Interview with Hal Johnson of 'Impossible Histories'

Hal Johnson is author of Impossible Histories. Check out my review on Blogcritics!

Tell us a little about your background

I’m mostly just a guy with a brain problem that forces me to read more or less continually. There are downsides to this brain problem, in the sense that I am not so socially ept, but it served me well when I wanted to pressure an editor into letting me write a book of alternate history scenarios. In the sense that I’ve always been a reader, I’ve always been a writer. I man, I read more books than I write, but I’m always writing something, or I guess I’ve always got an incessant narrating voice running in my head, and at times I find it easiest to write down what it’s saying. I’ve got several books out (Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods is the reigning fan favorite), and if Impossible Histories is the only one that’s all about alternate history, all of them stretch the truth in one way or another. In less than a month, I’ll have a new book coming out for young readers (or “the young at heart” as they say), Apprentice Academy: Sorcerers. If you like myths and legends, or magic, or witnessing the bad influence that is me corrupting the young, please preorder it.

What got you into alternative history?

I hope I don’t sound like too much of a goon if I say it was Dungeons & Dragons. Many years ago I started running a game, and because I always found it hard to keep track of geography in The Forgotten Realms, I set the campaign in the real world in the tenth century—or at least a slightly more fantasied-up tenth century, with giants in the mountains and high-level clerics in the Vatican. Once I decided to use the tenth century, though, I was more or less trapped: Not only did I have to keep reading about the local circumstances of wherever the party traveled (civil war in Byzantium; a puppet caliph in Baghdad) I had to figure out how past historical figures would have stocked these dungeons people are hacking with monsters, traps, and treasure.

Perhaps this would not have seemed like a logical pickle to most people, but I found myself essentially “doing” alternate history backwards—given a tenth century that is slightly different from our own, how would Alexander the Great’s conquests (for example) have had to have been different to get us here? Given the logic inherent in a world with magic, why would Alexander have led an army into Persia in the first place? A quest? An artifact?

The more I wrestled with these conundra, the more I started wondering about what changes in the past would ripple through history and make changes in the present. Maybe that’s a crazy way to come about it, but it was the first time I’d “messed with” history, and the habit stuck.

What are some of your favorite time periods to play with?

Even though ethically I think empires are terrible, esthetically I think they’re really cool, so I enjoy reading especially about the Macedonian and Mongolian empires. But empires tend to splinter, so the temptation is to try to figure out what could hold them together and what kind of world would we live in with fewer, larger states. A world in which Alexander’s empire grows and grows and lasts as long as, say, the Roman Empire did is one of my favorites, because I like thinking about a Dark Ages that follows, one with an Imperium that stretches from the Greek settlements in Spain to Hellenistic India.

I also like (although I’ve never written about) absurdly big-picture changes. Something like: What if ocean water was potable? Suddenly transoceanic exploration in even small boats becomes a lot easier, even trivial. The size of the ancient world contracts! Contact between the Old World and New made by Egyptians or Phoenicians. Not even fear of storms could keep people from launching out into the unknown.

Are there any time periods you don't particularly enjoy tampering with?

The problem—not a bad problem, but a complicating problem—with constructing an alternate history is that unless you’re willing to play fast and loose, you need to know not only the little bit of history you’re altering, but all the background, origins, and current events of the countries and peoples around it.

There are huge stretches of history—I mean both times and places—that are not completely opaque to me, but are mostly isolated facts. I read a biography of Frederick the Great once, but before I felt comfortable messing around with his timeline, I’d want to be more familiar with eighteenth century continental history, which I’m not.

I’m a nervous type, and I’m always afraid of getting caught out, so I like looking at time periods I think other people don’t know enough about to catch me in an error! I could never do a Civil War timeline, just because I think everyone else knows more than I do!

What have you learned about humanity and history from your alt history projects?

One thing history teaches you is that people really like to murder each other. Perhaps I have a reputation for being overly cynical about human nature, so let me not pursue that one. Instead…

Hey! Another thing I learned about history, and which is useful in writing alternate histories but also in writing in general, is that whenever and wherever you go, there’s always something happening. Every remote Medieval village had some kind of interesting local festival or legend or folk custom. Some of this hyperlocality has been erased by mass media, but it’s still around: I live in Connecticut, and I can drive for forty minutes and be someplace where no one knows what a package store or a tag sale or a grinder are.

But also, in every medieval village, something happened there: someone was martyred or there was a battle or the scenery inspired a poet. Part of the fun of alternate history is that wherever you look there’s something that influenced someone, and so there are an effectively infinite number of moments to choose from, to alter and play with and see what happens.

If you had an inter-reality portal, is there a particular timeline you would want to move to, and why?

I have to imagine that a timeline in which we dodged World War I would be less messed up—after WWI, the twentieth century was doomed to be split between fear of totalitarian conquest and fear of nuclear annihilation, and surely we’d be better off without that. Of course, there’re no more Nazis and no more Cold War nowadays, and it’s not like we’re not anxious, so maybe that doesn’t help. Maybe we’re doomed anyway.

So I’ll just pick a timeline where Robert E. Howard didn’t kill himself at the age of thirty and instead spent a long fruitful lifetime churning out Conan stories.

Where can people find you online?

I post annotations to Impossible Histories, other alt-history scenarios, and collections of “inspirational” quotes here: https://haljohnsonbooks.substack.com/

You can preorder my next book here: https://bookshop.org/p/books/apprentice-academy-sorcerers-the-unofficial-guide-to-the-magical-arts-hal-johnson/18588355?ean=9781250808356

I am bad at social media here: https://www.facebook.com/ImmortalLycanthropes