Research, research, research

Regular readers of this blog (as well as anyone who reads the blog description at the top of the page) know that I've been struggling for quite some time now with getting my second novel written. At first I was looking for something that would make a good complement to my first novel, an alternate history thriller about a victorious Nazi Germany. So, for instance, I stayed away from doing a second alternate history, as my agent expressed reservations about me defining myself as an "alternate history author" by starting off with two novels in that genre.

Now, though, I've gone long enough without producing that I just write whatever I feel most enthusiastic writing at the time. To this end, at the moment I'm working on something that might be just about the most repetitious project I could think of for someone whose first novel was an alternate history where Germany won the Second World War--I'm working on an alternate history where Germany wins the First World War.

But before I can come up with a story to tell in such a world, of course, I have to figure out just what that world looks like. And that's proving considerably more complicated for a victorious Second Reich than it did for a victorious Third Reich.

In the Second World War in Europe, there were really only three different sides: Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union and the Western Alliance. And with Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union locked in, quite literally, a battle to the death, there are really only two possible outcomes to the war--either the historical outcome of the Soviet Union destroying Germany, or the alternative of Germany overrunning and destroying the Soviet Union. So once it became obvious that a "German victory" was simply Germany defeating the Soviet Union, it was fairly simple to start from there and extrapolate how the world might look in 1971, the year my book took place.

But, even just in Europe, there were really over a dozen "sides" that fought the First World War--Germany, Britain, France, Russia, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, Serbia, Italy, Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, not to mention all the various ethnic minorities who took the opportunity of the war to try and establish their own national states (Poles, Finns, Ukrainians, Transcaucasians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians, Yugoslavs, Czechoslovaks). All of these states and groups entered the war more or less independently, prosecuted their own military campaigns more or less independently, and had their own independent war aims. So looking at how the world looks after a Central Powers victory requires looking at each of them independently and deciding what each one comes away from the peace settlement with (never mind that I can't even get that far until I've answered the just-as-complicated question of how the Central Powers win the war in the first place).

And then there's what might happen in the years after the peace settlement. After the historical First World War, it took Central and Eastern Europe a generation to settle down: never-bef0re-heard-of countries suddenly appeared on (and occasionally vanished from) the map of Europe; extremist ideologies like communism or fascism, that either hadn't existed before the war or had been nothing more than lunatic fringe groups, took power in some of the most powerful countries in the world; and of course eventually we had to fight the bloodiest war in human history to resolve the questions the 1919 peace treaties had left unanswered. In a world where France and Britain lose the war, is Western Europe going to look like this, too, in the 1920s and 30s?

I decided that it would be very helpful to flesh out this world I'm developing to do an "who's who" of Europe in this timeline, making a list of people who were alive during this period and asking myself how each one would fare. It's a technique I've used before, and I find it makes my worlds much more three dimensional and fully developed, because it forces me to answer questions ("What would Albert Einstein do? Would he have any reason to come to the United States? If he stays in Europe--does Austria-Hungary develop the first atomic bomb?") rather than just coming up with ideas on my own out of thin air.

Now, when I compiled this who's who list, it was important to include minor figures as well as prominent ones, since part of the attraction of alternate history is seeing which prominent figures from real history remain obscure, and which obscure figures become prominent. But this is a very well-documented period of history, and even using fairly stringent standards as to who makes it on the list--limited pretty much to military and political figures, with only seminal scientific or cultural figures mixed in--I ended up with eighteen hundred names.

Obviously, this is way too cumbersome to tun into an encyclopaedia of people. Even if each entry were too only take up five lines--enough for maybe or two or three sentences, not even close to long enough to be useful--we're still talking a 180 page document and ninety thousand words (that is, as long as a novel on its own).

So at the moment I feel like I'm left with a choice: either try tackling this list that, even if it doesn't end in abject failure, is going to take months and months of work (that could otherwise be spent being productive), or else have a timeline that is potentially missing what could be the one single brainstorm of an idea that would bring it all together.

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