Many readers might wonder about the title of this blog. Historical fiction is a vast genre used by thousands of writers over the last hundred years. It gives our readers a giant, or maybe a small look at fiction that happened in the real world and can be fictionalized in the real world. We use it to teach, enhance, excite, and experience the past by reading what we write in the present. But alternate history is an exercise in imagination. We can change the outcome of good, bad, up, down, in or out. The short explanation on the writing side is changing outcomes by exploring the past and changing it in a book. It doesn’t change the past, but it lets readers read things that did not take place. It delivers “what if” scenarios.[1]

Reportedly, there are six well-known alternate history books that enchanted readers and ramped up royalties for their writers. (1) Fatherland by Robert Harris. (2) The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick. (3) The Plot Against America by Philip Roth. (4) 11/22/6 by Stephen King. (5) The Yiddish Policeman’s Union by Michael Chabon. (6) The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead. And some say The Art of the Deal by the former president is alternate history. He didn’t write the book. It was written by Tony Schwartz, an American journalist and business book author known for ghostwriting Trump.[2]  It’s fair to say a man who doesn’t read books can’t write them. “Even so, being a writer without being a reader is like trying to compose a symphony when you don’t listen to much classical music or opening a restaurant when you don’t know the first thing about business or cooking.”[3]

Goodreads has Alternate History on its drop-down menu. They describe it as a “subgenre of speculative fiction (or science fiction) and historical fiction that is set in a world in which history has diverged from the actual history of the world. Alternate history literature asks the question, ‘What if history had developed differently?’ Most works in this genre are based on real historical events, yet feature social, geopolitical, or industrial circumstances that developed differently than our own.”[4]

The sub-genre is widespread enough to have its own Internet space: https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/  And of course, its Wiki.[5] For every writer tempted to write alternate historical fiction, there is an unsecure site, claiming to have a bibliography of more than 3,400 novels, stories, essays, collections, and other printed material involving the “what ifs” of history.[6]

The Ethics of Alternate History are explored at length in a special issue by Zachary Michel Powell in the South Atlantic Review. “Alternate history is inherently presentist. It explores the past less for its own sake than to utilize it instrumentally to comment upon the state of the contemporary world. When the producers of alternate histories speculate on how the past might have been different, they invariably express their own highly subjective present-day hopes and fears. . . unlike works by historians, alternate histories give up their mimetic relationship to historical reality for one that is estranging.”[7]

It’s easy to speculate, nor easy to hope your sense of the past comes to life. Alternate history is to write what pinball machines are to neural networks. Nuff said.  

[1] https://www.bearhillbooks.com/single-post/choosing-your-subgenre-of-historical-fiction-a-complete-guide#viewer-cmkv1

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Schwartz_(writer)

[3] https://quotidianwriter.medium.com/can-you-be-a-writer-if-you-dont-read-

[4] https://www.goodreads.com/genres/alternate-history

[5] https://www.alternatehistory.com/wiki/doku.php?id=start

[6] http://www.uchronia.net/

[7] https://www.jstor.org/stable/90024986

Gary L Stuart

I am an author and a part-time lawyer with a focus on ethics and professional discipline. I teach creative writing and ethics to law students at Arizona State University. Read my bio.

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