Dr Azam elucidates that fiction reshapes reality—counterfactual and dystopian genres ask “what if” to warn, teach, and reimagine society’s past and future, exclusively for Different Truths.
“Science and fiction both begin with similar questions: What if? Why? …” – Margaret Atwood, Booker Prize laureate.
The Bard himself took popular tales, asked himself questions, reworked them with plot twists and ‘what-ifs,’ submitted them to his genius, and his renown transcends time and space.
What if Khalid ibn al-Walid had lost to Heraclius at the Battle of Yarmouk in 636, and Abdel Kader had won the Battle of Tours against Charles Martel in 732? What if the Marathas had won the Third Battle of Panipat in 1761, Nelson had lost the battle of Trafalgar in 1805, Napoleon had won at Waterloo in 1817, or Confederate General Robert E. Lee had prevailed at Gettysburg in 1863? How would the world have unfolded then, and where would we have been today?
Or if Hitler had won the war and England had been occupied, as in Robert Harris’s best-selling 1992 novel, Fatherland. The answers to these questions acquire the status of didactic fiction that instructs within an entertaining framework.
Regardless of how tempting it might be to perceive an overlap between counterfactual and dystopian writing, or to view counterfactualism as dystopia’s next-door neighbour, they are far-flung cousins who occasionally cross paths.
Prefixing ‘dys’—Latin for bad—to utopia results in dystopia, or a utopia standing on its head. Dystopian writing, perceives symptoms of sociopolitical decline. Left untreated, the deterioration would exact a heavy price in the future by corroding achievements in human development. This vision crafts future worlds that illustrate a perversely inverted utopia functioning as an alarm bell to redress the socio-political deficiencies sabotaging the present.
Among the best-known dystopian novels are Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), George Orwell’s 1984 (1949), Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953), Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), Lois Lowry’s The Giver (1993), Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006) Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games (2008) and Naomi Alderman’s The Power (2016).
Counterfactual novels that line up with the above are Joan AIKEN’s The Wolves of Willoughby Chase (1962), Kingsley AMIS’ The Alteration (1975) and 1941/A(1993), Robert HARRIS’ Fatherland (1992), Philip ROTH’s The Plot Against America (2004), Melvyn BRAGG’s Autumn Manoeuvres (1978), Brian ALDISS’ Brothers of the Head (1977), and Michael CHABON’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007).
Counterfactual is also called alternative history, a divided stream of two sub-genres.
1. Upward counterfactual writing offers a blueprint of how the situation could have been better to avoid the chain reactions that led to its undesirable consequences — improvement by avoiding future mistakes in search of excellence, regarding man-made disasters such as the 9/11 attack on the Twin Towers.
2. Downward counterfactual fiction is about how the situation could have been worse, reducing dissatisfaction with how a situation was handled, lowering expectations and influencing a more positive view of the actual outcome.
Counterfactual is historical fiction, and dystopian is science fiction, illustrated by the image of a pendulum at rest, in the equilibrium position.
Dystopian and counterfactual intersect at the point of the pendulum’s majestic stillness, which is the present time. The extremity of the pendulum’s leftward oscillation represents the past, which is the raw material of the counterfactual, a sub-genre of historical fiction.
The extremity of the pendulum’s rightward oscillation is where dystopian takes birth as a sub-genre of science fiction.
Both sub-genres toil in the same workshop, which is the present.
The present is the launch pad for the creativity of both sub-genres.
They share and are united in dissatisfaction with the present, striving to engineer what they believe to be a better society.
Counterfactual literature’s dissatisfaction engenders creativity, the form of which recreates the past with a ‘what if’ to retrieve lessons for the future and prevent the repetition of a perceived historical regret. It goes well beyond mere escapism.
Dystopian literature seeks to retrieve imperceptible symptoms of underlying social decay in the present and imagine their consequences in the future. If the decline goes untreated in the present, it will mature in the future. The alternative reality offered in this case also surpasses escapism and feeds thought and debate.
By their very nature, both sub-genres, set within an entertaining framework, are didactic.
Dystopian literature plays on fear to mould people to the writer’s worldview: how society should and shouldn’t be. In effect, saying, “If you don’t take my advice, this is the sort of world your future generations will have to cope with.”
Counterfactual analyses the past to warn against repeating calamities that have already—and not might—occurred but risk being repeated. It does not work on advice being ignored but resurrects the model of something that actually happened and offers alternatives and crafts its consequences.
The basis of the premises is stronger.
Dystopian is alarmist before being constructive.
Counterfactual is wishful, leading to constructive.
Consequently, the counterfactual novel reorders the past into substitute vistas, offering an alternative reality to that of the present, believed to have been induced by a calamitous event. This alternative reality offers lessons to avoid repeating past blunders that made the world a worse place. It presumes that the chessboard of history is susceptible to the manoeuvring of single chess pieces; a new move will create different consequences.
However sustainable that logic may be, once crafted and read, it will invariably provoke debate and bring the issue to centre stage.
Hollywood has further reinforced the impact of counterfactual novels with movies such as Inglourious Basterds and Confederate States of America, and Bollywood’s Lagaan and RRR have written their headlines.
Thus, counterfactual novels have been successful, have left their mark and will continue to do so.
“Fiction is, indeed, ‘the lie through which we tell the truth,” concluded Albert Camus, the 1957 French Nobel Laureate.
Picture design by Anumita Roy
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