What exactly is the Alternate History genre?

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LearningTwoWrite

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Is it just giving ancient societies modern day technology? Just what if if a historical battle went a different way? Time travel to change the past?

Is it a "dead" genre? I don't see a lot of it but what I read I like plus it intrigues me.

A good story's never dead is it?
 

Alessandra Kelley

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I'm not an expert, but I think originally alternate history was taking a single historical event, changing its outcome, then extrapolating what would have happened if it had occurred. It was a kind of thought experiment.

Time travel stories are strictly fantasy, or sf if you can make a plausible, rigorous explanation.

Modern tech in ancient times I would consider a fantasy.

I don't know if alternate history is "dead". Harry Turtledove is still busy. And the interest in playing with historical events is recurrent.
 

SRHowen

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Alt History is taking an event that happened and changing the outcome. Say if Hitler won, or the south won the war, or if the Inca never fell, then going forward from the outcome changed event and telling the history of the new world.
 

thothguard51

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The Trojans won,
Hitler won WW2,
The Confederates won the Civil War,
The Russian Revolution never happened,
The French Revolution never happened,
The Cuban Missile crisis started WW3,
George Bush was never elected,
Al Gore didn't invent the Internet,

Pick something in history, (large or small), and make it so it never happened or ended differently...
 

CScottMorris

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All Science Fiction and Fantasy is at its root Speculative Fiction, that is fiction that explores the what if, and Alternate History concentrates on one simple what if by supposing that our history was just a little bit different.
What if the Chinese discovered and settled the new world before the Europeans.
What if the Roman Empire never collapsed.
 

FOTSGreg

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The genre's still going strong. As pointed out above Harry Turtledove is still going strong. Some of SM Stirling's work is considered alternate history and there's the 1632 series by Eric Flint and company. For what it's worth Stephen King has recently gotten into the act as well.
 

utopianmonk

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Also, the third book in DJ MacHale's Pendragon series deals with this idea. It takes a relatively small historical event, sprinkles in some fictional context, and changes the outcome so that the whole of earth's history is changed.

I've always found these ideas intriguing, so please, write more :)
 

Buffysquirrel

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There are two schools of thought who I believe spend much of their time battling this out on Wikipedia.

1. Alternate history is where you make a deliberate change in history, usually at a significant point, eg a major war, and then write about the 'new' timeline. Kim Stanley Robinson's The Years of Rice and Salt posits a world where the Black Death wiped out Europeans in 1405.

2. Alternate history is all that, AND stories that when written were set in the future but whose settings are now in the past, but whose events never came to be. For example, 2001: A Space Odyssey.

My husband also contends that soap operas like Eastenders are set in an alternate universe where nobody watches Eastenders. Or he does up until I throw something at him.
 
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Rob Lefebvre

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Just what it sounds like alternate history. Basically anything historical that did not happen the way that it actually did, and usually the events that follow. Or it can be a story where the alternate historical event happened and some point in the past and how it relates to the present. A good example is: "The man in the high castle" by Philip K. Dick. I am pretty sure that is the title.
 

LOG

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I like to think of it as fanfiction of history.

Don't read it too often though, and the only story of alternate history I've really liked was the Temeraire series.
 

elflands2ndcousin

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Alternate history can be a lot of different types of stories:

You've got purely realistic alternate history, like Harry Turtledove's How Few Remain. There, one minor thing in history is changed (the Union army does not intercept a Confederate message), and the book explores the consequences. There's nothing "fantastic" in the story, other than the fact that the book assumes something factual happened differently.

Then you've got historically-based, totally-unrealistic fantasy. An example of this might be Harry Turtledove's (his name will come up a lot with alt. history) Darkness series (which basically shows WWII in a quasi-medieval world with dragons and magic). Guy Gavriel Kay basically writes almost exclusively in this sub-genre: he doesn't write "alternate history" but his secondary (pure fantasy) worlds are heavily informed by real world history.

Somewhere between those first two ends of the spectrum, you've got totally fantastical alternate history that takes place in an "alternate" real world. Imagine our world with magic (Michael A. Stackpole does this with At the Queen's Command, Patricia C. Wrede does this with her Frontier Magic trilogy, Jonathan Stroud does it with his Bartimaeus books). Theoretically it takes place in "our" world, but there are elements of fantasy that make it completely different.

Then you've got time-travel alternate history, where history is influenced/changed to some extent by people traveling back in time. Mary Gentle's First History quartet is my personal favorite example of this, though lots of people like Connie Willis' books, or Tim Powers' The Anubis Gates. Another one of my faves is Michael Moorcock's Behold the Man. Eric Flint does a lot of this, too.

Then you've got "secret history" books. These basically stick pretty closely to actual observed history, but posit events/actors that historians know nothing about influencing major events. One can make the argument that Marie Brennan's Onyx Court series fall into this category: superficially, the history of London is as we know it. But the book's depict a whole complex series of events involving faeries who live in the Onyx Court beneath the city. There's overlap and interaction with the mortal realm, but the "basic events of history" are not changed.

Anywhere between these options you've got lots of other "alternate history" books. Consider just about every steampunk novel out there. They're all alternate history, at some level. Just alternate history of a particular type (check out Gail Carriger, Cherie Priest, Bruce Sterling & William Gibson, etc.).

I'd say alternate history - especially of the steampunk variety - is still going fairly strong today. There's some talk that the steampunk wave may have crested, but there's lots of it in the bookstores. And so much alternate history is published without being called alternate history that I'd venture a guess that it's secretly one of the most popular sub-genres out there.

As someone who loves reading it and writing it, that's what I hope at any rate!

Also, you might want to check out an essay I wrote earlier this year about techniques in alternate history. Might find some helpful stuff there.

Hope all this helps! Good luck, and good writing!
 
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LearningTwoWrite

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Thanks. That's great! I've been reading some short stories by sm stirling that I like. Egyptians with muskets and Romans owned by Aliens.
 
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DAv

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Also try alternatehistory.com/discussion which is the largest alternate history forum on the internet I believe and has some extremely well written examples of the genre.
 

MormonMobster

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Also try alternatehistory.com/discussion which is the largest alternate history forum on the internet I believe and has some extremely well written examples of the genre.

Aye; I'm an AH.com member, and I can attest to this. There are many well-written and varied alternate history stories in various formats; history-book, narrative, history lecture (as in, there's a narrative, but it's how a fictional professor teaches the alternate history), and many, many others.

You can easily register there, pick a historical topic you find interesting, and ask if there's been any good alternate history TLs (timelines) on it.
 

Stew312856

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I've been interested in playing around in alt. history or late and writing a sci-fi retelling of Howard Zinn's A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE USA. However, I heard that the fantasy retelling of WWII Turtledove wrote was just awful (I personally find the ideas fascinating but his prose rather pedestrian after reading a few chapters of one of his other novels). Any advice on pitfalls to avoid?
 

MormonMobster

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I've been interested in playing around in alt. history or late and writing a sci-fi retelling of Howard Zinn's A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE USA. However, I heard that the fantasy retelling of WWII Turtledove wrote was just awful (I personally find the ideas fascinating but his prose rather pedestrian after reading a few chapters of one of his other novels). Any advice on pitfalls to avoid?

If you're going to go realistic, then don't ignore the "butterflies" (you know, chaos theory, how a butterfly flapping its wings in New York causes yada yada in Brazil). Basically, if you have a major change (say, communist rebels taking over Britain in the 1880s), you can't have major historical events (like WW2) still happen unchanged from real life. Now, Turtledove gets around this by just putting his alternate history nations in similar circumstances as real-life nations, but he doesn't do it as well as many unpublished alternate history fiction writers would like.

If it's truly sci-fi alternate history, then go wild, just remember to consider all the changes that could happen from the sci-fi (say aliens invade during the Napoleonic Wars, what cultural changes does that cause? Technological? Linguistic? And etc).

What were you planning on writing? As I said, I belong to alternatehistory.com, which I think is the world's biggest alternate history forum. I can probably help you with figuring out details for alternate historical stuff.
 
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