The Crystal Decanter Competition 2005

Let's play a game of 'what if...'.

What if something had turned out different?

It could be war:

• What if Germany had won WWI;
• or Napoleon had prevailed at Waterloo;
• or Charles I had defeated Cromwell;
• or Harold defeated William;
• or Boudicca had driven the Romans into the sea;
• What if the South had defeated the North in the US civil war;
• or Japan had never attacked Pearl Harbour;
• or Lee Harvey Oswald had missed that fateful day in Dallas;
• or Chiang Kai Shek had defeated Mao Tse Tung;
• or the South African government had executed Nelson Mandela;

It could be science:

• What if Alexander Fleming had kept a clean laboratory;
• or Darwin had visited the Galapagos and seen only a hopeless jumble, rather than the beauty of evolution;
• What if Newton had been so distracted by his religious writing that he forgot to develop the laws of motion;
• or Marie Curie had not given her life studying X-Rays;
• Suppose the Black Death had remained endemic.

It could be society:

• What if the Lady Chatterley case had ended in defeat for the publisher;
• or The Pill had never been invented;
• or Stuart Sutcliffe had never died;
• or the Corn Laws had never been repealed;
• or Slavery had never been abolished;
• Adam Smith had never identified the 'hidden hand';
• Britain's agricultural landscape had never been enclosed;
• the Industrial Revolution had taken hold first in Greece, not Victoria's Britain.
• What if West Germay had won the 1966 World Cup?

What if writing fiction was made a criminal offence in 1400 and the law never repealed.

Or it could be something completely different. Something much more important.

Or much less. The choice is yours and all history is your playground.

There are only three rules:

1. The story must take place predominantly in the present day (so you need to work through the implications of even a small change in history);
2. The physical laws of nature cannot be changed; this is alternate history NOT alternate reality (so even if Darwin had not discovered evolution, it still exists - we just don't know about it);
3. By the end of the story the reader must, of course, know what part if history has been altered (or have enough information to work it out).

The item must, of course, be a work of fiction.

But that does not necessarily mean it has to be a short story in the usual sense. It could, for instance, be a faux-biography, or faux history or perhaps an imaginary series of news stories from The Times, or an interview with somebody who, by all rights, ought to be dead - or never been born

1500 words maximum, but that is a MAXIMUM. If your story requires less it will not be penalised.

Hand entries in at VWC meetings or send them to:

Ian Cundell
XXXXXXXXX
St Albans
Herts
XXXXXXX
(no longer needed to be public)

Send the story, under a pseudonym, in an envelope.

Send another envelope with the £2 entry fee and the real name to associate with the pseudonym.

As usual there will be a separate award of the best (or worst) pseudonym.

Deadline for entries: 18 May 2005