From the Mises Institute:
The history that didn’t happen can be just as interesting as the history that did.
This article is a small example of its own topic. Except by chance, I wouldn’t now be writing it. Not finding what I wanted while browsing in our library’s magazine aisles, I came across mention of “uchronie” in Le Nouvel Observateur. The philosopher Charles Renouvier chose this word as the title of his novel of 1857 and 1876; he coined it from Greek roots meaning “no time.” He was following the pattern set by St. Thomas More, whose Utopia derives from roots meaning “no place.” Utopia is a place that does not exist; uchronia is a time that did not exist. Uchronian works — to introduce the English adjective — are also called “what-if,” alternative, conjectural, or counterfactual history. They consider what would have happened if something else had chanced to happen.
Such works fall into two categories. The distinction is fuzzy but useful. Writings of the first kind, unlike actual history or a standard historical novel, are sheer fiction. They are not speculations about real events; they are stories that stand on their own. The Star Wars movies and Tolkien’s tales are good examples. Another is Islandia, a novel by Austin Tappan Wright, published posthumously in 1942. Wright describes events and personalities in a country on a fictional continent in the Southern Hemisphere before World War I. The people of Islandia, while highly civilized and advanced in philosophy and psychology, prefer their old ways, rejecting railroads and most other modern technology and narrowly limiting contact with the outside world. The reader (this one, anyway) drifts with the author into sympathy with the Islandian way of thinking.
Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1887) projects an opposite vision, one intended as backward only in an ironic sense; it imagines a prosperous and happy socialist utopia of 2000. This uchronia actually exerted some influence in its time, converting many readers to socialism because they wanted to live in the world of Bellamy’s vision.
A less satisfying example of the first category of uchronian works is Hadrian VII (1904), a rather amateurish fantasy by Frederick Rolfe, the self-appointed Baron Corvo. Its hero is a frustrated would-be priest whom a deadlocked college of cardinals implausibly elects as pope, the second English pope in history. Pope Hadrian radiates his benevolence right up to World War I — or, rather, to its avoidance. His ministrations successfully adjust the world’s important political conflicts. This story also had real-world effects. The oddness of the book and its author inspired a famous work of literary detection, The Quest for Corvo (1934), in which A.J.A. Symons discovered how strange the “Baron” actually was.
Link to the rest at the Mises Institute
Just citing obscure works for a proposition doesn’t support the proposition unless one reads those obscure works first…
Even if one didn’t already have a good grasp of the cryptolibertarian leanings (and that’s the polite, assuming-best-of-intentions term appropriate for a family forum like PV) of the Mises Institute, a positive or leading invocation of Looking Backward — let alone characterization as “alternate history” when the work explicitly disavows that anything that had occurred prior to its publication had been altered — shows that there’s… ok, this is a family forum… a hidden agenda at work. The same for Islandia; the OP never took a look at the publication notes printed in the back of my 1970s paperback, because the book was cobbled together from Wright’s notes and fragments (largely posthumously) and, again, does not rely upon alteration of history (it was a years-long effort to build something in isolation). The description of Utopia as “derive[d] from roots meaning ‘no place'” ignores Renaissance scholarly Latin and Greek, and More’s own penchant for puns (in this case, “eutopia,” meaning something close to “The Good Place,” thus “The Good Place Is Nowhere” as More himself described it).
There is a branch of Historiography that explores alternative history, counterfactuals, for real, looking into insights into what happened by exploring alternatives in the decision tree.
Anybody interested might look here:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterfactual_history
And this is a pretty good read:
https://www.amazon.com/What-If-Foremost-Historians-Imagine-ebook/dp/B002I1XRYU/ref=sr_1_6?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1529016342&sr=1-6&keywords=What+if
And, of course, there is a whole branch of SF&F dedicated to these kinds of speculations ranging from relatively rigorous (Eric Flint’s RING OF FIREV, aka the 163x series, from Baen. First volume is free. A very good read.) to the wild and wooly worlds of Steampunk.
Aside from Flint and associates (and they are Legion), Harry Turtledove and Scott Westerfeld are good contemporary reads.
https://www.baen.com/1632.html
I wouldn’t categorize the Ring of Fire series as “rigorous” by any stretch. But even apart from that, it is a different genre from rigorous counterfactuals. Those take some discrete event, make a plausible change to what happened, and explore the consequences. We might, for example, imagine Lt. Col. George Washington of the Virginia Militia being killed in the Battle of Fort Necessity in 1754 and consider how world history would be different. The Ring of Fire books belong to the genre of taking one or more modern people and tossing them backward in time. This genre goes back, arguably, to Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee, or at least to de Camp’s Lest Darkness Fall.
Within the *fiction* side of alternate history it is more grounded than most any steampunk.
But it is fiction so I kept it separate from the counterfactual essays that belong in historiography rather than fiction. (Two separate comments, notice! There is method to my madness.)
Alternate history fiction is narrative entertainment while counterfactuals are historical analysis essays. The core conceit is the same “What if” but that is all they share in common.
The OP not only made no such distinction, it even threw in outright fantasies that bear no resemblance to any history.
And yes, Twain is undoubtedly the father of alternate history fiction.
DeCamp brought it under the SF umbrella.
Frankowski and Turtledove, especially the latter, gave it prominence. Turtledove practically owns it. 😉
One series I really like is Birmingham’s AXIS OF TIME.
I hope he keeps it running now that he’s gone Indie. I really want to see where he takes it.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-12-17/brisbane-author-john-birmingham-makes-leap-to-self-publishing/8127990
By the way, I like this quote of his:
“It’s in the interests of the trade publishing industry to discourage their authors, particularly their literary authors, from thinking in business terms because that then allows them to keep control of the business.”
I agree that the OP is a hot mess.
It is entirely possible to write narrative fiction in an alternate history, strictly defined. Harry Turtledove’s Agent of Byzantium stories are an excellent example. There the what-if is “What if Mohammed had converted to Christianity?” The action is set centuries later, and the what-if is never explicitly stated, but it is clear. Mohammed is the protagonist’s favorite saint, who wrote the beloved prayer “There is only one God, and Jesus is his son.”
More typically, the author uses the conceit of cross-time travel between universes that diverged at some point in the past, with the protagonist from our universe observing the other universe, giving the reader a point of view on how history has played out differently.
The conceit of the modern person group sent back in time is something different. There the point is not seeing how some plausible different event would play out. It is about how the moderns deal with their situation, adapting to the past and adapting the past to them. “How would history be different if a West Virginia town were dumped in the middle of the Thirty Years War?” is a different sort of question from “How would history be different had Mohammed converted to Christianity?”
Steam punk is yet another thing. It is a version of historical fantasy, like those “Napoleonic Wars, but with dragons!” books.
Naomi Novik’s TEMERAIRE series.
Good reads.
Counterfactuals are essays.
They purposefully minimize the narrative aspect to ensure the focus stays on the historical meaning of the turning point.
“What if Lincoln wasn’t assassinated” would examine the impact of the assassination that did happen by looking at the what-ifs but really doesn’t care about the world the divergence would have created.
Alternate fiction stories are interested in the narrative that ensues instead.
Very different objectives, very different product.
Tolkien is a bad example. Alternative history deals with what might have happened in a real Earth if certain events were different.
Tolkien, like many fantasies, is set in a created world that is not Earth, though it may resemble it or even make us think of it as a metaphorical Earth.
Yes. The OP here seems to want to stuff everything, including the kitchen sink, into “alternative history.”
Sigh…
You’d think that anything labeled alternative history would involve something actually historical. On either the histographical or entertainment track.
Whether it be “What if Babbage had actually built his difference engine?”, “What if the Persians had won at Salamis?” , or “What if alien lizards invaded during WWII?”
Tolkien might have crafted a deep history for his universe but none of it reflects actual human history. Too much of a reach.
What Tolkien created wasn’t alternative history. It was alternative mythology. He was explicit about this. I suppose one could make an argument that all myth is alternative history, but this would not be a useful taxonomic scheme.
No, not useful.
You might as well say all fiction is alternate history because all fiction takes place in worlds not ours.
Overgeneralization serves no one.
I’m stuck in one now. 😉
Hey, I was going to say that!