Usually, when you make a decision in life, unless you have access to parallel universes, you can't truly judge how right that decision was.
There's not an emperor or artist out there I won't read a medical history of, even if - or especially if - the author uses that medical history to spin out wild counterfactuals about how wars or masterpieces might have turned out differently. They're like delicious philosophical mints to roll around inside your mouth, just to see how they taste.
Everything else happened - why not the things that could have?
Had I not gone to Japan in 1986, had I stayed home and majored in English literature as I'd intended to do, I might indeed have become an investment banker, an outcome that perhaps would have proved a more severe blow to the health of the U.S. economy than to the history of the novel.
Creativity requires novelty. Imagination is all about counterfactuals and untested possibilities that don't yet exist.
Certainly the philosopher of 'possible worlds' must take care that his technical apparatus not push him to ask questions whose meaningfulness is not supported by our original intuitions of possibility that gave the apparatus its point.
You can’t say ‘if this didn’t happen then that would have happened’ because you don’t know everything that might have happened. You might think something’d be good, but for all you know it could have turned out horrible. You can’t say ‘If only I’d…’ because you could be wishing for anything. The point is, you’ll never know. You’ve gone past. So there’s no use thinking about it.
Alternate history fascinates me, as it fascinates all novelists, because 'What if?' is the big thing.
It's defeatist to harp on what might have been, and yet, it's hard to resist considering what might have been.
To say that I would have done otherwise had I wanted to is simply to say that I would have lived in a different universe had I been in a different universe.
What is, is, and what might have been could never have existed.
History isn't just what happened, but what happened to whom and why and what would have been different if the cast of characters had been different.
I don't write historical novels but novels that wonder, 'And what if it happened in this way and not in this other one?'
In another time, in another place, I wonder who they might have been.
For things remain possible, even if God does not choose them. Indeed, even if God does not will something to exist, it is possible for it to exist, since, by its nature, it could exist if God were to will it to exist.
Imagination is all about new possibilities, eventualities that don't exist, counterfactuals, a recombination of elements in new ways. It is about the untested. And the untested is uncertain. It is frightening-even
In the many-mansioned house of Alternate History, I occupy a small corner. The trio of what-ifs I chronicled in 'Then Everything Changed' all begin with tiny, highly plausible twists of fate that lead to hugely consequential shifts in history.
I'll never know what my life would have been like if they hadn't made Lawrence of Arabia. What would I be? I would maybe have 10 children, a very fat wife. I would be very fat myself. I don't know.
