Alternative Fiction

Alternative history fiction is a kind of science fiction written by HG Wells, Poul Anderson, SM Stirling, Harry Turtledove and others. Imagine that a familiar event happened differently and has been remembered that way by fictional characters. In a BBC TV series, a character who was a TV script writer had agreed to write a series set during what to him and his contemporaries was the historical 1940's when the Germans invaded and conquered Britain after the death of Churchill. Asked how he would handle it, he replied, "Well, I can't rewrite history," whereas, of course, history has already been rewritten to bring such a character and his entire social context into (fictional) existence.

Anderson's main alternative historical speculations are in "The House of Sorrows," "Eutopia" and some installments of his Time Patrol series. More fanciful alternative histories feature not just events happening differently but also alternative laws of physics allowing magic to work. But, even here, historical events, Einstein originating relativity and Planck originating quantum mechanics, are given an alternative twist: Einstein and Planck cooperated in originating "rheatics," which led to the degaussing of cold iron and thus to practical magic.

See:

Magic And Goetics

Imagining Alternative Histories

Characters in that alternative timeline imagine ours.

We sometimes draw attention to works by other authors in which ideas discussed here have been taken further or developed differently. Thus, our familiar fictional narratives might have taken alternative directions. Superman, as written by Alan Moore, experiences a scenario in which Krypton did not explode. A heckler interrupts a political speech by Jor-El, asking which catastrophe is coming now, the planet blowing up again or just floods and plagues this time. Jor-El laments the passing away of a noble and proud Krypton - the Krypton of the old comics! In Moore's Watchmen, superheroes in the real world caused comic books to switch from superheroes to pirates. A news vendor remembers that there used to be SUPER-MAN and FLASH-MAN...

Imaginative writers take us out of our reality and back into it.