Agent of Byzantium

The Ifs of History: by Isaac Asimov

There have been so many occasions when the fate of humanity seems to have hung on the outcome of a single event that might have fallen this way or that with equal probability. What if Lincoln had said “I don’t feel like going to the theater tonight, Mother. I have a headache.” Or what if Gavrilo Princip’s gun had misfired when he aimed it at Franz Ferdinand of Austria?

My own favorite “if of history” involves a scientific discovery. Leo Szilard was a Hungarian scientist who had been driven out of Europe by Hitler’s anti-Semitic policies. He knew that uranium fission, recently discovered, might make a nuclear bomb possible and he wanted to be sure Hitler didn’t get it first. He labored to get scientists in the field to practice voluntary secrecy and keep their discoveries to themselves.

Then, he and a pair of fellow exiles, Eugene Wigner and Edward Teller, labored to get still another exile, Albert Einstein, to write a letter to President Franklin Roosevelt, urging him to set in motion a secret project to build a nuclear bomb before Hitler did. Szilard knew that only Einstein possessed enough weight to be persuasive.

The letter was sent in 1941, Roosevelt listened and, late in the year, he finally signed a directive that set up what came to be known as the Manhattan Project.

Now he signed it on a Saturday, and our society being what it is, people are often reluctant to do anything on a weekend. I could imagine Roosevelt tossing his pen onto his desk on the particular Saturday, and saying, with a touch of irritation, “The hell with it. Let’s take it easy. I’ll sign it first thing Monday.” It would have been such a natural thing to do.

Except that he did sign it, and it was on Saturday, December 6, 1941. If he had waited till Monday, he might never have signed it for Sunday, December 7, 1941 was Pearl Harbor day and, after that, by the time things cooled down, the whole business about the Manhattan Project might have been one with the snows of yesteryear.

What would have happened? Would Germany have gotten the bomb first? Would World War II have ended without the bomb and would the Soviet Union have gotten it first during the Cold War? Would no one ever have developed the bomb? You could write three different stories about three different consequences from this one little if of history—if Roosevelt had yawned and said, “I’ll do it Monday.”

It’s not easy to write such an if-of-history story. One little change might give birth to another and still another, until a later period becomes radically, almost unimaginably, different from what we now consider reality. Or else such a change may produce a difference which, through some kind of social inertia manages to converge until a later period is reached which is almost identical with what we call reality except for a few amusing—or ironical—changes.

Science fiction writers occasionally dare the difficulty. There are two examples I have remembered with love over the decades. One is L.Sprague de Camp’s “The Wheels of If,” which appeared in the October, 1940, Unknown and which dealt with a world in which the Moslems had won the battle of Tours, and the Celtic Church had won out over the Roman Church in the British Isles. The other is Ward Moore’s “Bring the Jubilee” which appeared in the November, 1952, Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and presented a world in which the Confederacy had won the Battle of Gettysburg and had established its independence. The latter was particularly touching because characters in it would fantasize the consequences if the Union had won the battle and America had remained intact. What a Utopian world they imagined would have resulted.

Well, now we have another attempt at an elaborate if-of-history. What if Justinian’s attempt at reestablishing the Roman Empire had not overstrained it? What if the Byzantine Empire had been able to hold off the Zorastrians of Persia and if Islam had never arisen to destroy the latter and permanently cripple the former. Might Byzantium have then carried Graeco-Roman culture, intact and in full, into the future?

Read Harry Turtledove’s imagined result.