Alternate history (also alternative history, allohistory, althist, or simply A.H.) is a subgenre of speculative fiction in which one or more historical events happen differently than they did in reality.Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction (Oxford University Press, 2007) notes the preferred usage is "Alternate History", which was coined in 1954; "Alternative History" was first used in 1977, pp. 4–5.
As conjecture grounded in historical fact, alternate history stories explore "what if?" scenarios about pivotal events in human history and depict outcomes diverge significantly from the historical record. These works typically feature a point of divergence (POD) from recorded history, a change that alters the subsequent course of events, and the resulting ramifications. Some alternate histories are considered a subgenre of science fiction or historical fiction.
Since the 1950s, many works in the genre have incorporated tropes such as time travel between timelines, psychic awareness of parallel universes, or the splitting of history into separate timestreams.
Definition Alternate history (also called alternative history) is a genre of speculative fiction in which one or more historical events occur differently from how they did in actual history. The genre commonly explores "what if" scenarios involving pivotal points in human history.
An alternate history generally requires three elements:
A point of divergence (often abbreviated as PoD) from the historical record, occurring at a time before the story is written; A change that would alter the subsequent course of history; and An examination of the consequences or ramifications of that divergence.
Works of fiction set in the past or present, but written before that time period - such as the novels 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) by Arthur C. Clarke and 1984 (1949) by George Orwell, or the film 2012 (2009) - are sometimes mistakenly identified as alternate history. These works do not diverge from the historical record as it was known at the time of their creation.
Alternative history is similar to but distinct from secret history, which can be either fictional or non-fictional and recounts events that occurred in history (whether real or imagined) but which had no apparent effect on the recorded historical outcome. It is also thematically related to, but distinct from, counterfactual history, which is a form of historiography that explores what might have happened in order to better understand why events unfolded as they actually did."It [alternative history] is, at the very root, the idea of conjecturing on what did not happen, or what might have happened, in order to understand what did happen."Martin Bunzl, "Counterfactual History: A User's Guide", American Historical Review (2004) 109 No. 3, pp. 845–858 in JSTOR
History of literature
Antiquity and medieval
Speculative and counterfactual thinking about historical events appears in some of the earliest works of Western historiography. One of the earliest known examples is found in the Roman historian Livy's Ab Urbe Condita Libri (Book IX, sections 17–19). Livy contemplated an alternative 4th century BC in which Alexander the Great had survived to invade Europe as planned. He asks what would have happened if Rome had faced Alexander in war and concludes that the Romans would likely have defeated him.
An even earlier instance of speculative material appears in Herodotus's Histories.
In the 11th century, the theologian and Doctor of the Church Peter Damian explored a philosophical form of counterfactual speculation in his work De Divina Omnipotentia. While discussing the limits of God's omnipotence, he considered whether God could alter past events, such as making it so that Rome had never been founded.
One of the earliest works of fiction with clear alternate-history elements is Joanot Martorell's 1490 epic romance Tirant lo Blanch. Written when the fall of Constantinople to the Turks was still a recent and traumatic memory for Christian Europe, the novel depicts a Breton knight, Tirant, who aids the remnants of the Byzantine Empire and successfully repels the invading Ottoman forces of , preventing the city's fall to Islamic conquest.
19th century One of the earliest works of alternate history to reach a large audience was Louis Geoffroy's Histoire de la Monarchie universelle: Napoléon et la conquête du monde (1812–1832) (History of the Universal Monarchy: Napoleon and the Conquest of the World) (1836). The novel imagines Napoleon's First French Empire victorious in the French invasion of Russia (1812) and in an invasion of England in 1814, eventually unifying the world under Bonaparte's rule.
In English, the first known complete alternate history is Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story "P.'s Correspondence", published in 1845. It depicts a man deemed mad for perceiving a different 1845 in which long-dead figures, including poets Robert Burns, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats, actor Edmund Kean, British politician George Canning, and Napoleon, are still alive.
The first novel-length alternate history in English is Castello Holford's Aristopia (1895). Unlike the nationalistic tone of Geoffroy's work, Aristopia portrays a utopian society: the earliest settlers in Virginia discover a reef of solid gold and are able to build a Utopian society in North America.
Early 20th century and the era of the pulps In 1905, H. G. Wells published A Modern Utopia. As explicitly noted in the book itself, Wells's main aim in writing it was to set out his social and political ideas, the plot serving mainly as a vehicle to expound them. This book introduced the idea of a person being transported from a point in our familiar world to the precise geographical equivalent point in an alternate world in which history had gone differently. The protagonists undergo various adventures in the alternate world, and then are finally transported back to our world, again to the precise geographical equivalent point. Since then, that has become a staple of the alternate history genre.
A number of alternate history stories and novels appeared in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (see, for example, Joseph Edgar Chamberlin's The Ifs of History and Charles Petrie's If: A Jacobite Fantasy ). In 1931, British historian Sir John Squire collected a series of essays from some of the leading historians of the period for his anthology If It Had Happened Otherwise. In that work, scholars from major universities, as well as important non-academic authors, turned their attention to such questions as "If the Moors in Spain Had Won" and "If Louis XVI Had Had an Atom of Firmness". The essays range from serious scholarly efforts to Hendrik Willem van Loon's fanciful and satiric portrayal of an independent 20th-century New Amsterdam, a Dutch city-state on the island of Manhattan. Among the authors included were Hilaire Belloc, André Maurois, and Winston Churchill.
One of the entries in Squire's volume was Churchill's "If Lee Had Not Won the Battle of Gettysburg", written from the viewpoint of a historian in a world in which the Confederacy had won the American Civil War. The entry considers what would have happened if the North had been victorious (in other words, a character from an alternate world imagines a world more like the real one we live in, although it is not identical in every detail). Speculative work that narrates from the point of view of an alternate history is variously known as "recursive alternate history", a "double-blind what-if", or an "alternate-alternate history". Churchill's essay was one of the influences behind Ward Moore's alternate history novel Bring the Jubilee in which General Robert E. Lee won the Battle of Gettysburg and paved the way for the eventual victory of the Confederacy in the American Civil War (named the "War of Southron Independence" in this timeline). The protagonist, the autodidact Hodgins Backmaker, travels back to the aforementioned battle and inadvertently changes history, which results in the emergence of our own timeline and the consequent victory of the Union instead.
The American humorist author James Thurber parodied alternate history stories about the American Civil War in his 1930 story "If Grant Had Been Drinking at Appomattox", which he accompanied with this very brief introduction: "Scribner's magazine is publishing a series of three articles: 'If Booth Had Missed Lincoln', 'If Lee Had Won the Battle of Gettysburg', and 'If Napoleon Had Escaped to America'. This is the fourth".
Another example of alternate history from this period (and arguably Herbert Millingchamp Vaughan's The Dial of Ahaz (1917) posits a multiverse filled with alternate versions of planet Earth. the first that explicitly posited cross-time travel from one universe to another as anything more than a visionary experience) is H.G. Wells' Men Like Gods (1923) in which the London-based journalist Mr. Barnstable, along with two cars and their passengers, is mysteriously teleported into "another world", which the "Earthlings" call Utopia. Being far more advanced than Earth, Utopia is some 3000 years ahead of humanity in its development. Wells describes a multiverse of alternative worlds, complete with the paratime travel machines that would later become popular with American pulp writers. However, since his hero experiences only a single alternate world, the story is not very different from conventional alternate history.
In the 1930s, alternate history moved into a new arena. The December 1933 issue of Astounding published Nat Schachner's "Ancestral Voices", which was quickly followed by Murray Leinster's "Sidewise in Time" (1934). While earlier alternate histories examined reasonably-straightforward divergences, Leinster attempted something completely different. In his "World gone mad", pieces of Earth traded places with their analogs from different timelines. The story follows Professor Minott and his students from a fictitious Robinson College as they wander through analogues of worlds that followed a different history. "Sidewise in Time" has been described as "the point at which the alternate history narrative first enters science fiction as a plot device" and is the story for which the Sidewise Award for Alternate History is named.
A somewhat similar approach was taken by Robert A. Heinlein in his 1941 novelette Elsewhen in which a professor trains his mind to move his body across timelines. He then hypnotizes his students so that they can explore more of them. Eventually, each settles into the reality that is most suitable for him or her. Some of the worlds they visit are mundane, some are very odd, and others follow science fiction or fantasy conventions.
World War II produced alternate history for propaganda: both British and American authors wrote works depicting Nazi invasions of their respective countries as cautionary tales.
Time travel to create historical divergences
The period around World War II also saw the publication of the time travel novel Lest Darkness Fall by L. Sprague de Camp in which an American academic travels to Italy at the time of the Byzantine invasion of the Ostrogoths. De Camp's time traveler, Martin Padway, is depicted as making permanent historical changes and implicitly forming a new time branch, thereby making the work an alternate history.
In William Tenn's short story Brooklyn Project (1948), a tyrannical US Government brushes aside the warnings of scientists about the dangers of time travel and goes on with a planned experiment - with the result that minor changes to the prehistoric past cause Humanity to never have existed, its place taken by tentacled underwater intelligent creatures - who also have a tyrannical government which also insists on experimenting with time-travel.