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One Lamp: Alternate History Stories from The
Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
edited by Gordon Van Gelder
(Four Walls Eight Windows, $15.95, 434 pages, trade paperback; published
in September 2003.)
In the 1990s, in the wake of the mainstream success of Robert Harris's
Fatherland and Harry  Turtledove's
The Guns of the South, alternate history became science fiction's
most commercially exportable subgenre.
Like those two bestsellers, the bookend stories in One Lamp,
Gordon Van Gelder's anthology of alternate-history fiction, deal with
the ever-popular topics of the Second World War and the American Civil
War. Neither of these overlong stories are among the book's gems; the
opener, C.M. Kornbluth's 1958 story "Two Dooms", is especially clumsy
and dated, transparently using someone from the "real world" stranded
in the alternate history to comment on the changes.
Such stories are not pure alternate history, i.e., fiction unfurling
in a world where history deviated from the course we know; rather, they
rely on science-fiction tropes such as time-travel and parallel dimensions
to allow characters to voyage between time streams. One Lamp
is a bit too heavily stocked with such "cheat" stories to feel like
it adequately fulfills its stated premise. There's even one story --
James Morrow's pointedly merciless social satire "Auspicious Eggs" --
that's simply set in the future, without any alternate history element.
Regardless, there are several memorable stories in One Lamp.
To name a few: Dana Wilde's "The Green Moon" is a hauntingly poignant
meditation, tracking the effects of multiple historical tamperings on
memory; Paul Di Filippo's "And I Think to Myself, What a Wonderful World"
imagines a wildly different 1960s cultural explosion; and the anthology's
best selection, Jan Lars Jensen's epic and multiculturally savvy "The
Secret History of the Ornithopter", describes a twentieth century in
which a different kind of air-travel technology is developed. 
Originally published in
The Montreal Gazette, Saturday, 17 January 2004.
Claude Lalumière's Fantastic Fiction
is a series of
capsule reviews first published in the Saturday Books
section of The Montreal Gazette.
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