it fit into its genre.