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Could it have happened otherwise?
This witty fantasia is woven round an ingenious
rewriting of history by a supercomputer
recording the candid memoirs of King-Emperor
George Akbar I of Anglo-India. In 1848
the Chartist revolution in Britain and the
uprisings in Europe have replaced Capitalism
by the ideal socialist Utopia of which nineteenth
century reformers dreamed-but is it? A
Darwinian luddism has confined new inventions
to a benevolent monopoly of Scientists who only
release what is good-or do they? World peace.
co-operation and goodwill among nations are
maintained- but how? In 1949 young George.
trained up to be a good constitutional and
proletarian monarch, leads a popular counter
revolution to restore Capitalism and give the
world consumerist prosperity and happiness
but does it? Does the computer's alternative
history ~son show us how we could solve the
me~of human aggression. class. colour and
~~derconflict, poverty. overpopulation. the
~.-~:.m.tsuse of technology. the destruction of the
· Earth ? These variations on the themes of
~ho_n. Brave Ne~~World, and The Apple
Can ~.dt<t~hfEl1l't}voking as well as amusing.
And any historian who douhts the logic of this
alternative sequence of events is invited to
question the computer itself.
Is ours the best of all possible Worlds?
£10.25net
THE EXTRAORDINARY REIGN
OF KING LUDD
ROY LEWIS
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an historical tease
THE PATTEN PRESS
First published in 1990 hy
The Patten Press
The Old Post Office
Newmill, Penzance Cornwall TR20 4XN
® Roy Lewis 1990
ISBN 1 872229 20 4
Manufacture co-ordinated in UK hy Laserhacks
20 Shepherds Hill
London N6 SAH
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may he repro
duced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or
hy any means, electronic mechanical. photocopying, recording or
otherwise, without the prior permission of the Patten Press.
Think rather of the pack-horse
on the down,
And dream of London, small and
white and dean,
The clear Thames bordered by its
gardens green.
William Morris
Socialism will develop in all its
phases until it reaches its own
extremes and absurdities. Then
once again a cry of denial will
break from ... the revolutionary
minority and again a mortal
struggle will begin in which so
cialism will play the role of con
temporary conservatism and will
be overwhelmed in the subse
quent revolution.
Alexander Herzen,
From the Other Shure 1849
Indeed, it will perhaps not be
long before even Antarctica will
enable thousands of miners to
earn an ample livelihood.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit,
the Errors of Socialism 1988
·It all came different,' the Mock
Turtle repeated thoughtfully. 'I
should like to hear her repeat
something now. Tell her to
begin.'
Alice in Wonderland
AN INVITATION
Could it have happened otherwise? Could history have taken
a different course at one or other of its nodal turning
points? Or is history determined by factors beyond men's
power to exert free will, to make real choices? So that, from
the beginnings of life on earth Napoleon was destined to lose
at Waterloo, Britain at Saratoga, the Mencheviks to the
Bolsheviks in 19 I 7?
Can we ever learn from history? Was the failure of
socialism in our time inevitable? Could it have succeeded
under different conditions, with different leaders? Could it
succeed at some future time?
Could history be an experimental science, in which, with
out the use of an imaginary time machine, we could recall
the past and alter the givens, the data, at some crossroads of
events, and study a different outcome?
Could there be an Institute of Experimental History
(Cliometrics) equipped with a new RISC supercomputer im
plemented with qualllum well technology using gallium ar
senide: so that its godlike memory could be programmed
with all the facts, technical and prosopographical, the
choices facing all men and women at a given juncture; be
given some new inputs, and asked to rerun the consequential
events of a century or so? Then we could observe what
happier things, or unhappier, would have occurred: and so
learn to manage our affairs more wisely henceforward.
There is: here at the Institute we have input a victory for
socialism instead of for capitalism in the revolution that
swept Europe in 1848, and replayed history and its curious
variations, from that time to this. Such a computer has,
admittedly, developed its own way of presenting its findings:
it has chosen to do so through the eyes, memories and
vantage point of a single personage, whose life story and
ordeal is told in this printout.
Any historian who cavils at the computer's deductions,
working from the premises loaded into its memory, is invited
to formulate a question to be input for its explanation. What
follows owes nothing to the caprices of fiction. It is a
determined sequence of events: proof of a theorem, step by
step, subject only to logical refutation.
