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Abstract
Alternative history is a fictional genre defined by speculation about what the present would be like had historical events occurred differently. It is postmodernist in undermining the arbitrary distinctions between history and fiction, and inherently intertextual in contrast to actual history. With roots in Geoffroy-Chateau's Napoleon et la Conquete du Monde (1836) and Charles Renouvier's Uchronie (1857), it has fully emerged as a literary genre only since World War Two. While some alternative history novels have been examined in relation to their authors' other works, this is the first full-length study to examine the genre as a whole.
The first novel in English to depict an alternative present was Ward Moore's Bring the Jubilee (1953), which explores the theme of individual responsibility in a contemporary United States defeated in the Civil War. Inspired by Moore's work, Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle (1962) examines the subjective nature of reality in a world where Germany and Japan won World War Two. Perhaps even more innovative stylistically, Keith Roberts's Pavane (1968) evokes a quasi-medieval England in which the Spanish Armada reasserted Catholic supremacy.
Science fiction's "New Wave" writers used alternative history to parody Victorian sensibilities in Michael Moorcock's The Warlord of the Air (1971) and Harry Harrison's A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah! (1972), and to attack fascism in Norman Spinrad's The Iron Dream (1972). Kingsley Amis united various strands of the genre and introduced it to a wider audience in The Alteration (1976), which depicts a slightly darker version of our world in which the Protestant Reformation never took place. Terry Bisson's Fire on the Mountain (1988), on the other hand, depicts a genuinely utopian present brought about by a successful slave rebellion prior to the American Civil War.
Alternative history has recently increased in popularity, due in part to cyberpunk authors William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, whose The Difference Engine (1991) transforms Victorian England through the introduction of steam-powered computers. Various conclusions to World War Two have also been examined in recent works, including Ted Mooney's Traffic and Laughter (1990), Craig Raine's "1953" (1990) and Robert Harris's Fatherland (1992).
