Pavane

Keith Roberts

1966

This is touted as one of the great Alternate Histories.

Papists had shot Good Queen Bess and in the ensuing anti-catholic riots the Spanish Armada put an end to Anglicanism and the other Protestant heresies.

Europe found itself locked into a new Dark Age with the Church controlling all scientific advances. But in the renamed Angle Land there were the initial stirrings of revolution as the South West chafed under the restrictions imposed on it by outsiders.

Told in a series of six movements from the mid nineteen sixties to an undisclosed future, the underlying disquiet of the people is examined and teased out in a wonderful tour-de-force of language. The stories are sort of linked by the history of Strange and Sons, hauliers and their mighty land engines that hauled loads between the various townships of the West Country, from a young John Strange taking over the company to his death as the undisputed King of Hauliers and how the family interacted with the High and Mighty and the not-so-high-and-mighty. But we also see the mysteries of the Old Ones and the mysteries of the Signallers Corp, and a poor fisher girl saves a smugglers’ ship from the hidden guns of the Pope’s army. But it’s Lady Eleanor’s fate after the fall of Corf Castle that ignites the people into the revolution that will sweep away the power of an over sure Church Militant and free them to make the scientific advances that would improve the lives of all the people immeasurably.

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This is part of the Science Fiction Masterworks series.

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