The accession of Leo XIV, the first American pope and the third successive non-Italian to lead the Catholic Church, brings to mind the illustrious career of Pope Germanian I, another outsider to the Holy See who reigned over a tumultuous era. Germanian began his career as the disputatious monk Martin Luther before ascending to the church’s highest office in the early 16th century, inaugurating a dramatic era of theological and institutional reform. His memory lives on in the relatively unadorned architecture of St. Peter’s Square, which reflects Germanian’s distaste for Roman pomp and his austere view of the Church’s teachings.
Wait, no, that’s not right. Luther never became pope. He was excommunicated by Leo‘s namesake, Leo X, for beginning the Protestant Reformation. There is no “austere” wing of the Vatican. Germanian sprang from the inventive mind of Kingsley Amis, whose 1976 novel The Alteration follows the adventures of a young English choirboy in a late 20th-century world where Western Christendom never fell apart.
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You might quibble with Amis’s proposed turning point — when Luther was summoned to Rome in 1518 to defend himself against accusations of heresy, he was almost certainly going to be executed or forced to recant (perhaps both) — but The Alteration is a cunningly realized example of alternate history, a genre that once had a considerable hold on the public imagination but has lately fallen out of favor. It’s not that writers, filmmakers, and audiences are suddenly uninterested in exploring slightly askew versions of our world. However, the idea of one key turning point irrevocably changing history has lately been eclipsed by the “multiverse,” a concept that encompasses all possible timelines branching off from our own.
The Alteration does not posit the existence of a Lutheran world, a world where Calvinism reigns supreme, a world where Islam rules the globe, and so on. Instead, Amis created a fully-realized version of one alternate universe, where every divergence stems from Luther’s ascension to the papacy. Many of the changes will elicit smirks of recognition from history buffs. Heinrich Himmler and Lavrentiy Beria, two of the great villains of 20th-century totalitarianism, have transformed into Monsignors Henricus and Lavrentius, high-ranking figures in a globe-spanning Catholic theocracy. The Lord of the Chalices is the alternate world’s version of The Lord of the Rings. David Hockney is known for creating religious mosaics instead of pop art. Jean-Paul Sartre, a prominent French Jesuit, writes weighty theological commentaries that are presumably as dense and unreadable as the philosophy he produced in our timeline.
Amis’s alternate universe is a funky combination of old-fashioned anti-Catholic prejudice, a 70s-inflected disdain for church teachings on sex and sexuality, and sharply observed history. The stigmatization of science and sclerotic economic and technical progress — late 20th-century Europe is stuck at roughly a Victorian level of technology, with the picaresque addition of airships and high-speed rail — recalls sociologist Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, which posited a mutually reinforcing relationship between Protestantism and capitalist innovation. The most technologically advanced state in Amis’s universe is the stern Calvinist Republic of New England, where New York is still New Amsterdam and Joseph Rudyard Kipling once ruled as First Citizen.
Not all alternate history is this good. The Alteration, Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, Robert Harris’s Fatherland, and a few other outstanding examples are the cream of the crop. In truth, the genre attracts a disproportionate number of cranks who seem a bit too interested in what the world would look like if the Nazis won the Battle of Britain or the Confederacy triumphed at Gettysburg. Alternate history books also have a tendency to spend too much time messing with familiar touchstones. It’s fun to play along with Amis’s game of “spot the reference,” but The Alteration occasionally gets bogged down in cultural minutiae.
However, when done well, this overlooked genre is a way to explore hinge points in human history. If Luther had not been born at precisely the right moment, when popular dissatisfaction with the Catholic Church and the invention of the printing press met his own rhetorical talents, Western Christianity would likely be very different today. Alternate timelines are a useful reminder that history is not just shaped by impersonal forces, but by chance, contingent circumstances, and a few outstanding (or terrible) individuals.
If two timelines are interesting, why not explore many different permutations? The idea of a multiverse seems a logical outgrowth of alternate history, but the former implies a very different view of human existence. If there are infinite timelines, many only trivially different from our own, a choice in one world is reduced to a mere footnote (or less) in an ever-expanding network of potentialities. In one timeline, Luther becomes pope. In another, he is executed for heresy. In another, he dies young from smallpox. In another, he becomes a hermit. If every possibility occurs, no choice matters. As the title implies, The Alteration is only concerned with one key turning point and its ramifications.
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Perhaps unsurprisingly, Hollywood’s artistic nadir has coincided with studios’ enthusiastic embrace of the multiverse concept. The mind-numbing creative implications of spinning infinite variations on the same few characters should be obvious. And if you never commit to one person making a life-altering choice, the consequences of that choice never really count.
In his 2013 introduction to a reissued edition of The Alteration, William Gibson noted that the Chinese government banned film and television about time travel. “Like Kingsley Amis,” he wrote, “they appreciate the subversive potential of a certain sort of imagining: the counterfactual, which is quite beyond state control.” Despite the dystopian nature of many alternate worlds, the genre actually embodies a hopeful and very human message. For better or worse, our choices matter a great deal.
Will Collins is a lecturer at Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest, Hungary.