The Lines of 'If'

In the Foreword to the second edition of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien addresses some feedback, comments and critiques he’s gotten over the prior years.  At one point, he talks about the theory that LOTR is an allegory, or an analogue, for WWI, saying:

"The real war does not resemble the legendary war in its process or its conclusion.  If it had inspired or directed the development of the legend, then certainly the Ring would have been seized and used against Sauron; he would not have been annihilated but enslaved, and Barad-dûr would not have been destroyed but occupied.  Saruman, failing to get possession of the Ring, would in the confusion and treacheries of the time have found in Mordor the missing links in his own researches into Ring-lore, and before long he would have made a Great Ring of his own with which to challenge the self styled Ruler of Middle-earth."

I don’t know about you, but I want to read that book.

(Well, aside from the bit I didn't quote about how both sides would have promptly exterminated the hobbits.)

I've always been fascinated by stories, or at least the idea of them, where the villain wins.  And I have to qualify that with "the idea of" because the villain never gets to win!  Not long-term anyways.  Either you start off with the villain in charge, and the story essentially follows the scrappy underdogs as they overthrow the villain and his/her/its dastardly rule, or they stop him/her/it before he/she/it can even get started.

(I’m not necessarily trying to make an argument for grimdark here, by the way.  While that particular genre does indeed have the villains winning more often (aSoIaF, anyone?), and I do enjoy at least some of it, I don’t think the two absolutely have to be connected.  I think it’s possible to tell a lighter story with a villain victorious, too.)

And I get why that is, of course; practically speaking, a book where the villain actually wins and there's no foreseeable hope of deposing him/her/it would probably be found rather depressing by most people (and therefore not sell well).  People want hope!  And plot-wise, while "oft evil will shall evil mar" is just a phrase, there's usually some measure of truth to it.  It's usually hard for evil to get out of its own way.  Then again, you can also say that of "nobody is a villain in their own story".

But so often the victory of the heroes hangs by a thread, and it would be so easy for things to happen differently.  Imagine Star Wars where the first R2 unit doesn't have a bad motivator, and Luke never winds up with R2-D2.  You can argue that every other narrow escape is achieved by skill or planning, or endemic non-OSHA-compliant design (seriously, what do people have against handrails?  Especially when the design aesthetic apparently runs to "giant bottomless holes everywhere!"), or other in-universe reasons, but that one is sheer dumb luck (or divine intervention). 

(For the record, I don’t have anything against divine intervention, as long as it’s essentially an “in-universe reason”.  Deus ex machina is fine with me if there are at least hints of dei and machinis in the story before the end.  If you’re telling a story, I’ll play by your rules if you do.)

Of course, I see the romance in the heroes, the desperate last stands, the all-or-nothing gambles; there's a reason that those make up so much of European mythology (and maybe elsewhere, but I'm not familiar enough with them to know).  Everybody likes a winner, or at least someone who goes down swinging.  And if they're an underdog, so much the better.  There's not all that much drama when Good is the overpowering force, after all.

It’s just that every so often, I'd like to see a villain have the breaks go his/her/its way in a story.  Or for their evil plan to actually be well-thought-out and well-executed and succeed. And it just doesn't happen (again, at least long-term), even though it could.

This is probably why I'm a Slytherin.

For reasons like that Star Wars example, where the entire story hangs on a single decision or event, I’ve also always been fascinated by the “What If?”s and the “If Only”s.  I know that’s only human nature, to some extent, but for most people it only seems to apply to their own lives.  "What if I'd handled this event differently?"  "If only my team had just made this play...", etc.

Alternate histories and alternate versions of stories are very much the domain of sci-fi (and less commonly, fantasy); that's pretty much definitional.  It's pretty much a staple in any sort of sci-fi TV show to have a time travel episode, and most of them are of the "change the past and screw something up in the present" type, and even if no time travel is involved, they'll often have fun changing something in the past and seeing what happens.

Those butterfly effects are what I find most interesting, because it requires a logical, intensive look at chains of causality and the effects of small changes.  (Unfortunately, the story I linked there is actually a terrible example of the actual phenomenon.  So is my previous sentence outside this parenthetical.  Such are the effects of pop culture and self-reference.) It’s easy enough to invent your own alternate history based on an alien invasion in WWII or dragons in the Napoleonic wars.  Those are fun, but they’re essentially invented worlds; they’re something that never could have happened.  (Yeah, yeah, you can’t prove a negative, but “had a vanishingly small chance of happening” just doesn’t pop on the page here.)

To take one example from a book I’m (finally) finishing, Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton (wow, this book was good, but it took forever to get through), the author observes that Hamilton backing a different gubernatorial candidate for the state of New York at one point might have changed the political dynamics years later, preventing (or at least postponing) the election of Jefferson.  Who knows what the country might have looked like had that happened?  And it so easily could have, except maybe not, because it would have required the people involved to be slightly different, and who knows what effects THAT would have...

This is probably why I should never, ever have a time machine.

I mean, don't get me wrong, I'd do my best to use my powers for good, but it would be oh-so-tempting to use them for awesome.  And surely if there's anything we've learned over the years from this sort of story, it's that meddling even with the best of intentions oft goes awry...