Hi, everyone! I hope that you are ready for the next installment of Uchronia Lallena. Today, I will speak about one of the most important ingredients that any uchronia writer that prides oneself on that must understand for its correct use in his works: the Point of Divergence, also known as Jonbar Hinge or POD.
As you can suppose, the POD is the exact moment in which an uchronia separates from real history, causing, as a consequence, the change of many events derived from that moment. Many novels and other uchronic works normally begin their story speaking about that point, that moment in which everything changes, to show why the world is now different. I already demonstrated this idea in post #3, when I spoke about The Legacy of the Glorious: in our reality, the telegram that warned of the arrival of the Spanish agent that carried the official confirmation of Leopold zu Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen's candidacy to the Spanish throne was badly transcribed, stating it would arrive on June 26th, while in The Legacy of the Glorious the telegram warns that said arrival will take place on June 6th, a difference of twenty days that make the Congress of Deputies decide "King Leopold I of Spain" on June 8th instead of "King Amedeo I of Spain" on November 16th.
The first of the alternative names, Jonbar Hinge, comes from the novel The Legion of Time by Jack Williamson. In one of its short stories, called John Barr, the eponymous character is about to pick up an object on the floor, without knowing that from his choice depends the course of history and the future: if he picks up the magnet, his later actions will lead to the development of an utopic civilization called Jonbar, but if he picks the stone with his hands, the end will be the brutal tyranny of the state of Gyronchi.
The points of divergence, as described in all works, can be very subtle or very stunning. For example, it can be as subtle as a soldier of one side finding an important cigar box before the enemy does (which is the beginning of the TimeLine-191 saga written by Harry Turtledove) or as stunning as the Black Death becoming even more deadly and killing nearly all of the European civilization in the 14th century (as it happens in The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson).
Naturally, there are some PODs that are very favored by the uchronic writers. One of the most well known is the Axis victory in World War Two: for one reason or another, Germany, Italy, Japan and their minor allies manage to win against the four great powers they were facing (France, Great Britain, the Soviet Union and the United States) even though the numbers tell that the victory of the latter was more probable. The D-Day Landings in Normandy is one of the potential triggers of such a victory, as well as a German success in the development of the atomic bomb or a Soviet defeat in the Siege of Stalingrad. Unfortunately, many of these uchronias, particularly those with a POD later than 1943, are developed as if the Western Front (France, Italy, North Africa and the North Sea) were the only places where there was fighting, when most of it was concentrated in the Eastern Front (Soviet Union and rest of Eastern Europe), where it has been calculated that between 75% and 80% of the German army was fighting, while being methodically smashed by the force led by generals like Georgy Zhukov or Semyon Timoshenko.
Another popular POD is that a certain person is not born or dies at a young age (or the opposite, that someone that died young survived the event that caused his o her death), making the influence of their presence and actions to vanish. A small scale example is the film It's A Wonderful Life, directed by Frank Capra and with James Stewart as the main character, George Bailey. After several situations in which George sacrifices his happiness to help others, and finding himself in the troubling place of being arrested for a crime he has not committed, George tries to kill himself so that his family may collect his life insurance, but his guardian angel stops him, showing him what would have happend if he had not existed: his hometown would have fallen in the hands of the film's villain, and all of the good actions he made in his life would have never happened, turning the lives of all of his family and friends to become much worse than it was in reality (a curious event: the popularity of this film is owed to the fact that someone in the National Telefilm Association forgot to renew the rights to the film, allowing all TV networks to show this film only having to pay the writer's rights to the novel in which the film was based, at least until 1993, when the NTA's successor argued that the film was still under copyright as a work derived from said novel.
So, as you can see, any action you take or choice you make may change many things in the future. Who knows? Maybe, by the mere fact that I am writing this, or that you are reading it, will make the world become very different to what it could have been...
I await for you on next Tuesday so that you can keep learning about uchronias!
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