Counterfactuals are largely the preserve of the reactionary Right, and Peace refuses the temptation to change the facts. He writes his retro-speculative fiction in the spaces between the recorded facts, extrapolating, inferring, guessing. Yet the question the reader cannot help but pose is: what would have happened if the miners had won? (A question that has added piquancy since subsequent revelations have shown that the government was much closer to defeat than was ever suspected at the time.) The narrative in which the Strike is now embedded - the only narrative in town, the story of Global Capital - has it that it was part of a receding ebb tide of organised working class insurgency. Defeat was inevitable, written into the historical passage from Fordism to post-Fordism. The hard Left are outflanked, fighting under the banner of the Past for "the history of the Miner. The tradition of the Miner. The legacies of their fathers and their fathers' fathers."

But such a narrativisation is question-begging, since the very credibility of this story relies upon the events of the strike unfolding as they did. What if they hadn't? Under the aspect of eternity, everything is inevitable and we are all Spinozists. But life has to be lived 'forward', making us Sartreans. Reading the book now inevitably dramatizes the tension between these two positions, between knowing that everything has already happened and acting as if it hasn't.