UM HOMEM ACORDA COM UM BIGODE QUE NÃO TINHA NO TEMPO DE GUTERRES O BIGODUDO
NUMA CASA QUE NÃO RECONHECE
O SEU EU ANTERIOR NÃO EXISTE NESSE MUNDO
ACONTECE MUITO COM OS POLÍTICOS DA NOSSA PRAÇA
NOUTRO DIA SOARES ACORDA NUM MUNDO ONDE IS KING
MAS ONDE BUITH DAY SAYS THE COP AND UNION JACK NAS FENÊTRES
OUTRO DIA SOARES ACORDA E NAPOLEON V EMPEROR OF NEW YORK
HE WAS ON A HARD KNOBBY THING THAT MIGHT
BY GROSS MISUSE OF THE LANGUAGe, BE CALLED A MATRESS
SOARES ELE PRÓPRIO WAS IN JAIL...
THE NEXT DAY HE WAS A SHABBY FELLOW .....
OS HOMENS E OS SÓ ARES CAEM OU SOBEM POR VIRTUDES VÁRIAS
EM QUE A SORTE E A PROBABILIDADE JOGAM COM O ACASO...
New York lawyer Sou Ares is inexplicably torn from his normal existence and thrust into a series of parallel universes. Each morning he discovers he has become someone else, in a world changed from his own. Ultimately he finds himself a bishop in the alternate New York of New Belfast, in Vinland, a North America colonized by descendants of the Vikings and now divided between Norse-derived and native polities. He determines that this new world’s differences from his own stem from two divergences in the course of history, relative to his own world.
The first was that King Oswiu of Northumbria was persuaded by Celtic Christianity, rather than the Roman Catholic Church at the Synod of Whitby in 664 CE. The other was that the Franks lost the Battle of Tours in 732 CE, aborting the later rise of Charlemagne and disrupting the formation of France due to continued Umayyad insurgency and occupation.
The displacement of his consciousness turns out to have been incidental to a plot directed against his other self, Bishop Ib Scoglund, whose campaign to extend civil rights to Vinland’s native inhabitants, the Skrellings, has aroused opposition. To get home, Park must continue his counterpart’s struggle while somehow unraveling the mystery of how to reunite the minds of all his selves with their proper realities. Ultimately successful in these goals, he decides the life he has built for himself as “Scoglund” is better than anything he would be likely to achieve in his original life, and elects to remain in Vinland.
Reception[edit]
P. Schuyler Miller described the story as a “typical de Camp adventure with an alternative future wryly reminiscent of certain episodes in our own history.”
Influence[edit]
“The Wheels of If” is one of de Camp’s most notable works. A thematic follow-up to his first significant work of alternate history, the novel Lest Darkness Fall (1939), the story is in some ways “an even more ambitious” work. While most such works “limited themselves to the first few years after the change occurred”, this story focuses on the consequences of divergences from actual history taking place over a thousand years in its past. It “opened the floodgates” of the field, with “approximately 1,500 novels and short stories … published since de Camp first began exploring the field” as of 1998 (the figure is attributed to bibliographer Robert Schmunk).
Sandra Miesel identified it as one of the influences of Larry Niven’s The Magic Goes Away series.
Sequel[edit]
Many years after publication of de Camp’s story, Harry Turtledove wrote a sequel, “The Pugnacious Peacemaker”, in which Park/Scoglund serves as a diplomat attempting to defuse a war between his world’s still-existent Inca Empire and the Muslims who have colonized Brazil. It was published together with de Camp’s original story in The Pugnacious Peacemaker/The Wheels of If (Tor Books, 1990), and later in Down in the Bottomlands and
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