Jonbar adj.

Almost certainly the best-known work set in a world where Hitler won the war is Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (1962) [...] In Dick’s case the ‘Jonbar hinge’, the point at which the story departs from genuine history, is an attempted assassination of President-elect Roosevelt in 1933.

Time War is an exciting new tactical level game that begins in the future. A future where governments, using their ability to send men and equipment into time, fight their wars and vie for power in the past. Highly evolved computers predict the ‘Jonbar Junctions’ (Critical moments in history) and what actions can be taken by the time forces to create a favorable change in the power balance of their own time.

A gate between universes is called a nexus, also a junction, portal, or star-gap. [...] Nexi are intimately connected with Jonbar junctions. These are critical moments when several alternate worlds could arise. Nexi are often found before pivotal, world-shaking events.

[Author John] Whitbourn is brave to have tackled the problem. He has put considerable thought into the changes wrought by his deviations and found interesting ways of conveying them to the reader. He has perhaps been a little over-ambitious especially as there is more than one turning point (jonbar hinge). Not content with a different time line, this world is one where elves (nasty, vicious creatures if you believe the stories) lurk in the extant ancient forests. And there is magic.

These Worlds to escape into—created at a time when the discovery of the planet was nearing completion, and the hegemony of the imperialist West over lesser tribes was no longer an unquestionable given—are clearly ancestral to the kind of alternate history story S M Stirling wishes to write, the kind of adventure in which sf-style journeys to lost worlds, or to planets where topless girl warriors fall in love with you, are replaced (it is a simple paradigm shift) by Jonbar Points which bifurcate reality into histories that are no longer ‘fixed’, playgrounds where adventure is still possible.

[Howard:] Conqueror is very sfnal in that it gets the reader to ask the question ‘What if...?’ Alternate or stillborn realities seem to be a theme that you can never quite keep way from, so what jonbar hinges are the most important in Time’s Tapestry? [Baxter:] The basic conceit in Time’s Tapestry is that we’re working through historical epochs, each of which is subject to meddling from the then future, our near present. So the whole thing is full of jonbar hinges.

‘I mean, it’s only a theory, what do I know, but I think certain moments in time are fixed. Tiny, precious moments. Everything else is in flux, anything can happen, but those certain moments, they have to stand.’ If this is correct (and he [sc. the Tenth Doctor] admits it’s only a theory), then there are apparently ‘Jonbar Struts’ as well as ‘Hinges’, with the vast majority of events in space-time ‘in flux, anything can happen’, implying that they are causally or historically less significant than ‘Jonbar’ events.

As O’Toole perspicaciously demonstrates, the Second World War constitutes the Jonbar hinge of the Brexit imaginary, constructing a mental space where national and personal identities are configured by binary oppositions: victor and loser, powerful and powerless, and in O’Toole’s formulations, ‘dominant and submissive, colonizer and colonized’.