Lebow, Richard Ned
Entry updated 29 October 2021. Tagged: Author.
(1941- ) French-born political scientist, in US from infancy, prolific in his field for many years; he is of sf interest for two recent volumes. Forbidden Fruit: Counterfactuals and International Relations (2010) is a sustained analysis of Alternate History narratives, which he calls Counterfactuals, a term perhaps too easily understood to imply that historical facts are safely determinable; it is not frequently used in this encyclopedia. Archduke Franz Ferdinand Lives!: A World Without World War I (2014), which contains some fictional episodes, lucidly and comprehensively presents a range of possible histories of Europe if World War One had not occurred; he argues with some persuasiveness that Archduke Ferdinand's assassination, though traumatic, was arbitrary; and that war might not have been inevitable if he had in fact survived (as almost happened). Lebow also presents a capsule narrative of his own early life, which modifies the birth data previously given. He states in Archduke Franz Ferdinand Lives! that he was born in Paris in 1941 of refugee parents, who managed to initiate his dramatic escape from the Nazis and eventual arrival in New York the next year. His parents, being Jews, were murdered. [JC]
Richard Ned Lebow
born Paris: 1941
works (highly selected)
- Forbidden Fruit: Counterfactuals and International Relations (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2010) [nonfiction: pb/]
- Archduke Franz Ferdinand Lives!: A World Without World War I (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) [nonfiction with fictional interludes: hb/David Baldeosingh Rotstein]
links
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