Author | Robert Silverberg |
---|---|
Cover artist | H. Lawrence Hoffman |
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Genre | Science fiction |
Publisher | Holt, Rinehart & Winston |
Publication date | 1967 |
Media type | Print (hardcover) |
Pages | 244 pp |
Followed by | Beyond the Gate of Worlds (short stories) |
The Gate of Worlds is an alternate history novel by American writer Robert Silverberg. It was first published by Holt, Rinehart & Winston in the United States in 1967. The first UK hardcover edition was published by Gollancz in 1978. [1]
In this alternate world, the Black Death killed three fourths of the European population (rather than our actual one fourth), delaying progress and, ultimately, the Industrial Revolution. Most of Central Europe was conquered by the Ottoman Empire, which occupied it until the twentieth century, leaving it in no shape for colonization of much of the non-European world as in our timeline. Constantinople was conquered in 1420, the Ottomans moved into Vienna in 1440, and took over Paris in 1460, before invading the British Isles in 1490.
The greater virulence of the Black Death in Europe allowed non-European powers to emerge. These included the Aztecs and Incas in Middle Hesperides and Lower Hesperides, given that Europeans only 'discovered' the Hesperides in 1585 through an inadvertent Portuguese expedition. In Asia, Russia, India and Japan are now the main powers. By contrast, Turkey has undergone a period of instability that cost it control over England, from which it was expelled in the early twentieth century due to the leadership of a new royal dynasty inaugurated by "James the Valiant."
Evidently, William Shakespeare's ancestors survived the epidemic, although Shakespeare wrote his histories, tragedies and comedies in the Turkish language, set in the Ottoman Empire milieu of England's new Muslim masters.
The narrator and protagonist is eighteen-year-old Dan Beauchamp, who travels from impoverished England in 1967 to seek his fortune in the Aztec Empire. Along his way, he is accompanied by Aztec sorcerer Quequex. [2]
In 1991, Silverberg edited a thematic sequel to The Gate of Worlds, entitled Beyond the Gate of Worlds, consisting of three short stories that are set in the same fictional universe, and further explore its non-western multipolar world and its international relationships. Silverberg himself contributed the lead tale, "Lion Time in Timbuctoo," while John Brunner and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro also contributed stories.
Thematically, and given that it also occurs in a divergent timeline that originated in the context of a more virulent fourteenth century Black Death than our own, the (2002) novel by Kim Stanley Robinson The Years of Rice and Salt uses a similar literary device to consider the impact on global history of a less dominant Europe. However, in Robinson's analogous post-pandemic timeline, Europe never recovered from its decimation at the time of the epidemic, and India's Mughal Empire retains its ascendancy, as do the empires of China, Persia and the Ottomans, North America's Iroquois confederation, the Aztec and Inca empires and other inhabitants of this multipolar world.
Like Silverberg's alternate history, Muslim civilization declines during the alternate 19th to 20th centuries, leading to the triumphs of China and India during a decades-long 20th-century global war. Unlike Silverberg's world, there is comparable technological progress to our own timeline, due to that prolonged multipolar global war. By its early 21st century, Robinson's world has aircraft, information technology, and potential access to nuclear weapons.
L. Neil Smith also imagined in The Crystal Empire a world where a Europe that lost most of its population to the plague is unable to resist Muslim colonization in the centuries after. In Smith's imagining, the Mongol Empire also falls victim, allowing the Mughal Empire to rise faster and farther in its place. The novel is set primarily in North America, where a descendant of European refugees who fled the plague crosses the continent to find the title civilization, established by Chinese refugees on the West Coast.
Still another novel using a similar theme is Harry Turtledove's In High Places . In that timeline, the impact of the Black Death is somewhere in between those envisioned by Silverberg and Robinson. In this depiction, Christian Europe is weakened by the plague, enabling the Muslims to conquer Spain, Italy and South France - but they are then blocked by the resistance of the remaining Christian powers, emboldened by a militant new form of Christianity centering on Henri, "The Second Son of God". Like in Silverberg's book, England in this timeline is a backwater which never amounted to much, and there was no tide of European overseas expansion and colonization. However, by the Twentieth Century, both Christians and Muslims have reached America, and are busy colonizing it, in conflict both with its natives and with each other.
Alternate history is a subgenre of speculative fiction in which one or more historical events have occurred but are resolved differently than in actual history. As conjecture based upon historical fact, alternate history stories propose What if? scenarios about crucial events in human history, and present outcomes very different from the historical record. Some alternate histories are considered a subgenre of science fiction, or historical fiction.
The Ottoman Empire, historically and colloquially known as the Turkish Empire, was an empire that controlled much of Southeast Europe, West Asia, and North Africa between the 14th and early 20th centuries. The empire also controlled parts of southeastern Central Europe from the early 16th to the early 18th century.
The 15th century was the century which spans the Julian dates from 1 January 1401 to 31 December 1500 (MD).
The 16th century began with the Julian year 1501 and ended with either the Julian or the Gregorian year 1600 (MDC), depending on the reckoning used.
The 17th century lasted from January 1, 1601, to December 31, 1700 (MDCC).
The 18th century lasted from 1 January 1701 to 31 December 1800 (MDCCC). During the 18th century, elements of Enlightenment thinking culminated in the Atlantic Revolutions. During the century, slave trading and human trafficking expanded across the shores of the Atlantic, while declining in Russia, China, and Korea. Revolutions began to challenge the legitimacy of monarchical and aristocratic power structures, including the structures and beliefs that supported slavery. The Industrial Revolution began during mid-century, leading to radical changes in human society and the environment. The European colonization of the Americas and other parts of the world intensified and associated mass migrations of people grew in size as part of the Age of Sail.
The Years of Rice and Salt is an alternate history novel by American science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson, published in 2002. The novel explores how world history might have been different if the Black Death plague had killed 99 percent of Europe's population, instead of a third as it did in reality. Divided into ten parts, the story spans hundreds of years, from the army of the Muslim conqueror Timur to the 21st century, with Europe being re-populated by Muslim pioneers, the indigenous peoples of the Americas forming a league to resist Chinese and Muslim invaders, and a 67-year-long world war being fought primarily between Muslim states and the Chinese and their allies. While the ten parts take place in different times and places, they are connected by a group of characters that are reincarnated into each time but are identified to the reader by the first letter of their name being consistent in each life.
A series of military conflicts between the Ottoman Empire and various European states took place from the Late Middle Ages up through the early 20th century. The earliest conflicts began during the Byzantine–Ottoman wars, waged in Anatolia in the late 13th century before entering Europe in the mid-14th century with the Bulgarian–Ottoman wars. The mid-15th century saw the Serbian–Ottoman wars and the Albanian-Ottoman wars. Much of this period was characterized by Ottoman expansion into the Balkans. The Ottoman Empire made further inroads into Central Europe in the 15th and 16th centuries, culminating in the peak of Ottoman territorial claims in Europe.
Habsburg Spain refers to Spain and the Spanish Empire, also known as the Catholic Monarchy, in the period from 1516 to 1700 when it was ruled by kings from the House of Habsburg. It had territories around the world, including modern-day Spain, a piece of south-eastern France, eventually Portugal and many other lands outside the Iberian Peninsula, like in the Americas. Habsburg Spain was a composite monarchy and a personal union. The Habsburg Spanish monarchs of this period are chiefly Charles I, Philip II, Philip III, Philip IV and Charles II. In this period the Spanish empire was at the zenith of its influence and power. Spain, or "the Spains", referring to Spanish territories across different continents in this period, initially covered the entire Iberian peninsula, including the crowns of Castile, Aragon and from 1580 Portugal. It then expanded to include territories over the five continents, consisting of much of Latin America and the West Indies in the Americas, the Low Countries, Belgium, Luxembourg, Italian territories and France in Europe, Portuguese possessions such as small enclaves like Ceuta and Oran in North Africa, and the Philippines and other possessions in Southeast Asia. The period of Spanish history has also been referred to as the "Age of Expansion".
Aztec Century is a science fiction novel by British writer Christopher Evans. In 1994, Aztec Century won the BSFA Award for Best Novel.
The Gate of Time is a 1966 alternate history novel by American writer Philip José Farmer (1918-2009). It was revised and expanded as Two Hawks from Earth in 1979.
The British Empire has often been portrayed in fiction. Originally such works described the Empire because it was a contemporary part of life; nowadays fictional references are also frequently made in a steampunk context.
The historical phenomenon of colonization is one that stretches around the globe and across time. Ancient and medieval colonialism was practiced by the Phoenicians, Greeks, Turks, and Arabs.
In world history, post-classical history refers to the period from about 500 CE to 1500 CE, roughly corresponding to the European Middle Ages. The period is characterized by the expansion of civilizations geographically and the development of trade networks between civilizations. This period is also called the medieval era, post-antiquity era, post-ancient era, pre-modernity era, or pre-modern era.
"Sidewise in Time" is a science fiction short story by American writer Murray Leinster that was first published in the June 1934 issue of Astounding Stories. "Sidewise in Time" served as the title story for Leinster's second story collection in 1950.
"The Wheels of If" is an alternate history science fiction story by American writer L. Sprague de Camp. It was first published in the magazine Unknown Fantasy Fiction for October, 1940, and first appeared in book form in de Camp's collection The Wheels of If and Other Science Fiction. It later appeared in the paperback edition of the collection published by Berkley Books in 1970, in de Camp's subsequent collections The Virgin & the Wheels and Years in the Making: the Time-Travel Stories of L. Sprague de Camp, and in the anthology Unknown Worlds: Tales from Beyond. It also appeared, together with a sequel by Harry Turtledove, in The Pugnacious Peacemaker/The Wheels of If and Down in the Bottomlands and Other Places. The story has also been translated into German.
A hypothetical military victory of the Axis powers over the Allies of World War II (1939–1945) is a common topic in speculative literature. Works of alternative history (fiction) and of counterfactual history (non-fiction) include stories, novels, performances, and mixed media that often explore speculative public and private life in lands conquered by the coalition, whose principal powers were Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and Fascist Italy.
Times Without Number is a time travel/alternate history novel by John Brunner.
The Crystal Empire is a 1986 novel by American science fiction and alternate history writer L. Neil Smith. It is set in an alternate universe that shares with Kim Stanley Robinson's The Years of Rice and Salt, Robert Silverberg's The Gate of Worlds and Harry Turtledove's In High Places a point of divergence where the Black Death kills much more of Europe's population than it did in reality, opening the way for a Muslim conquest of Europe. The plague also decimates the Mongol Empire, allowing a Mughal power to arise in the Far East in its place.