WSJournal. The Yellow Prose of Texas? Secession Movement Blooms in Fiction.

Alternate-History Authors Explore Putting The 'Lone' Back in the Lone Star State.

The Yellow Prose of Texas? Secession Movement Blooms in Fiction

Alternate-History Authors Explore Putting The 'Lone' Back in the Lone Star State

"The Secession of Texas" by Darrell Maloney of San Antonio envisions an independent Texas with its own border patrol, guarding against people trying to sneak into the country illegally—from Oklahoma.

"Lone Star Daybreak" by Erik L. Larson of Houston tells the story of recruits in the Texas Defense Force, a militia that protects the separatist state from Yankee armies. "Yellow Rose of Texas" by Dennis Snyder describes a U.S. saddled with $22 trillion in debt , a defanged military and a leftist president who promises to remove religion from public life, prompting an armed and economically vibrant Texas to declare that it has had enough.

"It's not a comedy by any means," says Mr. Snyder, a pastor at a nondenominational church in Michigan who has never been to Texas. "The president basically says he is going to rewrite the Constitution when he takes office," he says. "Texas realizes he is going to take us into bondage and rebels."

None of the authors say they actually support secession; they just think it makes for a provocative story line. Texas secession fiction falls into a long line of what-if books exploring alternate versions of history.

Winston Churchill contributed to a 1931 collection of essays called "If It Had Happened Otherwise" with an entry envisioning how World War I might have been avoided—if the Confederacy had won the Civil War.

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Newt Gingrich added to the genre with a series of novels he co-wrote with William R. Forstchen, including "1945." It sees the Nazis temporarily winning World War II in Europe, triggering a Cold War with the U.S., which had fought Japan.

Some alternate-history novels have envisioned a separate Texas, notably 1990's "The Difference Engine" by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, which explores what might have happened to the world had computers been perfected in Britain a century earlier. In the book, Texas and California morph into independent nations.

But the suggestion that Texas might break away has only recently become a common plotline. Some authors say their interest was spurred by recent events, such as Texas Gov . Rick Perry's remark in 2009 that "if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people you know, who knows what might come out of that" (Mr. Perry has repeatedly said he doesn't favor secession).

John Buescher, a researcher at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, has championed alternate histories as a way to teach real history.

"For a history geek, there are certain moments when all sorts of things can happen and the world would be totally different," Mr. Buescher says. Of the current Texas fancy, he adds, "Texas is feeling its oats economically these days, and there is a sense in the Zeitgeist that Texas would be pretty interesting if it really was its own nation."

Secession fiction isn't burning up the best-seller lists. Mr. Snyder's book, which came out in February, is produced by a small Christian imprint he owns called Concerning Life Publishing. Mr. Maloney published his novel himself in January. Mr. Larson's book was released by an Oklahoma company called Tate Publishing & Enterprises last month. All are available on Amazon.com AMZN +1.33% .

"I'm not getting rich off of it, that's for sure," says Mr. Maloney, who is retired from the Air Force. He says he is working on a sequel.

One book with a major publisher, St. Martin's Press, is "Don't Mess with Travis" by Bob Smiley, which envisions a Texas governor driven to secession after he discovers a federal plot to siphon off the state's natural resources and ship them to California.

"We wanted to show the absurdities on both sides of the aisle," says Mr. Smiley, a television writer in Los Angeles and former researcher for the late William F. Buckley Jr. Of secession, he adds, "It obviously remains something people in Texas think could and maybe even should happen."

Most Texans don't want to secede, according to a Public Policy Polling survey in January. But Texans are fond of pointing out that the state fought for independence once before—and won—after a ragtag army led by Sam Houston defeated Mexican Gen. Antonio López de Santa Anna in 1836. The short-lived Republic of Texas joined the U.S. in 1845.

Most scholars agree that it is now impossible for any state to secede, after the Civil War and an 1869 Supreme Court decision involving Texas that found that the nation was "indissoluble." Still, some Texas nationalists continue to argue otherwise, and a hardy few even meet occasionally at Washington-on-the-Brazos, where delegates signed the Texas Declaration of Independence in 1836.

Alan R. Erwin learned how seriously some took the idea in 1979, when he wrote a pioneering work of Texas secessionist fiction, "The Power Exchange"—and found that some Texans considered him the leader of a real revolution. The truth was more prosaic. Mr. Erwin, a member of the state's Public Utility Commission, was merely bored. He says he wrote much of the novel, released by Texas Monthly Press, during long-winded hearings concerning Southwestern Bell , T +0.08% the telephone company owned by AT&T.

"I kept telling them, 'You need to read my book, because we don't win,'" Mr. Erwin says of the actual secessionists.