The alternate history subgenre of fiction explores the implications of a particular historical event unfolding differently, resulting in a vastly different reality from our own. According to the American Historical Association, alternate histories provide an intriguing window into how people understand their pasts, with authors reimagining events that serve as crucial turning points and shape their national mythologies. Alternate history works emphasise the importance of historical events by depicting a world that is nearly unrecognisable, all because the course of history has been altered.
One such work is the upcoming comedy-thriller novel The Gate of the Burnt One by Philip G. Cohen, to be published on May 24, 2024. His second work of fiction after 2022's Infiniti, The Gate of the Burnt One imagines a world where the Moors were not expelled from Spain in 1492. Instead, the Caliphate was able to expand across Europe, conquering Spain, France, and Italy, resulting in an Islamic State of Europe in the present day.
However, The Gate of the Burnt One frames the story in a unique and humorous way. The alternate reality is depicted in the pages of a screenplay for a movie being produced and shot by the book's main characters. The story begins with a film crew in Morocco's Sahara Desert encountering numerous obstacles in their production – the director has overdone it on local kif, the scriptwriters have abandoned the set, and the lead actor has barricaded himself inside his trailer.
Tinctorio Indigolin, a businessman who has made billions from cryptocurrency, agrees to finance the stalled production in an attempt to leverage a tax loss, all the while dodging attempts on his life by an Irish assassin. The filming resumes, and, each night, a captivating screenplay created by a mysterious writer appears on set, page by page, depicting the alternate world where the Reconquista never succeeded. As the screenplay unfolds, it transforms the lives of everyone involved in the film. Various twists, assassinations, and narrow escapes unfold, mirroring the collapse of the Moorish Kingdoms.
Similar to Cohen's previous book, The Gate of the Burnt One includes a flicker illustration on the upper right corner of the alternate pages of the book. The series of 121 drawings by Amy Rose Tyler depicts a man walking through a gate where he is consumed by fire and yet he walks out of the other side unscathed.
The book's title is a translation of Bab Mahrouk, the western gate of the old walled city of Fes, Morocco, which was built during the Almohad Caliphate, which controlled most of the Iberian Peninsula, then known as Al-Andalus. Cohen, who claims Cadaqués in Spanish Catalonia as his second home, is passionate about the region's history, examining a world where the 800-year Islamic rule of Spain persisted into the modern day.
Cohen is gearing up to publish his third book, Codex, an erudite thriller which includes a dramatic reinterpretation of the events covered by the New Testament.
