alternate history (fiction)

Alternate history (also alternative history, althist, AH) is a genre of speculative fiction of stories in which one or more historical events occur and are resolved differently than in real life. As conjecture based upon historical fact, alternative history stories propose ''What if?'' scenarios about crucial events in human history, and present outcomes very different from the historical record. Alternate history also is a subgenre of literary fiction, science fiction, and historical fiction; as literature, alternate history uses the tropes of the genre to answer the ''What if?'' speculations of the story.

Since the 1950s, as a subgenre of science fiction, alternative history stories feature the tropes of time travel between histories, and 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. In the Spanish, French, German, and Portuguese, Italian, Catalan, and Galician languages, the terms ''Uchronie'', ''ucronia'', ''ucronía'', and ''Uchronie'' identify the alternate history genre, from which derives the English term ''Uchronia'', composed of the Greek prefix ("not", "not any", and "no") and the Greek word () "time", to describe a story that occurs " nno time"; analogous to a story that occurs in ''utopia'', " nno place". The term ''Uchronia'' also is the name of the list of alternate-history books, '' uchronia.net''. Moreover, ''Allohistory'' (other history) is another term for the genre of alternative history.

Definition

Alternative history is a genre of fiction wherein the author speculates upon how the course of history might have been altered if a particular historical event had an outcome different from the real life outcome. An alternate history requires three conditions: (i) A point of divergence from the historical record, before the time in which the author is writing; (ii) A change that would alter known history; and (iii) An examination of the ramifications of that alteration to history. Occasionally, some types of genre fiction are misidentified as ''alternative history'', specifically science fiction stories set in a time that was the future for the writer, but now is the past for the reader, such as the novels '' 2001: A Space Odyssey'' (1968), by Arthur C. Clarke and ''Nineteen Eighty-Four'' (1949), by George Orwell, because the authors did not alter the history of the past when they wrote the stories.

Moreover, the genre of the Secret History of an event, which can be either fictional or non-fictional, documents events that might have occurred in history, but which had no effect upon the recorded historical outcome. Alternative history also is thematically related to, but distinct from, Counterfactual History, which is a form of historiography that attempts to answer the ''What if?'' speculations that arise from counterfactual conditions in order to understand what did happen. As a method of historical research, counterfactual history explores historical events with an extrapolated timeline in which key historical events either did not occur or had an outcome different from the historical record.

History of literature

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 wnjudgment, 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 loss 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 . 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.

In the English language, the first known complete alternate history is 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