‘Delenda Est’: Counterfactual and Narratological Obligations in Poul Anderson’s Gerundive History

This chapter explores some of the rules and laws under which counterfactual narratives operate. It investigates the obligations limiting the imagination of that which should or ought to happen in such speculation about the past – including the tendency for the actual historical timeline to reassert itself at some point in the (hi)story. In particular, it reassesses the six criteria of good counterfactuals proposed by Tetlock and Belkin: clarity, co-tenability, consistency, and projectability. It takes Poul Anderson’s 1955 short story ‘Delenda Est’ as its case study – a time travel counterfactual in which Anderson’s Time Patrol discovers a world in which ‘it looks as if something upset the Roman empire and the Celts took over’. Blending close reading of Anderson’s text with detailed consideration of the wider theoretical issues that it stages, it demonstrates that ‘Delenda Est’ exhibits an aptly anticipatory regard for the rules and obligations of counterfactualism.