Alternate History Fandom
| Synonyms: | What If? |
| See also: | Future History, Speculative Evolution |
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Alternate history is a subgenre of speculative fiction in which one or more historical events have occurred but are resolved differently than in actual history. As conjecture based upon historical fact, alternate history stories propose What if? scenarios about crucial events in human history, and present outcomes very different from the historical record. Some alternate histories are considered a subgenre of science fiction, or historical fiction.
Since the 1950s, as a subgenre of science fiction, alternative history stories feature the tropes of time travel between histories, the psychic awareness of the existence of an alternative universe, by the inhabitants of a given universe; and time travel that divides history into various timestreams.
It is related to Speculative Evolution & Future History in term of concept & similarity.
Origin of Alternate History
Antiquity and medieval
The earliest example of alternate (or counterfactual) history is found in 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 attack Europe as he had planned; asking, "What would have been the results for Rome if she had been engaged in a war with Alexander?" Livy concluded that the Romans would likely have defeated Alexander. An even earlier possibility is Herodotus's Histories, which contains speculative material.
Another example of counterfactual history was posited by cardinal and Doctor of the Church Peter Damian in the 11th century. In his famous work De Divina Omnipotentia, a long letter in which he discusses God's omnipotence, he treats questions related to the limits of divine power, including the question of whether God can change the past, for example, bringing about that Rome was never founded:
I see I must respond finally to what many people, on the basis of your holiness's [own] judgment, raise as an objection on the topic of this dispute. For they say: If, as you assert, God is omnipotent in all things, can he manage this, that things that have been made were not made? He can certainly destroy all things that have been made, so that they do not exist now. But it cannot be seen how he can bring it about that things that have been made were not made. To be sure, it can come about that from now on and hereafter Rome does not exist; for it can be destroyed. But no opinion can grasp how it can come about that it was not founded long ago...
One early work of fiction detailing an alternate history is Joanot Martorell's 1490 epic romance Tirant lo Blanch, which was written when the fall of Constantinople to the Turks was still a recent and traumatic memory for Christian Europe. It tells the story of the knight Tirant the White from Brittany who travels to the embattled remnants of the Byzantine Empire. He becomes a Megaduke and commander of its armies and manages to fight off the invading Ottoman armies of Mehmet II. He saves the city from Islamic conquest, and even chases the Turks deeper into lands they had previously conquered.
19th century
One of the earliest works of alternate history published in large quantities for the reception of a large audience may be 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), which imagines Napoleon's First French Empire emerging victorious in the French invasion of Russia in 1812 and in an invasion of England in 1814, later unifying the world under Bonaparte's rule.
The Book of Mormon (published 1830) is described as an "alternative history" by Richard Lyman Bushman, a biographer of Joseph Smith. Smith claimed to have translated the document from golden plates, which told the story of a Jewish group who migrated from Israel to the Americas and inhabited the region from about 600 B.C. to 400 A.D., becoming the ancestors of Native Americans. In the 2005 biography Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling, Bushman wrote that the Book of Mormon "turned American history upside down [and] works on the premise that a history—a book—can reconstitute a nation. It assumes that by giving a nation an alternative history, alternative values can be made to grow."
In the English language, the first known complete alternate history may be Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story "P.'s Correspondence", published in 1845. It recounts the tale of a man who is considered "a madman" due to his perceptions of a different 1845, a reality in which long-dead famous people, such as the poets Robert Burns, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats, the actor Edmund Kean, the British politician George Canning, and Napoleon Bonaparte, are still alive.
The first novel-length alternate history in English would seem to be Castello Holford's Aristopia (1895). While not as nationalistic as Louis Geoffroy's Napoléon et la conquête du monde, 1812–1823, Aristopia is another attempt to portray a Utopian society. In Aristopia, the earliest settlers in Virginia discover a reef made 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 [1907] and Charles Petrie's If: A Jacobite Fantasy [1926]). 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[citation needed] 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 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.[citation needed] "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.