ABSTRACT
The alternate history (also known as alternative history, alternate universe, allohistory, uchronia, and parahistory) is that branch of nonrealistic literature that concerns itself with history turning out differently than we know to be the case. Although alternate histories were published in the 1700s, and although historians write such “counterfactuals” or “subjunctive conditionals” as thought-experiments with which to study causality, the alternate history has become chiefly associated with sf for two reasons: many sf writers are drawn to this subgenre and it provides one way of posing sf’s fundamental question, “What if the world were different?” In the alternate history, a historical moment (a “nexus point” or “Jonbar hinge,” the latter coined in Jack Williamson’s The Legion of Time (1938)) is altered and the author explores the consequences of this divergence. The alternate history asks questions about time, linearity, determinism, and the implicit link between past and present. It considers the individual’s role in making history, and it foregrounds the constructedness and narrativity of history. Typically, the nexus point refers to “our” world, but in some instances authors instead create an entirely different world or push the action so far into the past or future that tracing the effect of the changed nexus point becomes difficult or impossible – for example, Brian Aldiss’s The Malacia Tapestry (1976) relies on a Jonbar hinge in which intelligent life descends from dinosaurs, yet results in a world strikingly like that of Renaissance Italy.
