The Inquisitor's Apprentice

A Brief Note on Alternate History

Attentive readers will have noticed a few differences between Sacha’s New York and our own.

In our New York, Thomas Edison was the Wizard of Menlo Park, not Luna Park. James Pierpont Morgan never owned a shirtwaist monopoly or an indelible ink monopoly — though he did own a lot of other monopolies. The Yankees were officially called the New York highlanders until 1913—though their fans had long ago adopted their famous nickname. And the Elephant Hotel, which burned down in 1896, was a lot smaller and seedier than the one Sacha visited.

The reasons for those differences would fill a much longer book than this one. Alternate history is an arcane subject — an inky battlefield where persnickety professors torpedo each other with footnotes, and careers sink on the shoals of unsupported theses and insufficient bibliographical references. So perhaps we’d best leave the arguing to the academics and content ourselves with noting that in the infinite spectrum of parallel worlds, everything that can happen has happened.

There is a world somewhere out there where Wall Street Wizards deal in magic as well as stocks and bonds, and Mrs. Lassky is selling her Mother-in-Latkes, and Inquisitor Wolf is gazing absentmindedly around a magical crime scene.

And of course some things are the same in every world. Baseball is still baseball. and New York … well, New York is magical in any universe.