The Truth is Dead

Marcus Sedgwick (ed)

Walker Books, UK: 2010

ISBN: 9781406320039

Genres: historical fiction, short stories

Issues: change

extension concepts

What would our life today be like if... Hitler had died in WW1? If Napoleon had escaped from his isle of exisle and raised another army? If the men who landed on the moon never made it back?

Marcus Sedgwick suggests that these stories can be described as 'counterfactual – that is, they take an event in history and consider how things might have turned out if one or two factors had been just a little bit different'. However you describe them, they are thought-provoking and at times darkly humorous.

Writers love to ask what if? and these are stories by masters of the craft – men and women who can take that 'what if' and turn it into an all-too-believable scenario. Apprentices working on their craft would do well to study how these eight experienced writers position the reader, work on their assumptions and then turn them upside down. Each story is as concise as a poem, 2500-3000 words of carefully crafted narrative, a peephole into a possible past.

Despite the restrictions that short stories necessarily impose, each writer has managed to evoke a complex character, one who dominated history, and make them human – three dimensional, living, breathing, flawed characters, rather than mere names. Any story that makes a reader think and question has achieved greatness. By that definition, here are eight great stories. (Trust me – you'll never read the story of the Temptation of Christ in quite the same way again.)