Leviathan (Westerfeld Novel) - Historical Liberties

Historical Liberties

The novel is an alternate history story of events around World War I. The author closes the book with an explanation of what events were real and which were fictional.

• In reality, the Archduke and the princess were shot while riding in a coach during the day. In the novel, they survive this attempt, only to be poisoned that night.
• It was once speculated that the Austrian and/or German government arranged for the death of the Archduke either as an excuse for war, or for their distaste for his politics. This theory was discredited much later in the 20th century.
• Archduke Franz Ferdinand actually had three children, not one, and none of them were named Aleksandar. However, like Alek, these children did not inherit their father’s land or title due to the nature of their mother’s heritage.
• The Archduke really did petition the Pope to have the conditions of his morganatic marriage adjusted, but in reality he was unsuccessful.
• In the novel, Charles Darwin not only made discoveries into evolution and biology, but also DNA and genetics and how to manipulate them, which is what allowed the creation of the fabricated creatures used by the British. Exactly how fabricated creatures are made is never explained. In reality, DNA was not discovered until the 1950s.
• Dr. Nora Barlow was a real person, the granddaughter of Charles Darwin. However she was not a zoologist, nor a diplomat.
• Dr. Barlow’s pet, Tazza, a thylacine, is a real animal and would have been alive at the time of the story. They were hunted to extinction by humans, and the last known thylacine died in 1936.
• The first armored fighting vehicle did not enter battle until 1916, and used treads like farm tractors instead of legs, a fact that Alek openly mocks in the novel as "ridiculous".
• The fabricated animals called "Huxleys" are named after Thomas Henry Huxley, a renowned biologist known as Darwin's Bulldog for his advocacy of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution.