The twentieth-century world of To Climates Unknown is “without America” (technically, without what is today known as the United States of America) because the Mayflower, in 1620, never reached its destination. Instead, it was attacked by pirates from the Barbary Coast, and its crew and passengers enslaved. This is (again technically) actually not the Jonbar Point of this alternative history, because what had happened some time earlier, and seems to have caused the disruption in what we might as well call the time-stream, was the collapse of the bridge between the pier and the Golden Hind at the knighting of Sir Francis Drake. In “our” history, this, rather surprisingly, resulted in no fatalities. In the one Arturo Serrano charts in this complex and data-heavy novel, one man falls to his death. This is William Adams, in our world the first Englishman to reach Japan, and who became an advisor to the Shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu. He went on to help develop the Japanese fleet, and became instrumental in the expulsion of the Jesuits from Japan.

The result of this single death is a remarkable series of changes, including the introduction of Roman Catholic Christianity (or a form of it) to China and the development of three powerful colonising Empires to replace what in our timeline would be first the British Empire and then the eventual development of the USA as a Great Power. Elsewhere, the early death of René Descartes, in 1621 rather than 1650, means that there is no eighteenth-century Enlightenment in Europe, and the Iberian Catholic Empire survives the European conflicts we know as the Thirty Years War—but is menaced by a secret weapon developed by the Protestant savant Cornelis Drebbel. That invention was nothing more than a curiosity in our timeline, but here it is developed by the Danish rather than the English, and the consequences prove quite different.

In detailing all this, Serrano presents, with a great deal of skill, the complexities of this period, from the religious rivalries of the Thirty Years War and the scientific to the technological speculations of the time. As well as the inventions of Drebbel, we meet, for example, the Danish explorer Jens Munk, who failed in 1619 to find the North-West Passage through the Canadian Arctic to China and Japan and after a disastrous winter in Hudson Bay returned home. Here, he learned from local inhabitants and charted a route eastwards around the “old continent.” The economic power developed by the Danish results in the conquest of England and a new “Canutic Empire.” We meet also, at one point, the fascinating and enigmatic Queen Kristina of Sweden, who in “our” timeline was queen of Sweden from 1632 until she abdicated in 1654, and was acclaimed as one of the most learned women of the seventeenth century. She was probably even more interesting than the picture of her in this novel.

To return to the hijacking of the Mayflower: the absence of “our” developments in the North American continent means that a United States of America never comes together. We read that in 1917, the continent is a mosaic of ministates and colonies:

. . . from north to south, there were the Prairie Confederacy, the Newe-Nuwuvi League, and the Republic of Nuevo México, squeezed between the Viceroyalty of New Spain in the south, Novadania in the north, the Third Californian Empire along the entire west coast (the map didn’t acknowledge the Oregón Free State), and finally, in the east, Royal New France, a huge strip of land that extended all the way from Quebec, bulged around the Great Lakes, and followed down the Mississippi encompassing all of Louisiane. Farther to the east, the coast was dotted with a dozen little colonies, starting in the far north with an oddly-shaped peninsula that had formerly belonged to New France but now was called New Holland . . .  Then, to the south of New Netherland, was the rather unremarkable Realm of New Sweden, still under the old colonial rule but legally Canutic, and to the south of it lay the Dominion of Virginia, the only place that had been available for the English flee to after the occupation of their homeland.

When Serrano allows himself to go into story rather than make lists, much of what he describes is the sort of historical incident mentioned in the history books but rarely explored at any great length. (The acclaimed account of the Thirty Years War which I consulted to refresh my own knowledge of the period had, for instance, perhaps a single page in total on Queen Kristina).  Perhaps this rich plot’s most interesting character is the Japanese Hasekura Tsunenaga, who in “our” history returned to Japan a Christian convert in 1620 after heading an embassy to Pope Paul V, only to find an increasingly isolationist and anti-Christian Japan. Here, because the non-appearance of Adams in Japan retards the development of large ocean-going ships, he is forced to China, where he becomes caught up in internal politics (with the help of Ma Xiaobo, a female agent who secures her own power by passing herself off as a eunuch), and is able to secure freedom for Jesuit activity in China. His explanation to the Emperor Taichang of the term “Son of the Heavenly Lord” allows the wily Emperor to cement his power by fusing the theological term with Chinese nomenclature and declare himself “Son of Heaven,” enabling a third “Empire” to arise, resulting in something like the steady-state tripartite world conflict depicted in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949),  although here some at least of its colonised nations and peoples are able to develop an agency more effective than has taken place in our world: in effect, though partially, they experience their own “Enlightenment.”

This intellectual flowering, however, is much-delayed. The “Likasi Renaissance” is fuelled by an upsurge in scientific research in the comparatively liberally governed colony of Zaire in the 1930s. Serrano’s description, alas, skates over too much ground too quickly to be anything more than faintly comic: Rukamma, with Paolo Farnana (a version of the historical Congolese Paul Panda Farnana M’Fumu), reflects on her students who have discovered asteroids, developed the microscope, discovered that air had weight, invented Mendelian genetics, while she herself has discovered the linguistic relationships between families of languages. To cap it all, she then uses this insight to examine the relationship between species—and invents “evolution”:

But when she looked at the image again, a new chain of thoughts was put into motion. She applied the chalk to it again, retouching the smudge she’d made. Just like she’d done before, she drew a line under each simian head and, following habit, made them converge at a root. She liked the way it made sense. Beasts were related too. She thought of horses and donkeys, of lions and tigers. There had to be more branches elsewhere.

There is no reason why ideas could not have developed in this way in an alternative time-stream. What undercuts the passage is the lack of a convincing reason why they should. While Serrano offers some interesting and thought-provoking alternatives, in a novel which aims to argue the philosophical differences between histories—and, above all, engage with the nature of colonialism—it cannot be denied that the actual history (both in “our” timeline and the novel’s) is complex and knotty. There are many appearances here of characters who, like Paul Farnana, have “versions” in our world; others are missing. There seems to be no analogue of Marx or Marxism. We assume, because of the death of Descartes, that there was no Enlightenment, but in assuming such we veer very close indeed to the “Great Man” theory of history. In observing the hegemonic powers increasingly from the outside, Serrano allows unspoken voices to be heard, which is commendable. But the voices of those living within the hegemony are muted, and we have simply to believe that the complex and contradictory dynamics of Roman Catholic theocracy (for instance the role of the Jesuit order, the tradition of Humanists such as Erasmus) result in a system unchallenged and—perhaps in the absence of a Great Man?—unchallengeable over the centuries.

Furthermore, some of the changes to history seem plot-driven. The Barbary raid on Iceland in 1627 (led by Ivan Dirkie de Veenboer aka Suleyman Reis [d. 1620], who commanded an Algerian fleet of corsairs, though most of his crew were, like him, Dutch) takes place here in 1620—because the “ripples” of the initial earlier change bring it forward to coincide with the voyage of the Mayflower. So, also, Samuel Fuller—who becomes the castrato composer Samuele Fulla and is approached to help John and Bridget Bradford solve the mystery of their missing relatives—is not the historical Samuel Fuller, who was an adult on the Mayflower. Upon Fuller’s appearance, the focus moves from John and Bridget’s quest to Samuel’s relationship with Odahingum, a gender-fluid Ojibwe. While there is a rather tender touch to the suggestion of a troubled spirit who finds peace, there is also a sense of digression. The complexities of the novel become difficulties. The position of Novadania (essentially and interestingly modern Canada)—an ally to the “survivor peoples” but like many liberal allies “a friend with open ears and closed hands” —raises a number of questions about “liberal allies”, but we simply do not experience the country or its relationship to the more despotic hegemonies. The Arctic has been “burned away” by the Canutic Empire’s demand for timber and deliberate ice-melting to secure sea-routes across North Europe; hurricane seasons are getting worse and worse year by year; volcanoes have made Iceland uninhabitable; Pacific island nations have vanished . . .  but all of this this is merely reported.

In fairness, the large-scale sweep of history and counter-history inevitably raises questions which detract from the central theme, which is (Serrano has said in an interview ) “a hopeful dramatization of the motto E pluribus unum, the founding idea of the US,” which also aims at not simply “regurgitating the American myth.” The early decades of the book’s time-span, as noted above, are not the easiest of history for the average reader, and it is all too easy for Western readers, particularly, to read or be taught the lives of people like William Adams or Hasekura Tsunenaga without the context of the societies they encountered.

This is a difficult issue to confront. But to create a genuinely historical alternative-history novel of this type would have resulted in something much longer, much baggier, and probably much fuller of the misreadings and generic errors Serrano tells us in his “Author’s Afterword” that he was determined to avoid. What happened to the hugely important Ottoman Empire, for instance, is hardly featured, although late in the book we hear of it succumbing to China. The word “Africa” appears only three times, and we must assume that the European scrabble for colonies simply divides the continent among different rulers (we learn that Zaire is taken by the Portuguese rather than the Belgians, to become a somewhat less dystopian colony). On the other hand, many of the characters (John and Bridget Bradford, Queen Kristina, Samuel Fuller, Ma Xiaobo, Hasekura Tsunenaga, Neema Farnana) find their wishes and goals thwarted by the underlying movements of greater historical forces. This is not a comforting read, as characters seem randomly killed off, or disappear from the narrative as we jump forward in increasingly large spans of time; but it is arguably a much more interesting and challenging one—and one which runs counter to any nascent whiff of the “Great Man” theory that may otherwise have been present in these pages.

It is certainly a reading which confronts that sort of popular Alternative History (found in several episodes of Dr Who, for example) which results in a sudden hand-waving triumph for the underdogs as the “real” history surges through to victory. Except, of course, that in the end it does something very similar, with what seems to be an act of wish-fulfilment: the establishment of something which Serrano seems to think is a kind of United States, with a similar moral undertone to that with which “our” United States” began, but with a much greater understanding of the nature of colonialism. Serrano is clearly trying not to write the kind of AH where things are “put right” in that simplistic way, and instead be much more nuanced about the complexities of history. Out of this admirable approach, however, comes a sense that the “right” time-stream is some sort of Platonic ideal, in which after the revolution things will be better.

And it’s on that issue that the novel fails to deliver what Serrano in his interview hopes for. For instance, at one point, the Alliance of Survivor Peoples votes on whether to use the super-weapon developed from the research of Neema Farnana, daughter of Paul and Rukamma. The list of voters gives little sense of how different these cultures are from each other, and although the point of the episode is precisely that the “Alliance” is not a unified network, we are given little to distinguish the colonised and subordinate nations of “this” world from ours, and little sense that the Empires and proto-Empires of colonised continents might have developed in different directions were the hands and minds grasping for their resources different. Zaire, we understand, is an “outrageously freethinking and therefore papally damned” colony, but its actual relationship with its colonisers is obscured. It is difficult to know why the subordinate societies of this time-stream are able to challenge colonial hegemonies more successfully than ours, other than the fact that the author wants them to. We see, throughout the development of the novel, an examination of Empire and the coming-together of a counter-narrative which is finally articulated as “a space where it doesn’t matter where you come from or what you speak or what you look like”.  But this counter-narrative is eventually offered as a threat. Be nice, or we will unleash a nuclear holocaust upon you. “Live under our rules, and you’ll be surprised at how much freer you’ll be.”

We have to assume that the character Gilberto, for example, really believes in his “dream of kindness between humans  . . .  [and] hope for an uncorrupted generation to take over from the ruling one,” and that his threat of mass destruction if this dream doesn’t become reality is genuinely altruistic rather than the threat of a kinder, gentler Empire:

“I hate to do it to you, but if we don’t do this, you’re not going to stop. Unless you’re done killing us, in which case we’d love to hear it. Are you done killing us? Wouldn’t you like there to be some less horrible way for us to deal with each other? At some point you have to get tired of this, because Heaven knows we are.”

But it is hard to escape the impression that anxieties about whether there actually is or could be an “uncorrupted generation” are being waved away, and that Gilberto’s version of “this will hurt me more that it hurts you” does not in fact offer much hope for humanity.

What has made Serrano’s history different enough from ours to enable his characters to move towards an essentially hopeful conclusion, then, is not evident from the text of this ambitious, at times passionate, but underdetermined novel. In the end, what we carry from it is the memory of our own relatively unsung pioneers—such as William Adams, Hasekura Tsunenaga, Kristina of Sweden, Cornelis Drebbel, Jens Munk, Mysore Hiriyanna, or Paul Panda Farnana M’Fumu— and what they might have achieved in different circumstances, rather than the worked-out political engagement with the nature of colonialism that the novel initially promised.