[Reprinted in Irreantum (in two parts), Winter 2000-2001 and Spring 2001 issues.]

There's a category in speculative fiction known as alternative history. Many of the best sf&f writers have been known to play the game. What would happen if the Nazis had won World War II? If someone went back in time and stopped Booth from assassinating Lincoln? Or -- in the case of this story by Mormon author Lee Allred -- if the Utah Mormon settlers, using repeating rifles developed by Jonathan Browning (father, presumably, of the famous gunsmith John Moses Browning), managed to hold off Johnston's Army for three years in Echo Canyon -- until, in fact, the larger world intervened in the form of the Civil War?

Allred's lengthy story -- technically a novellette or novella, I'm not sure which -- is superbly crafted, and seems (to be the best of my limited historical knowledge) thoroughly researched. The story is told from the point of view of a Captain Beck, who commands Sidney Johnston's artillery. He's a likeable character, a man of intelligence and integrity who despises Johnston but serves out of a sense of duty, despite some personal sympathies with the Mormons whom his sister has joined.

At the time the action starts, the army has been blocked in the canyons for three years. New supplies have arrived, however, including lighter repeating artillery and more men. Anxious that Robert E. Lee, who is sailing around the Horn to California with troops to attack the Mormons from the West, will get to Utah before he does, Johnston orders another attack, only to find the canyons all but abandoned and the Salt Lake Valley burned to the ground by the retreating Mormons. Johnston, Lee, and Grant (who has meanwhile attacked from the south) meet in the ruins of Salt Lake, only to face the prospect of an ongoing guerrilla war. And then Porter Rockwell comes in with newspapers from the east, telling of South Carolina's secession.

It's a fascinating tableau. Johnston is buoyant over the secession. Grant is firm for the Union. Both try to woo the Mormons, through Rockwell, to come in on their side. And Lee is troubled, uncertain where his duty lies. Allred has Peck say something that may not be true, but that we all have to wish could have been: that Lee, making a choice for the Union, could himself bring Virginia along with that choice. The story ends with Lee walking amid the granite blocks of the temple lot, trying to decide "whether those granite blocks lying there are the unfinished foundation of a new nation; or the tombstones of a foolish, lost cause."

This story has many excellences. I haven't studied the historical record to know if Johnston is as thoroughly slimy as Allred depicts -- lying and scheming and murdering through "duels" anyone who challenges him (including, in one scene we are shown, George McClellan) -- but in general, the story seems to have an authentic "feel": one of the hardest things to get right in an alternative history scenario. You get the sense that you're meeting Lee, and Grant, and above all the ordinary men, in a setting that's a bit different than the one we know -- but that they remain themselves as they might have been in that different setting.

It's tempting to try to imagine how the Civil War itself -- and Mormon history -- would have been different in the scenario Allred envisions: with virtually the entire army (and its best commanders) off in Utah when the secession occurs, and with the Mormons possessing the ability to block anyone from swift passage back up the canyons and across the plains to rejoin the main body of the nation. Would the chances have been increased, in this case, for a Mormon-controlled Deseret, in or out of the Union? Allred merely tempts us with these possibilities; still, it's precisely this kind of speculative twist that adds flavor to this variety of tale.

There's a deftly understated personal story here as well. Peck orders his men to rescue an injured Mormon, pinned under his dead horse. They engage in some conversation before the man, Reddick, succumbs to his wounds. Then, overseeing Reddick's burial, Peck finds a picture of his own sister in the man's locket. Talking to one of his own men afterwards, Peck asks, "He was my brother-in-law. Is that what the Army is for? Brother against brother?"

The Civil War was, in many ways, the world's introduction to the horrors of modern war: devastating artillery used against men, with massive losses; scorched-earth policies (remember Sherman's march to the sea); and utter destruction as the price of a war not simply between two nations but between two ways of life. In this story, Allred makes the Mormon War a bitter foreshadowing of all that -- one which its principals can clearly see. As Reddick tells Peck before his death, "It's our turn now, but yours is coming. Mark it well. This is your future, too." Or as Peck puts it to Lee: "Do you want Virginia to end up looking the way it does outside that window? Do you want a war of brother against brother, father against son?"

On top of all this, what makes this story perhaps the best single work of speculative Mormon fiction I have read is Allred's skillful drawing together of the twin themes of slavery and polygamy, and his thought-provoking linking of the causes of Deseret and the American South. As Allred's Lee puts it, "This new war we're about to fight will still be over the same questions this unfinished war here is being fought over. Who holds the higher allegiance: one's people or one's nation? Do you have the right to live in a manner your neighbor finds morally repugnant? Does he have the right to prevent you?"

There remains, of course, the significant difference that -- as Allred has Porter Rockwell argue -- "At least us Mormons enter our 'peculiar institution' by free consent -- we don't require chains or whips. We have no auction blocks." Still, this story brought home to me in a way I had never experienced before just how closely linked the Mormon troubles with the United States were with the conflict over slavery and the Civil War, both ideologically and historically. (Yet another spin could be brought into the mix by adding the early Saints' efforts to get the Federal government to intervene on their behalf within the state of Missouri, which was essentially denied on the basis of states' rights.) Reading Allred's story made me consider both Mormon and American history from a different perspective.

If this is the sort of thing you enjoy at all, I highly recommend this story. Even if it isn't your cup of tea, if you want to know what speculative fiction can contribute to Mormon literature, you need to read this.

jlangfor@pressenter.com