Erik Svane is an interesting person. Essayst and writer, a cosmopolitic upbringing, he is becoming famous as being the author, together with Dan Greenberg, of a comic series, Géneral Leonardo. The weird thing in this series - and the thing that interests The Uchronicles, is its basing itself on an alternate history point of divergence: Leonardo da Vinci succeeds in building his strange warmachines and in changing the course of 16th century. Here comes an interview with Erik.



Erik Svane, where do you come from and when did you start when your alternate history (AH) interest?


Well, my father is from Copenhagen and my mother is from New York, so I have dual citizenships, i.e., I am Danish-American, although (due to my father being a diplomat) I was born in… Prague! I cannot say I am interested so much in alternate history (AH) per se as I am in simply well-written, well-researched books that bring pleasant surprises. For instance, of course you know that two of the most common scenarios in AH is how would today's world be had Hitler won World War II or had the South won the American Civil War (almost invariably, it turns out that the North lost at the battle of Gettysburg).
Now, two of the earliest AH books I read were Ward Moore's "Bring the Jubilee" and David Poyer's "The Shiloh Project". It so happens that I find the latter book much more interesting not only because Ward Moore's story is mainly a time travel history but because in Poyer's "Shiloh Project", there is so much effort in trying to make the CSA (and the whole continent and, indeed, the whole world) alive real: whereas Ward Moore has an idealized South where President Robert E Lee freed the South's slaves and the CSA is doing nothing if not thriving and (what remains of) the US is simply a basket case, Poyer also has the slaves freed, but living in a South-Africa-type apartheid; when not rioting, the blacks try to escape to the North — I should say to the rump USA — by crossing a Berlin-type wall across the American continent, which naturally leads to a Cold War atmosphere reigning between South and North (or between the CSA and the rump USA). In addition, there is not only tension between Northerners and Southerners as well as between blacks and whites, but also between the South's reigning aristocrat class that are descended from the antebellum planters and the region's so-called "poor white trash".
Finally, in "The Shiloh Project", you keep unearthing small "treasures" such as an airship called the President McClellan (suggesting, albeit not stating outright, the — hardly illogical — premise that President Abraham Lincoln lost the election of 1864) or a Second-World-War-type conflict between the USA and Japan (the Shiloh Project of the title refers to the North's building of a super-bomb to drop on Yokohama) or, yet again, France's government of the 1860s continuing to our day (and the French living under the rule of Napoleon VII). It's the same delight you find in Robert Harris's "Fatherland" (to use the second most common scenario in AH), in which, more than halfway through, you suddenly find out that the President Kennedy that we have been reading about and that an aging Adolf Hitler has been opposing in the early 1960s is, first of all, not John F. Kennedy but Joe Kennedy and later, not JFK's elder brother Joe Kennedy Jr but both men's (equally aging) father, Joe Kennedy Sr.

What is the historical character that intrigues you the most?

There are many, including Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill…

Why did you choose comics?

Should I say, "I didn't choose comics, comics chose me" (laughter)? I have always loved comics, but not just any comics. Like with books, films, and AH stories (in any medium), I like stories that are believable and well-researched, that bring pleasant surprises, and that are a delight to read. My favorite authors include Carl Barks (I had the pleasure of interviewing the creator of Uncle Scrooge 14 years ago), Harvey Kurtzman (Two-Fisted Tales), Jean-Michel Charlier (Blueberry), and Goscinny (Astérix) and they are the creators I hope to emulate.

Did you ever write any AH story that did not become a comic strip?

Well… when I was a teenager, I imagined a story in which Denmark became a dictatorship and (with the help of… Belgium!) proceeded to conquer all of Europe, visiting untold disasters upon the conquered peoples. This tongue-in-cheek story was not long, probably less than a dozen pages, it was full of winks and nods to current affairs, and I used it only to send in letters to my friends over a period of three or four letters.

Leonardo's rise in your stories is very interesting. According to you, how come he did not succeed in most of his warfare machines?

In real life, you mean? Not in the comics I write for Dan Greenberg and for the Éditions Paquet? Well, human and animal muscle was not strong enough to make the machines advance for a sufficient amount of time, so we had to wait for the industrial revolution for machines of that type to be invented.



The character you describe is a very open and Renaissance-like one. Is that your favourite period?

Not really. My preferred period is the modern era, starting from the 1750s, or thereabouts. Specifically, I prefer the Civil War and the Second World War eras. I am now writing a western starting right before the Civil War, but there is no AH involved.

Could you imagine an AH journey of Leonardo in the New World together with Christopher Columbus?

How did you know?! How did you realize that in my private notes for volume III (the remaining volume is yet to be published), Leonardo da Vinci meets Cristoforo Colombo!? Nobody knows this, not even my artist, Dan Greenberg, not even my editor, Pierre Paquet, but in the third volume, (a young) Leonardo da Vinci meets up with (a young) Christopher Columbus!! Although the meeting is brief, and although there is not talk about traveling together on a voyage of discovery, the idea was to have meet up so that, after the current three-volume opus, a relationship could be explored for a future series…

Do you think AH could have a future in Europe as a literary subgenre?


Again, I think it is more a sci-fi subgenre than a literary subgenre per se, but we can hope that this will change.

Science fiction and AH as literary genres have often to make up a sort of "camouflage" in a novel in order to be better sold, why does this happen?


Not that I want to repeat myself, but again, believable and well-researched stories that bring pleasant surprises and that are a delight to read is the most important ingredient. Once you have this, you can branch out into any medium or any direction you want, I believe. Remember George Lucas. Sci-Fi was in no way a major film category before 1977, but then a movie came out that brought wondrous surprises and was a delight to see. And it has been one of Hollywood's major genres ever since. What I found out, however, about a graphic novel like Charlier and Jean Moebius Giraud's "Blueberry" or a movie like "Star Wars" is that I would look up all kinds of other western comics and check out all kinds of other sci-fi movies, and almost inevitably, they would not make the mark and be disappointing.

What are you working at at the moment?


I am writing a real book on the differences between the old world and the new (Europe and America), and I am preparing scripts for other graphic novels. Leonardo da Vinci being Italian, both I and Dan Greenberg would be very happy if we could find an Italian editor for "General Leonardo".




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