I, Mengele: by Philip Challinor

Following on from the author's Foundations of the Twenty-First Century, Philip Challinor's I, Mengele is a rare look into the academic and culture wars of an alternative history. F21C created a world in which Britain had fallen to the Nazi's during World War 2 - it succeeded by sidestepping the gaming mechanics of most alternative histories, instead concentrating on a curiously deft fit of Nazi politics and philosophy into daily English life. The book avoided epiphanies, deliberately so, except perhaps the resolution of duty into horror by means of a narrative that I would describe as speak into memory; by that I mean again that history is written by the winner. 

I, Mengele is drawn from the same alternative history. It is a critical study of an epic film, conceived in Germany, financed in Hollywood, made in Britain. In our history Mengele is famous, or rather infamous. In that history Mengele is neither; victory has rendered him an almost anonymous functionary as the Holocaust has been overlooked by historians of the Reich for obvious reasons. All this is about to change as the cultural custodians of F21C take ownership of some of the less daring yet equally important actions of the war years. But how can mass-murder be reimagined as heroic service to the Reich?

Mengele's life and exploits are presented as epic fantasy, filmed in the manner of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. Herein lies the power of the author's imagination: Mengele's victims are become CGI monsters. They are recreated as writhing hordes and dark inhuman masses. Jews, Russians, Gypsies... all are thrown into the CGI melting pot to emerge as the villains of epic fantasy as we know them - the faceless armies of Mordor, or the boundless hordes of Mallorea. As someone who has always found much fantasy to be faintly distasteful, this came as something of a revelation for me as it pinpointed my distress. Perhaps the most striking comparison to be made is with Norman Spinrad's The Iron Dream. It hadn't occurred to me until I read I, Mengele that Spinrad's novel can be read similarly - as an attack on the dehumanising East/West divide in fantasy fiction.

The book also provides fascinating background detail, including Churchill's cribbing of Hiro Hito in his surrender speech; and the timetable for the invasion of Russia being moved forward by three crucial weeks to June 1st, just time enough to get the Wermacht to Moscow before Christmas, 1941. It is interesting to compare such details with David Downing's The Moscow Option, another front rank World War 2 alternate.

Ultimately I, Mengele demonstrates that a commentariat can make almost anything acceptable if its cultural context is engineered to reflect the prevailing political consensus.

You can buy a copy of I Mengele here, and its companion volume The Foundations of the 21st Century here.

The Voivode: by Philip Challinor

There is cosmic horror; and then there is cosmic holocaust.The former is the sensibility of human frailty in an unknowable universe; the latter is the insanity that ensues from it.

In Philip Challinor's extraordinary novella, The Voivode, vampirism is in league with the pre-Galilean universe, and its enemy, the Church, is mired in the dark ages. The spacecraft Persephone, lifted into the void by the burning of ten thousand or so heretics, attempts to venture beyond Earth's furthest satellite, Sol. Instead it finds evidence of the Gililean universe in the form of a new planet that appears to orbit Sol; and it finds itself under siege from within, as a stowaway vampire lays waste to the crew with the help of the ship's doctor. Sangruel the vampire and the doctor change the Persephone's course to land on this new planet and claim it... but it claims them in the most curious and horrifying manner.

At the heart of The Voivode is a bloody transfusion; that is, a protectionist exchange of knowledge and of power. Earth's enlightenment is to be more of the same, on an industrial scale, as Challinor reveals the newly discovered planet to have been asset-stripped of its only resource, blood, which is, after all, the currency of vampires. Blood cells converted to coin.

The Voivode, like most of Challinor's work, is precisely rendered. There are touches of Ligotti and Lucius Shephard (The Golden comes to mind); in fact, the prose is better than the former and the conceit fully matches the latter. It is a major work of strange and vivid imagination, and in subjecting cosmic horror to economic rationalism, Challinor has found a wholly unique voice.

You can buy a copy of The Voivode here - I absolutely recommend that you do.

The Foundations of the Twenty-First Century: by Philip Challinor

The year is 1989. The place is London. But the event... the event is the centenary of Hitler's birth, and it is being celebrated by Britain; not simply Nazi-occupied Britain, but a country almost fully integrated into Germany's Third Reich, embedded, as it were. The Royal Family still survives, suggesting an all-too familiar treachery; there are references to Isolationists gaining influence at the beginning of World War Two; the Russian front appears to be ongoing and claiming the life of many a British Volk soldier; and there is mention of America escaping the fate of Philip K Dick's The Man in the High Castle. Foreign tourists abound in London for the centenary, and all appears well on the Home Front.

Harold Cullen is part of a group of cadets who arrive in London to begin their courses and are seconded to assist with centenary duties, amongst other things - for in Nazi Britain the officious attitude of the stern corporal is king, and as punishment for youth and lack of rank, the group finds itself detailed to hand out leaflets, while billeted in a dreary but surprisingly large flat. The cadets are a mixed bag - while they are all keen to hone their Nationalist-Socialist zeal, Cullen seems particularly adept - for example, happily spying on fellow train passengers on the journey to London. Not content with this, he is also keen to explore the personal belongings of their landlord, whose flat seems rather more spacious than Cullen deems fit for a single man living alone. The landlord, Truman, well aware of what motivates the likes of Cullen, lets slips that his accommodation is reward for a special service performed for the Reich years before. But he remains tight-lipped about details, and this only furthers Cullen's curiosity. Perhaps Cullen's zeal can only be attributed to the fact that his grandfather also performed special service for the Reich, of which he is always mindful, chiefly because he is never allowed to forget it - not by his mother, his instructors, or by the other cadets - the exact nature of that service, however, is never shared with him.

The book takes the form of a first person narrative by Cullen, perhaps a journal of some kind, because each entry is dated. The prose throughout is terse, succinct and, at times, a little conspiratorial. All the pettiness of life in Britain is combined with the perversity of Nazism, and they are found to be compatible, collaborators, familiars even. The language reflects this in turn of phrase and figure of speech - phrases are jackbooted through the text as slogans (blood always tells), figures are uniform and correct. It captures ideology not only as a way of life, but as a mode of self-censoring forethought - as interior life. However, Cullen's narrative gives the impression of being a little too correct - at least at first. He has an eye for the disloyal; but he also has a disarming eye for the loyal. He sees and reports contradictions, anomalies, pettiness and even ideological doubts, all of which take various forms; and his crisis, when it comes, is an almost willfully perverse and unwelcome development in his career. It is as though we are not the only people looking over his shoulder.

Up to this point, there appears to be almost no resistance, except perhaps in one regard: the near-forbidden knowledge of another event, uncelebrated but seemingly unforgotten, and which can be pieced together from clues and hints scattered throughout the text, variously as allusions, threats, boasts and anecdotes. Who, for example, are the mysterious "hoaxers" hiding in plain sight on the London Underground? Just what was the supreme service rendered by Cullen's landlord to the state?  Even the early reference to trains running on time assumes ominous significance, once the reader has pieced together the subtext. Usually, in alternative history, authors game their point of departure - it is built into the text as a twist or a hook. But here, no such point of departure matters, and there are no safe games to be had from a reveal. If anything, history and its alternate converge in the opposite of foregrounding - as a defining back shadow which haunts the text. F21C transports its themes by more than train of thought: the final, almost hallucinatory journey is anything but that - it is the culmination of everything we have seen and heard: in Cullen's history, and in ours.

As for resistance, in a way Mr Challinor performs a remarkable feat: in a book which so cleverly transports the reader, the thought occurs - if history is written by the winner, who writes the alternate history? The dissident perhaps.