The fact checkers at Macmillan did a great job catching me out, but sometimes I outfoxed them and slipped an error into my book Impossible Histories. I realized (eventually) that I should keep some kind of publicly available list of these triumphs over mere fact, which some people call errors. Feel free to send me additional examples (but be nice!). Links to the index and bibliography, both of which you can print out and, in conjunction with these errata, paste in to your copy of IH, are below. (If you want a personalized bookplate to paste in as well, just write a review.)
•p. 36 “the first recorded outbreak in Greenland is not until 1430 or so”: I double-checked my source (Donald Hopkins’s Princes and Peasants: Smallpox in History) and this is indeed mostly what he writes, but you’ll notice it makes no sense with the narrative I’ve been weaving. How could there be a smallpox wave recorded in 1430 when the last known contact between Greenland and Europe was 1409? It’s not like we’ve dug up some local Greenland record, complete with dates. For that matter, how did the smallpox get there?
I assume Hopkins was estimating based on some archaeological dating (the word “recorded” is my colorful addition), and it just happened to mismatch the historical record by some decades. There are various possibilities for how the smallpox may have arrived—either it was there before but lurking asymptomatically among isolated hermits (?) for a while or a ship unknown to written history arrived later on (which is hardly impossible).
Regardless, it would clearly be more consistent and responsible for me to to drop the “recorded” and revise this sentence to “the first known outbreak in Greenland is not until the early fifteenth century.”
•p. 68 “We know that Atahualpa…”: At least this one isn’t my fault, but…what is up with that font??!?
•p. 260 “the siege of 1558 had been”: This is the biggest blunder in the book. It should be “the siege of 1529,” which sounds like a small error, considering, but it requires rephrasing of the next few paragraphs, in which I harp upon 1558 again and again, building castles on what I had thought was the bedrock of dating, but was actually the sand of error.
•p. 303 “the end of the humanity”: A small typo. Obvs. this should be “the end of humanity.”
•p. 322 “as late as 1789 in Samuel Johnson’s translation of A Voyage to Abyssinia”: Of course, by 1789 Johnson had been dead for five years. His translation actually came out in 1735. I don’t know what I was thinking.
•p. 381 “(in the sense that it involved committing the entire US arsenal”: Just need to close those parentheses with a ).
•p. 393 “Diodorus Siculus…(XX.40§41)”: This citation seems to be an absurdity; that’s not how D.S. (or later editors) divides up the book. I should have put XX.40§7, or even XX.40.7, with no 41 in sight.
•passim: Also, it turns out that half the book is just fictional accounts of hypothetical “what-if” worlds that never happened! Who let that slide?
Impossible Histories Index
For space reasons (they say), the index for Impossible Histories got cut, but I think indices are super useful, and I want to encourage all readers to print this out and stick the folded pages in the back of their copies of IH. Corrections welcome!
Impossible Histories Bibliography
For reasons of space, Impossible Histories lacks a traditional works cited section. You can print this out and insert it into your copy, right next to the index.