What If? Art 7: History Books That Never Existed

It has been six years since I posted any 'what if?' book covers on this site, the last being my spate of 'lost' books back in November 2007:  http://rooksmoor.blogspot.co.uk/2007/11/what-if-art-6-books-that-existed-but.html  The use of book art as an element of 'what if?' speculation has long interested me and my engagement with it is outlined here: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.co.uk/2007/08/what-if-art-1-history-book-that-never.html

For the cover of my latest 'what if?' anthology, 'Other Lives: ‘What If?’ Outcomes for Famous People in History' (2013), I considered doing gravestones or announcements in newspapers.  However, the people feature stretch from Alexander the Great in the 4th Century BCE right up to people in the 20th century.  In addition, not all the differences about the duration of their lives but also some of them taking different decisions.  As a result I returned to the idea of creating history books that never existed in our world.  I tried to keep as close as possible to the style that you find on history book front covers, though also to bring in a bit of variety.  These appear as small images on the front of the book.  However, I thought people might enjoy seeing them separately in a larger format here, with some explanation of why I decided on the different titles and formats.

One challenge was that to emphasise the alternate history aspect often required two things.  First the date has to be included to show the precise divergence from our history.  This is notable with the book on the impeachment of George Bush.  I included '1987' in the title, as I envisaged Bush becoming President following the assassination of Ronald Reagan in 1981, rather than being impeached during the term of office 1988-92 that he had in our world.  The other challenge for those who I was looking at as living longer than in our world, was to find images that showed them as older than they ever were in our history.  Thus, I had to work on the hairline of Julius Caesar and Abraham Lincoln and spread the grey in Indira Gandhi's hair far further than was the case in our history.

'Alexander the Great's Conquest of the Iberian Peninsula'

 For this cover I used an image of Alexander's father, King Philip II of Macedonia to stand in for the older Alexander the Great.  The book envisages Alexander living into his fifties rather than dying in his early thirties.  Thus, not only completing his conquest of western Asia but then turning to conquer the remainder of the Mediterranean region with this book focusing on his final conquests in what is now Spain and Portugal. 

'The Bactrian Campaign of Julius Caesar' 





The basis of this book is Julius Caesar surviving or preventing the assassination attempt against him.  As a result he lived on into his sixties and was able to carry out the conquests in western Asia that we know he had planned.  Bactria is the region of Central Asia between the Caspian Sea and the Hindu Kush, covering the modern central Asian republics.  It was a region Alexander the Great knew and Caesar had sought to conquer.  I worked to adjust the image to make it appear as if it showed an older, more wrinkled Caesar.  He was concerned baout hair loss and in this image I have him with some male pattern baldness.

'Parliament's Lost Leader: Oliver Cromwell 1599-1643'

This is another example of a cover that needed dates on it to show that it was Cromwell's earlier death, in this case in battle in 1643, rather than peacefully in 1658 which was envisaged.  By this stage Cromwell was significant in the Parliamentarian camp but was not yet in a position to become leader of the country.  Thus this book would ask what missed opportunity the country had with him being killed at this stage.  If his death was earlier then it is unlikely he would have warranted his own historical study. 

'1777 - The End of the American Bid for Independence'

In my book, the focus is largely on George Washington dying at Valley Forge along with many of his troops in the winter of 1776/7.  However, if he had died then, his fame might not have been sufficiently significant to warrant a book of his own, so I envisage this one seeing with his death, the break up of the Continental forces and the end of the attempt of the Thirteen Colonies to break from British control.  This is a manipulated painting which actually shows Continental soldiers being trained.  However, it seemed to sum up the difficulties at Valley Forge and the three men at the front are in very submissive positions and look as if they are laying down their arms, assuming they have been captured by the British.  The background is the Continental flag of the time.

  

'Lincoln's Post-War Administrations 1865-1872'

This book like the one on Caesar envisages Abraham Lincoln surviving assassination in 1865 or that never having been attempted.  Again I needed to age him in the photo and I added in a map of the USA from the post-Civil War period to show Lincoln living on into this period.  His survival would have meant much more difference to that period of US history than I initially realised. 



'The World Economic Depression and the Demise of Capitalism'



This uses the classic Progress Publishers style for a book that never existed.  Progress Publishers were a Soviet back publishing house that made Communist literature available in cheap editions in the hope that ordinary people would buy them.  They were typically purchased by students who had to read set books.  This one would have been published in 1931 assuming that Lenin had not died in 1924 but had lived on as leader of the USSR.  The Great Depression which began with the Wall Street Crash of 1929 appeared to many Communists and Fascists to be the proof that capitalism could not work and that a different political approach was necessary.  One could imagine Lenin delighting in his emotionless way to the difficulties capitalism was facing and have hoped that the world Communist revolution was imminent.

'The Overthrow of President Franklin D. Roosevelt'



This one envisages the planned coup d'état of 1934 actually going ahead, leading ultimately to Franklin Roosevelt being pushed from power, probably forced to retire on grounds of ill-health.  I felt this picture might be his resignation speech to the nation.  This was a scenario that I had not envisaged leading to such a bleak outcome for the world as a whole.  However, it quickly became apparent that without the New Deal and certainly Roosevelt's almost one-man attempt to involve the USA in the Second World War not only would that war have dragged on longer but the US and the global economies would have struggled to return to any kind of prosperity well into the 1960s. 

'Gustav Stresemann and the Decline of National Socialism 1931-35'

  

As a bit of a contrast, for this one rather than use a photograph, I picked a commemorative stamp for Gustav Stresemann.  I manipulated the dates on it so he is shown as living to 1936 rather than dying in 1929 as was the case in reality.  The point behind this book is that probably only Stresemann had the skill and appeal across the political spectrum to undermine National Socialism, the proper name for Nazism.  He was a conservative and a nationalist but certainly never sought anything like the regime Hitler installed.

'A King of Our Times - Edward VIII, 1936-72' 

This is another one in which the date was necessary to show the change.  This is a late picture of the Duke of Windsor who in our world ruled briefly in 1936 before abdicating so he could marry the American divorcee, Wallis Simpson.  This book envisages he never met Simpson or he chose to remain on the throne.  The trouble with Edward was his willingness to interfere in politics, engage in illegal currency deals and his sympathies for Nazism.  Given he would have been influential in the run-up to the Second World War, it is likely that this would have had an impact on British foreign policy.  I have opted for the styling of a bland 1970s book on monarchy that you can see online which belies the kind of difficulties this alternative would have brought to Britain.

'The Collected Articles of Benito Mussolini' 

It was quite a challenge to find a photo of Mussolini in which he was not in military clothes, shaven headed and pontificating.  This is a surprisingly human picture of him that seemed to fit really well with the different path envisaged, i.e. rather than becoming a dictator, he remained a Socialist journalist.  As a consequence, rather than being executed in 1945, I envisaged him living into old age.  His longevity and his writing is likely to have meant that he received some attention across Europe, perhaps even becoming a kind of older statesman of Socialism, though maybe not to the scale of Antonio Gramsci.

  

'The Assassination of Charles De Gaulle'

This is an old image dating back six years, which I revived for the chapter in 'Other Lives' on the assassination of De Gaulle.  I removed the date from this one as the chapter speculates on his killing at a number of dates.  However, the picture is from the early 1960s so suggests an assassination at that time.  As I wrote the chapter, my views on when the assassination would have had greatest impact shifted back in time a little.  However, I think this is one feasible 'what if?' which tends to be overlooked by writers. 

'Nixon as President: The Second Term, 1964-68' 



As is often the case with these alternate history covers I start with an actual history book.  This ones envisages Nixon being first elected in 1960 when he was narrowly beaten by John F. Kennedy, rather than in 1968.  The picture fits with the timescale of the book.  The 'button', i.e. the badge, is a genuine image of one produced for the 1964 election when Lyndon Johnson won.

'China's Reprieve: The Fall of Chairman Mao, March 1966' 



This centres on a picture of Mao Zedong with his likely replacement if he had been overthrown in the mid-1960s, Deng Xiaoping.  While China would have remained a totalitarian dictatorship under Deng, it certainly would have been spared the madness of the Cultural Revolution 1966-76 that caused so much damage to the country.  The Cultural Revolution was primarily about Mao re-establishing his predominance in China, so with him being ousted, which seemed possible at this time a different path would have been followed.

'The Indian Dictatorship, 1984-89'

 



This was another book about a leader avoiding being assassinated.  The idea is that Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi avoided being assassinated in 1984 yet the attempt on her life and accompanying turmoil in the country led her to impose a dictatorship as she had effectively done in the 1970s.  For this picture I had again to try to age the image and I think it comes out reasonably well, with Gandhi's streak of grey having spread more widely across her hair.  This picture with the furrowed brow makes her look older too. 

'The Impeachment of President Bush'


I have explained the reason for the date at the start of this posting.  This cover is to signify a chapter which is less about Bush than about the implications of the assassination of Ronald Reagan in 1981.  With the De Gaulle one in place, I did not want another title with assassination.  The chapter naturally envisages Bush as Reagan's Vice-President, as Johnson did after Kennedy's assassination, taking over at his death and serving out Reagan's term, then being elected himself.  Furthermore it seems likely that Bush would have become directly involved in the Iran-Contra scandal and this would have led to him being charged with wrongdoing and to his impeachment.  It is probable that in such a situation Bush would have resigned as Nixon did when threatened with impeachment.  However, I picked this image as it suggested Bush had the pride and arrogance to hold on and to fight against the charges.

What If? Art 6: Books that Existed but have been Lost

This posting is slightly different. All of the books shown did actually exist at one time, it is just that for various reasons they have now been lost to us. In the past ten years a whole slew of lost books has turned up in various places, suich as 'Paris in the Twentieth Century' by Jules Verne (1863) a very accurate prediction of Paris in the 1960s which reappeared in 1997; 'Basil Howe: A Story of Young Love' by G.K. Chesterton (1894) was published in 2001; 'The Rum Diary' by Hunter S. Thompson (1950s) which resurfaced in 1998; 'Summer Crossing' by Truman Capote (1943) republished in 2004, 'The Last Cavalier' Alexandre Dumas's final novel which had been lost then refound and published again in 2005, plus Robert A. Heinlein's 'For Us, the Living' (1939) which was suppressed as it was seen as 'too racy' at the time. This year, 89-year old Dutch author, Hella Haasse found a manuscript of her own lost book 'Sterrenjacht' (Hunt for the Stars) (1950). The next one to be published imminently is 'The Children of Húrin' by J.R.R. Tolkien which is apparently set 650 years before the events featured in 'The Hobbit'. There is a great list of lost books at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_work Many of them date from Classical times and it is just an issue of things being lost in history or destroyed for example in the burning of the Library at Alexandria. Even material that we know about produced by William Shakespeare is now no longer available, but we know it existed because others refer to it (the same has happened with paintings, some artists include other artists' paintings in the background of their pictures and these are often the only clues, along with things like bills of sale, that we have about these paintings which are now lost). In more modern times, books have tended to be lost because of war or repression or more often because the author themselves or their executors have destroyed incomplete or early work or work that embarrassed them. Capote thought he had done this with his early 'Summer Crossing' but one manuscript escaped destruction.

Thus, the novels and the plays featured here are books which existed at one time, but you certainly can no longer pick them up at your local bookstore. Whenever a lost novel is found there is a great rush to get it published as sales, if only based on curiosity alone, are typically strong. This is a range of some of the interesting lost books. I have worked on the covers over a few weeks and have noticed I have become rather dependent on Victorian paintings for the covers, sort of Pre-Raphelite style in most cases so I hope you forgive my lack of imagination in this respect. I will do them in chronological order.

'Achilles' by Aeschylus

Aeschylus (525-456 BCE) was an Ancient Greek playwright. He is supposed to have written 90 plays in his life of which only 6 survive with another possible one attributed to him. Fragments of his 'Achilles' were found in mummy wrappings a decade ago. His plays were tragedies and very influenced by the Persian invasion of Greece so it is likely that his played about the flawed legendary Greek hero Achilles (played reasonably well in all his arrogance and narcissism by Brad Pitt in 'Troy' (2004)) would have combined both tragedy and some Greek patriotism. Aeschylus did better than some other playwrights of Ancient Greece we have 11/40 of Aristophones's plays, 18/90 of Euripides's, 7/123 of Sophocles's and none of those by Agathon, Cratinus, Diphilus and Theodectes. Given how so many Greek stories have ended up in our modern day culture and fiction let alone being performed themselves, even if 10% of these let alone one in four or more had survived, then we would have some very different material in our culture. An interesting 'what if?'

'Studiosus' by Pliny the Elder

Pliny the Elder (23-79) was a Roman historian, natural historian and author. We have more of his natural history works than we do his other material. His 'History of the Times' and 'History of the German Wars' may have given us a different picture of Roman civilisation especially penetration into Germany as many now believe that there were Roman settlements farther into Germany than was previously thought. In addition Pliny lived through the end of the Roman Republic into the Imperial period, including the conquest of Britain. The book featured here, 'Studiosus' was his lost study of the art of rhetoric, an important skill in Roman civilisation.

'Love's Labour's Won' by William Shakespeare (1598)

As discussed in a previous posting it has been argued that a number of other writers may have been responsible for William Shakespeare's (1564-1616) work. In addition there are plays that are attributed to William Shakespeare and may or may not have been written by him and quite often were collaborations between him and another writer. Aside from these discussions there is harder evidence that shows a number of his own plays have been lost. 'Love's Labour's Won' written in 1598 was the matching play to 'Love's Labour's Lost' but there is no trace of it today. (In an episode of the British television series 'Doctor Who' the time-travelling characters meet Shakespeare and having saved him for attack by alien witches this missing play is mentioned).

'Les Journées de Florbelle' by the Marquis De Sade (1807)

The Marquis De Sade (1740-1814) was a playwright and author in the years leading up to and including the French Revolution and almost to the end of the reign of Napoleon. He is renowned for his erotic fiction and his name was given to the sexual perversion of 'sadism' in which a person gains sexual gratification from inflicting pain, though the term has now broadened to refer to straight forward brutality. De Sade spent much of his life in prison or insane asylums. He his most famous for 'Justine', 'Juliette' and '120 Days of Sodom'. The Marquis's son had all of his unpublished manuscripts burnt after his father's death including the many volumes of 'Les Journées de Florbelle' featured here. Another eight of De Sade's works have been lost.

'The Poor Man and the Lady' by Thomas Hardy (1867)

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) is an author renowned for his sentimental dramatic stories set in the West of England, possibly his most famous book is 'Tess of the D'Urbevilles' (1891). 'The Poor Man and the Lady' was Hardy's first novel written in 1867, but not finding a publisher for it he destroyed the manuscript. His first published novel was 'Desperate Remedies' (1871) though it was published anonymously. If he had kept hold of 'The Poor Man and the Lady' manuscript it is likely he would have found a publisher for it in the early 1870s. With this cover as with Aeschylus and Pliny the Elder, I have used the wide-ranging Penguin Classics range which covers both works of the Classical World of Ancient Greece and Rome as well as 'classics' from books through the centuries.

'Pilgrim on the Hill' by Philip K. Dick (1956)

Philip K. Dick (1928-1982) has featured quite a bit on this blog so probably needs no introduction. Somewhere in the world probably exists an actual copy of this book with a different cover as there are three of Dick's earliest novels: 'A Time for George Stavros' (1956), 'Nicholas and the Higs' (1958) and this one which have subsequently become lost. Dick features religious elements in some of his novels. In 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?' (1968) via a device he and his wife grasp, the hero tunes into a constant television programme of religious leader struggling up a hill who can throw rocks at the viewer. So though I have no idea about the content of the 1956 novel 'Pilgrim on the Hill' one might speculate its plot included some elements of this.

'You and Me and the Continuum' by J.G. Ballard (1957)

This is another lost early novel of a science fiction writer, though J.G. Ballard (born 1930) never actually finished it, it was seen almost completed in 1956. Ballard has given rise to the term 'Ballardian' because of his various dystopian visions such as 'The Drowned World' (1962), 'The Burning World' (1964) and even Shepperton (in Surrey, England where he lives) becoming an overgrown jungle in 'The Unlimited Dream Company' (1979). Attention to him in the mainstream media has been around his novel 'Crash' (1973) and the movie that was made of it in 1996 about people who get sexually aroused by car accidents and his semi-autobiographical novel about his life in China during the Second World War in 'Empire of the Sun' (1984) and its movie of the same name in 1987. Maybe 'You and Me and the Continuum' would have been a more mainstream science fiction novel, maybe it would have been an early engagement with his later dystopian themes of worlds out of control. Ballard is still alive so maybe someone will ask him if he remembers and if they do (or already have done) can someone point me towards his answer.

'Double Exposure' by Sylvia Plath (1964)

Maybe our computer age is ending the 'lost' novel, now that we are no longer dependent on handtyped manuscripts that can be lost by authors (even when this appeared as a conceit in the movie 'Love Actually' (2003) it appeared very dated) or destroyed by their executors. Different versions of novels can be deleted by a touch of a button. However, so many of us create backup files (often our computer will do it without asking, this blog keeps saving as I type so even if I died while writing this my partially saved 'lost' blog posting would remain for discovery) that there may be many copies that would not be deleted. In addition, I have already encountered this, that there are stories I have saved on disk that I cannot now access because the file type has changed and I cannot open them to delete them maybe one day a data archaeologist could get in and access my early work (this happened to the University of Hull's computerisation of the Domesday book carried out in 1986, they thought they were all high-tech at the time, but a decade later no-one could access their files; funnily enough, the original Domesday Book is as easy for a user to read as the day it was written).

So, anyway, this speculation brings me to why my cut-off date for a lost book maybe the 1960s, twenty years before home computers. The manuscript of 'Double Exposure' or 'Double Take' (people are uncertain about the exact title, I picked the former, partly because of the mental illness Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) suffered and a sense of a divided personality and by including the Marilyn Monroe image in the picture it suggests double taking a celebrity) was seen in poet Sylvia Plath's possession around the time of her suicide and it is believed the manuscript was destroyed in 1970. I imagine it being taken up and published posthumously. Monroe had died in 1962.

So all of these books see counter-factuals if just simply in someone holding on to what had been written. At the minimum their survival would have expanded the body of work we discuss about these writers and their books may have fed into our contemporary culture triggering a range of cultural outputs. Of course, given that lost work seems to keep turning up in recent years, it is quite possible we will see some of these on the book shelves in the coming future.

Denying a Counter-factual: Issues around Second World War invasions of the USA

While seeking out source material for my current lost book cover project I came across the following image of a cover of 'The Man in the High Castle' by Philip K. Dick (1961). To contextualise this, 'Fail Safe' was a novel written novel by Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler published in 1962 and was about an accidental nuclear attack by the USA on the USSR it became a movie in 1964 directed by Sydney Lumet with Peter Fonda and Walther Matthau in it. Similarly 'Seven Days in May' by written by Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey in 1962 sees a coup staged by generals in the USA who fake a nuclear crisis so that the President can be sealed in a bunker and they can take control. This novel also became a movie in 1964 directed by John Frankenheimer starring Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas and Ava Gardner.

In many ways, Dick's book is different, as you can see from the cover it envisages the USA lost the Second World War and was divided by Nazi Germany and Japan. This is the only map I have seen of the set-up though I think it is a bit wrong as in the novel the Germans stay East of the River Mississippi and so not holding Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Arkansas and Louisiana as shown here. If I remember correctly the Japanese have not gone much farther East than Nevada and Idaho; a series of collaborationist American states are mentioned as running the region of the Rockies.

Dick was a prolific author having 44 novels published in his lifetime (1928-82) and numerous short stories; other things were published after his death. I think he is the science fiction author who has had more of his stories turned into movies than any other; 'Blade Runner' (1982), 'Total Recall' (1990), 'Screamers' (1995), 'Minority Report' (2002), 'Imposter' (2002), 'Paycheck' (2003), 'A Scanner Darkly' (2006), 'Next' (2007) and 'Confessions d'un Barjo' are all adapted from his stories. Ironically I had always assumed 'Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind' (2004) was based on a Dick novel; it certainly has many elements he enjoyed playing with.

Dick's novels, whilst predominantly science fiction, are often influenced by drug issues and mysticism. This applies to 'The Man in the High Castle' which is probably the novel which saw the best crossover into mainstream popular fiction before the 1980s. Towards the end of the book, through the use of the I-Ching method of predicting the future, many of the characters find they are in the 'wrong' world and that our world where Germany and Japan were defeated is the 'real' one. This undermines much of the basis of counter-factual fiction, but plays to Dick's interest in our perceptions and how these can be distorted, a theme which you will see even in the movie adaptations, such as Rick Deckard in 'Blade Runner' uncertain whether he is an android or now, the protagonists in 'Total Recall', 'Minority Report' and 'Paycheck' are all uncertain too what is the 'truth' and what has simply been fed to them. 'A Scanner Darkly' is about seeing the world through a drug haze.

I would argue, however, that Dick's denial of the possibility that a US defeat in the Second World War (which is unsurprising, if he had written anything different in 1961 he would never had had it published) fits an ongoing denial in the USA that they ever faced the danger of this or that they are not somehow the blessed nation. My political concerns about the USA creep in here, I fully acknowledge that, but I also think it is unhealthy for any country to think it is exempt from the dangers and possibilities of (violent) change that occur. This has often been a problem for the UK as well. The US inability to accept that it can be threatened and even be defeated is what has made it so difficult to cope with the Vietnam War, the 11th September attacks and the disintegration of the position in Iraq.


I found parallels with this in a computer game released by Talonsoft in the late 1990s. Their games in the so-called 'Campaign' series were produced from 1996 onwards. They seem pretty simple nowadays, being platoon-level turn based games with a landscape set out in hexagons like the board wargames that were popular in the 1980s. However, there were little animations and sound effects of the soldiers, tanks, etc. moving around. In addition there was immense historical detail of the battles they featured. They started with 'Eastern Front' which as it suggests featured battles of the Soviet campaign not only against the Germans but also the Finns, 1940-45. This was followed by 'West Front' which included North Africa as well as France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany and other locations of the Western Front of the Second World War. The final one was 'Rising Sun' which had a series of battles in the Pacific region. The games were produced as a boxed set with the three core games, plus all the upgrades as 'The World At War' in 2001. The company went on to do battles of the Arab-Israeli conflict too and it had already covered battles from the American Civil War.


Though the games seem simplistic now, the attention to detail and the ability to refight classic battles meant they were long a draw for wargamers. Naturally I enjoyed reversing history and was able to defeat the German attempt to take Crete in 1941 and stop the Panzers at the River Marne in 1940. As yet I have never been able to hold the bridge at Arnhem in 1944 for the Allies, but I kept a far larger bridgehead. In addition, upgrades of the games contained specifically counter-factual scenarios, such a series of battles around the German invasion of Britain in 1941. These allowed you to play either the German attackers or the British defenders not only in the South of England but even up to attacks on Manchester in the North-West.


I was interested to try out the Japanese invasion of the USA in 1942. Playing as Japanese characters especially in campaign mode which allows you to fight a sequence of connected battles was always difficult. Despite Talonsoft's efforts in terms of historical accuracy, whenever you played as a Japanese commander, even if you were not actually defeated, but failed to achieve all of the objectives you had been set, your character committed seppuku, even if only at the rank of major. Anyone who has looked at the Japanese campaign in China and the Pacific knows this did not happen. The Japanese were not always successful and their commanders only committed suicide when things seemed hopeless and they were holed up in some redoubt, not when they simply faced set-backs particularly on the advance. If the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy had adopted the ethics of Talonsoft, by 1942 there would have been no senior officers left.


What was more disconcerting is when you turn to the counter-factual invasions of the USA. In the 'West Front' game, you can play as the Germans and defeat the British so conquering the UK; equally you can play as the British fighting off the attacks. However, in the 'Rising Sun' game, you cannot play as the Japanese in attacking the USA, you can only play as the US defenders. In addition, in contrast to all of the other battles you can fight (which often turn quickly counter-factual even if starting off on a historical basis, otherwise what is the point of playing the computer wargame, you might as well simply watch a documentary), there is a statement saying how this never would have happened, that the Japanese never would have been able to invade the USA and so on. Is the USA that insecure about its place in the world that it cannot even let people play at invading it? Why is it alright for Talonsoft to let the UK fall to Nazism (and for Moscow, Leningrad and Stalingrad all to be overrun by German troops) but for the West coast of the USA for this not even to have been a possibility?

It is clear, as we have seen from looking at counter-factual books about the Second World War and even about the American Civil War there is still a lot of political currency in the USA around 'what if?' and that many Americans are unwilling to even countenance speculation over 'wrong' history whether in print or in a computer game. In my view this counts as a form of censorship as without speculation how can we truly test our society and the options it has faced and faces still. Without such testing it is all too easy to fall into seeing thing as simply 'inevitable' and 'right'.