Fourth of Julys That Never Happened

Posted by Colin Harvey Jul 4, 2009

Happy Independance Day, USA.

As I was thinking about the weekend -and presumably the tennis buffs will be happy at an all-American women's final, but not much else of note is happening- it struck me that there isn't a lot of science fiction about The Big Day.

You can read Alternate American Civil War fiction from Ward Moore's Bring The Jubilee to Harry Turtledove's many alternate historiesuntil your toes curl up, but Charles Coleman Finlay's fiction apart, I can't think of much SF about the revolution, especially of the rigorous alternate history variety. Let me know if any spring to your mind.

It's seems as if it's unthinkable, yet while it might have been Britain's Vietnam, a long-distance war against a highly motivated and well-marshalled guerilla insurgency, American independance was considerably less inevitable than the Nazi defeat in WWII, and plenty of writers from Dick to Deighton are prepared to play in that fictional sandpit.

So what might have happened? Assuming that the British didn't hold onto the colony, they might yet have influenced the shape of the future Union, from assassinating (I know, a very un-British way of doing things!) the leading lights of the Union, to persuading the South to stay allied to the King, at least until Wilberforce and abolition might have provoked the South to a different path.

The French of course had considerable influence -- might the US have allied more closely to the Francophone world? Quelle Horreur! I hear you cry. The Golden Arches of MacDonalds selling baguettes...

Had the Union been a looser federation, Mexico might yet have exerted greater influence in the 19th century over the shape of the USA - Texico, or Neuva Mexico, perhaps.

These are the obvious ones. I'd be interested to hear other suggestions about Fourth of Julys that never happened.