 Confession time…
I’ve been so absorbed in writing that I’ve neglected this blog. That’s a tad unsatisfactory. However, I have been entertaining some fascinating ‘writers abroad’ on my writing blog. I included myself but all the links are there to writers in Spain, France, Switzerland, Sweden who use their transferred homeland for inspiration.
Of course, some of us just make it up as in Roma Nova, but the Mélisende novels feature a heroine well-grounded in my region of France, Poitou.
And the good news is that the new book, Double Pursuit, will soon be on its way. The manuscript is with the editor at present and the cover is commissioned with the imaginative Jessica Bell Design. She’ll produce the cover for the ebook and paperback. I’m hoping for a late September publication date, but all these things take time.
Both Mel and McCracken are back, but there are changes ahead…
In the meantime, this is what will appear on the back cover of the book:
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She’s hunting arms smugglers. But who is hunting her?
One dead body, two badly injured operatives and five crates of hijacked rifles.
In Rome, former French special forces intelligence analyst Mélisende des Pittones is frustrated by obnoxious local cops and ruthless thugs. Despite the backing of the powerful European Investigation and Regulation Service, her case is going nowhere. Then an unknown woman tries to blow her head off.
As Mel and fellow investigator Jeff McCracken attempt to discover the heart of the criminal network as well as their own unpredictable relationship, all roads point to the place she dreads – the arid and remote African Sahel – where she was once betrayed and nearly died.
Can Mel conquer her fear as she races to smash the network and save her colleague’s life?
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A little side note…
If you sign up to my monthly newsletter, you can download both the prequel to Double Identity and a Conrad and Carina Roma Nova short story.
Alison Morton is the author of Roma Nova thrillers – INCEPTIO, CARINA (novella), PERFIDITAS, SUCCESSIO, AURELIA, NEXUS (novella), INSURRECTIO and RETALIO, and ROMA NOVA EXTRA, a collection of short stories. Audiobooks are available for four of the series. Double Identity, a contemporary conspiracy, starts a new series of thrillers.
Download ‘Welcome to Alison Morton’s Thriller Worlds’, a FREE eBook, as a thank you gift when you sign up to Alison’s monthly email newsletter. You’ll also be among the first to know about news and book progress before everybody else, and take part in giveaways.
If you enjoyed this post, do share it with your friends!
 Time or alternate time? What if the Nazis had won the Second World War (Fatherland – Robert Harris, The Man in the High Castle – Philip K Dick) or England had remained Catholic (Pavane – Keith Roberts, The Alteration – Kingsley Amis) or if Alaska rather than Israel had become the Jewish homeland (The Yiddish Policemen’s Union – Michael Chabon)? Or perhaps if Roosevelt had lost the 1940 election and right-wing Charles Lindbergh had become US president (The Plot Against America – Philip Roth)?
These are serious works. No aliens, no time-travellers slipping back to points in history to change it, no fantasy or magic, just a development of history on a different course triggered sometimes by a very minor historical event. I recommend Erik Durschmied’s The Hinge Factor – How Chance and Stupidity Have Changed History which shows how easily this could, and has, happened.
So what if it did?
The trigger causes a “point of divergence” (POD) splitting it from “our timeline” i.e. the history we know and live in, to the “alternate timeline” in which some or many things have changed to create a new, alternate world. Quite a number of things in the alternate world will seem the same as the ones we know in our normal time which gives us a false anchor. Others, including social structures and attitudes as well as politics and nations, may be disturbingly different.
Scientific investigation into parallel universes and alternate worlds has prompted new thought and writing. With the advent of the Internet, wide-ranging discussion and speculation has appeared in newsgroups, blogs, and produced sites like Althistory Wiki, Alternative History Weekly Update and a well-respected magazine AltHist which publishes alternative and historical short stories. The Historical Novelists’ Society embraces alternative history in its remit and is including a session on alternative history in its September conference.
In books, film and television, alternate history has often been flavoured with time travel or timeslip, e.g. Sliding Doors or Eric Flint’s 1632 series of books or fantasy such as Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell or Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series. Steampunk, which originated during the 1980s and early 1990s, incorporates elements of alternate history as well as science fiction, fantasy, horror and speculative fiction.
As with any other genre or sub-genre, the writing varies, as does the plausibility of themes and plots. Personally, I believe you have to know your own timeline history well, or know how to research it methodically and extensively before attempting to “alternate” it. New terms have been created in alternate history discussion groups to deal with anomalies. Said to have originated on the usenet group soc.history.what-if, the term “alien space bats” is used to criticise implausible alternate histories or an improbable deus ex machina. Dan Hartland in Strange Horizons called alien space bats “everyone’s favourite SF plot McGuffin”.
 Dawn of an alternative time? For me, the most appealing alternate history stories are those set naturally in their world without info dumps or long explanations. Yes, we need some clues, and yes, we need character 1 to tell character 2 to duck when a steam-driven arquebusque loaded with a radiating bullet is about to blow their head off. But we don’t need a full explanation of how the technology was developed. Keith Robert’s Pavane suffers a tad from this. In her Eve Dallas detective series set in 2057 J D Robb effortlessly describes the futuristic elements as they arise, and only in bare, scraped detail. These are not alternate history as such, but crime stories set in a different, though possible future. I use them to illustrate the style I’m aiming for.
Writers can use techniques such as photos, pictures, the new person asking the long-standing resident, reading the info online, reading a map, or asking a guide, getting an older relative/mentor to recount something to fill in these gaps, but not in a dump-y way. The essential thing is to get the alternate world’s history right and then develop it around the story in a plausible way. This is not easy and the odd spreadsheet helps…
At its best, alternate history challenges fixed ideas while providing entertainment. Readers, especially those who haven’t tried an alt history book before, are intrigued by the different setting, but are still after the things I listed at the end of this post – in summary, a cracking good story with emotional grip. In my own books, where the POD was over 1,500 years ago. I use an alternate world not only as a setting but as an essential interactive layer – a mix of culture clash with temperament clash.
 Running from her enemy And plot? In my first Roma Nova thriller, INCEPTIO, the heroine, from a version of the New World that looks reasonably familiar to us, is having enough trouble dealing with an uncompromising special forces officer from a very different Europe, let alone struggling to stay alive when a vengeful enforcer is attempting to obliterate her.
Alternative history gives us a rich environment in which to develop our storytelling. I’m taking full advantage of this, but above all, I’m aiming to give the reader some damn good thrillers!
More info:
Alt Hist: Historical Fiction and Alternate History -The new magazine of Historical Fiction and Alternate History
Alternative History Weekly Update
Wikipedia – Alternate history article
Uchronia: The Alternate History List is an online database that contains 2900 alternate history novels, stories, essays and other printed material
Althistory.wiki
Alison Morton is the author of Roma Nova thrillers – INCEPTIO, CARINA (novella), PERFIDITAS, SUCCESSIO, AURELIA, NEXUS (novella), INSURRECTIO and RETALIO, and ROMA NOVA EXTRA, a collection of short stories. Audiobooks are available for four of the series. Double Identity, a contemporary conspiracy, starts a new series of thrillers. JULIA PRIMA, a new Roma Nova story set in the late 4th century, is now out.
Download ‘Welcome to Alison Morton’s Thriller Worlds’, a FREE eBook, as a thank you gift when you sign up to Alison’s monthly email update. You’ll also be among the first to know about news and book progress before everybody else, and take part in giveaways.
If you enjoyed this post, do share it with your friends!
Seeing this title, many people immediately think of the Second World War in Europe – the fall of France in 1940, the harsh German occupation, the bravery of the resistance and the Allied liberation in 1944/45. In the Far East, it was as brutal, but in a different context. Life under occupation for most people range from difficult to lethal, but it was characterised by deprivation, impoverishment and loss of personal and collective freedoms, including of expression.
But these cycles have occurred throughout history. Some would say Julius Caesar’s conquest of Gaul, its occupation by Rome over hundreds of years, ongoing rebellion and uprising and eventual collapse of Roman Gaul which led to freedom, albeit a freedom that was consumed by war and land grabs by newer conquerors and a loss of stability and relative prosperity.
Going back to the twentieth century, Hitler and Mussolini were defeated, but in Spain Franco stayed in power after a bitter civil war from the end of that war in 1939 until his death in 1975. Although seeming to become a modern European country in the 1960s and early 1970s via a pragmatic military alliance with the US, industrial renewal and the opening up to mass tourism, Spain retained its authoritarian, fascist nature – the ‘iron hand in the velvet glove’ – until the new 1978 constitution and the thankfully peaceful transition to constitutional monarchy and democracy.
Portugal endured nearly a half-century of authoritarian rule: first a dictatorship following the 1926 coup d’état, then from 1933, the ‘Estado Novo‘ (New State) ruled by António de Oliveira Salazar with all the trappings of dictatorship including the notorious secret police (PIDE) until 1968, when he had a stroke. Salazar was replaced by Marcello Caetano, who was deposed during the ‘carnation revolution’ of 1974. It was the end of the Estado Novo (the longest-lived authoritarian regime in Western Europe), and the dissolution of the Portuguese Empire. The NATO countries had tolerated the fiercely anti-communist regime out of realpolitik when the Cold War was at its height.
Being frivolous for a moment, the military coup that started the Portuguese revolution had two secret signals to begin. The first, aired on Emissores Associados de Lisboa at 10:55 p.m. on 24 April was Paulo de Carvalho’s “E Depois do Adeus” – Portugal’s entry in the 1974 Eurovision Song Contest!
The two late 20th century liberations from brutal regimes were relatively peaceful, but the 1940s one was hard won – a war of invasion and attrition involving hundreds of thousands of fighters, galactic amounts of military matériel and crushing debt for decades afterwards. Lives were ruined, dreams shattered and countries devastated and new forms of dictatorship overtook the eastern part of Europe with the cycle repeated.
Many films and books emerged in the 1950s and 1960s based on events from the Second World War conflict; they continue to hold a fascination for a new generation of writers today. Moreover, stories set in the former Eastern Bloc in Europe, for instance, the Karin Müller detective series, are becoming very popular. We’re particularly interested in the stories of individuals’ personal resilience, endurance and resistance.
These essential themes have been highlighted not only in historical fiction, but in imaginary genres, as we see in Game of Thrones, Harry Potter and Star Wars. It’s a way of exploring how we might feel and act in such circumstances. Would we keep our heads down and try to ignore things, be realistic and work with the regime or would we commit small acts of sabotage or resist the occupation actively with the terrifying and highly likely risk of imprisonment, torture and death?
I found myself wondering the same as I wrote INSURRECTIO – the story of a power-grab and establishment of a brutal, fascistic regime in the 1980s – and RETALIO – about endurance, resistance and determination to liberate a homeland. Although set in the imaginary Roma Nova, these were not easy books to write. Even though I was experiencing terror, brutality, sacrifice and outstanding courage at second hand, as the child of parents who fought in the Second World War against tyranny and repression, I felt I needed to.
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If you would like to read about the 20th century power grab in Roma Nova and the story of resistance and retaliation, you can download the ebooks of INSURRECTIO and RETALIO via these links and order the paperbacks online or through your favourite bookshop. (INSURRECTIO paperback) (RETALIO paperback) 
Alison Morton is the author of Roma Nova thrillers – INCEPTIO, CARINA (novella), PERFIDITAS, SUCCESSIO, AURELIA, NEXUS (novella), INSURRECTIO and RETALIO, and ROMA NOVA EXTRA, a collection of short stories. Audiobooks are available for four of the series. Double Identity, a contemporary conspiracy, starts a new series of thrillers.
Download ‘Welcome to Alison Morton’s Thriller Worlds’, a FREE eBook, as a thank you gift when you sign up to Alison’s monthly email newsletter. You’ll also be among the first to know about news and book progress before everybody else, and take part in giveaways.
If you enjoyed this post, do share it with your friends!
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