The Nebula Awards

For want of a genre

Guest Blog by Chris Cevasco on November 12 2008

What if... — There is, perhaps, no genre more closely identified with answering that question than that of alternate history.  But what exactly is meant by “alternate history”?  And is it in fact a genre unto itself or merely a subgenre?  If the latter, then to what wider classification is it subordinate?

To answer these questions, a working definition of alternate history is in order.  Essentially, an alternate history tale is set in a version of our world in which one or more events occurring in our historical past happened in a plausibly different manner than we know to be true.  The modified occurrence(s), typically referred to as the story’s divergence point, must be significant enough to result in a world recognizably different from our own.  In the best alternate history tales, the nature and details of that difference and the manner in which the characters interact with the changed world will tell us something new and insightful about our own world and time.  A prime example and seminal work of alternate history is Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (1962), set in the former United States in an alternate 1962 in which, fifteen years earlier, the Axis Powers had defeated the Allies in World War II and the U.S. had surrendered to Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.

By way of further clarification, the actual tale might be set in the past, the present, or the future, though in all cases the setting must exist in a timeline that came into existence through a divergence in our past.  In other words, the divergence must pre-date the present at the time the novel is written; anything else would simply constitute futuristic science fiction.

Given this definition, it makes a certain amount of sense that alternate history has been most commonly identified as a subgenre of science fiction (hereafter SF).  SF is a genre that might look forward or backward, extrapolating scenarios that have yet to happen in the future or never happened in the past, but which plausibly could happen (or could have happened) given the laws of science and nature as we know them.  True we may not ever have faster-than-light travel, but in SF the explanation for how we achieve it is at least based upon scientific or pseudo-scientific principals rather than on magic, for example, which is inherently contrary to laws of nature and would result in a work of fantasy rather than SF.  Similarly, alternate history looks at events in the past and imagines a plausible way in which those events might have unfolded differently.

But the science fiction genre does not have an exclusive proprietary claim to alternate history.  The Historical Novel Society lists alternate history, along with other forms such as time-slip and historical fantasy, as subgenres in its definition of historical fiction.  Indeed, those works of alternate history focusing more on the world created (often set decades or even centuries after the divergence point) arguably fall more firmly under the umbrella of SF, while those which devote more time to examining the events leading up to and including the divergence read more like historical fiction.  But it should be noted that with either approach, the story generally is not simply about the point of divergence; it must extend beyond that point in order to explore the world the divergence creates.  To end a story with a divergence would simply be to pose the question “What if?” without providing an answer.

Floating above and off to the side of these genre definitions are such curious creatures as Philip Roth’s recent novel, The Plot Against America, set in a world in which Charles Lindbergh was nominated for the U.S. presidency at the 1940 Republican National Convention and, after defeating Roosevelt in the election, led the U.S. down a path of isolationism.  Although otherwise meeting the definition of alternate history, Roth’s work is rarely called SF or even historical fiction, being lumped into that even-more-difficult-to-define realm of “literary” fiction.  Nonetheless, the book won both the Society of American Historians‘ 2005 prize for outstanding historical novel on an American theme and the 2006 Sidewise Award for Alternate History.  Perhaps, then, alternate history is merely a device, unburdened by the need for its own genre and which authors working in many different genres might employ.  There are, after all, alternate historical mysteries (e.g. Jo Walton’s Farthing [2006] and the stories in the Lou Anders-edited anthology Sideways In Crime [2008]), horror tales (e.g. Kim Newman’s Anni Draculaeseries), and young-adult fiction (e.g. Harry Turtledove’s ongoing Crosstime Traffic series).

A special case is those works in which the divergence happens through some deliberate outside intervention—usually by means of time-travel or alien activity.  A novel often pointed to as a defining work of alternate history, Harry Turtledove’s Guns of the South (1992), fits squarely into this mold.  It explores a world in which the American Civil War takes a dramatic turn when time travelers prematurely introduce a future technology—AK-47s.  Similarly, L. Sprague de Camp’s widely influential Lest Darkness Fall (1941) involves a time-traveler seeking to prevent the dark ages that resulted from the fall of Rome.  While such works are indeed alternate history, they might more accurately be defined as altered history.  The plausibility of these sorts of divergence points is less certain than it is in alternate history’s purer forms, in which the divergence is one that could well have resulted without external influence simply through chance (e.g. weather conditions, accident, timing), personal whim, or other vagaries of fate.

To further define the alternate history subgenre, it is worth considering what does not qualify as alternate history.  First among a group of related but distinct forms is secret history (sometimes called “hidden history"), in which the author suggests otherwise unknown occurrences going on “behind the scenes” of history—occurrences that either helped drive the known events of our past or that were sufficiently reconciled with those events so as not to alter them.  Examples of this type of work include Ken Follett’s Eye of the Needle (1978) (in which a German spy almost succeeds in foiling D-Day), Dan Brown’s ubiquitous The Da Vinci Code (2003) (positing among other things a secret history of Catholicism), and the tales in the Darrell Schweitzer-edited anthology The Secret History Of Vampires (2007) (the premise of each story is that there is one or more vampires lurking behind a real historical event).

Another form is the personal alternate history (sometimes called “micro alternate history"), in which a fictional character is shown how his or her life might have turned out differently or is actually afforded an opportunity to re-live an alternate version of his or her life.  Two of the most popular examples of this are the films It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) and Sliding Doors (1998).  To some extent, Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (1843) is another example, inasmuch as Scrooge is shown how his life and the lives of those around him will progress unless he changes his ways and is then given the opportunity to implement those changes.  What distinguishes these sorts of stories from alternate history is that the divergence point only results in changes on the personal level but does not impact wider historical events.  Obviously there can be some crossover between the forms if, for example, the character in question is him/herself a major historical personage.

A final fictional form distinct from but often confused with alternate history is the parallel world (sometimes called “alternate world” or “secondary world") story.  These are tales in which “real world” historical locations, cultures, religions or other institutions are modified or invented wholesale so as to distinguish the resulting world from our own.  Said worlds exist ab initio and need not have arisen from the actual world.  Often, though certainly not always, such parallel worlds are characterized by the addition of some supernatural element and thus might also be referred to as historical fantasy. Examples of works featuring parallel worlds include most of the fantasy novels by Guy Gavriel Kay, the Kushiel’s Legacy series by Jacqueline Carey, and the Temeraire series by Naomi Novik.

There is also a tradition dating back at least to the Victorian period of posing counterfactuals—scholarly essays (rather than stories) analyzing historical events by posing and then answering “What if?” questions so as to determine the relative importance of the events being altered.

Genre questions aside, alternate history continues to remain a very popular form.  Why are writers and readers drawn to these sorts of tales?  I was once fortunate enough to hear George R.R. Martin give a lecture about his own experiences as a reader, and he indicated that, foremost, he reads fiction (and I paraphrase here) to experience the sensation of falling through a window into a wholly different locale—an environment that can seem as real as the world around us.  I think in some sense this is why we all read fiction—out of a desire to escape for a time from our regular, mundane existences into a time or place we have not or cannot actually experience.  SF and fantasy allow for this in the extreme and are thus often described (disparagingly or not) as escapist genres. 

Perhaps that’s why alternate history is so popular among fans and writers of SF—while the worlds we read about in such works are often spectacularly different from our own, it is nonetheless always our world.  This engenders not only an element of enjoyable escape, but the thrill of something akin to verisimilitude—a sense that we are reading about a world into which we might easily have been born had some event in the past happened only slightly differently than it did.

Having now reached the end of this brief overview, I’m frankly not sure any of the questions posed above have been fully answered.  Perhaps this is due to my own failings, but I’d like to think it’s because there are no clear-cut answers to be had.  And that’s not necessarily a bad thing.  For want of a genre, I don’t think the kingdom—or in this case, the demand for these sorts of tales—will be lost.  Indeed, I find myself in the ironic position (notwithstanding the impressions this article may give) of preferring to eschew genre labels whenever possible.  It is my hope, however, that thinking about each of the above similar but distinct forms is nonetheless a worthwhile endeavor that will result in a fuller appreciation of the many ways in which history can lend itself to storytelling, enriching the experience of readers and writers alike.  And if I’m wrong about this?  Well, we can all imagine an alternate world in which I’m right ...

Christopher M. Cevasco is the editor/publisher of Paradox: The Magazine of Historical and Speculative Fiction.  Stories appearing in the biannual magazine have twice been finalists for the Sidewise Award for Alternate History and have appeared on several reviewers’ Best-of-Year lists; the magazine recently won the 2008 WSFA Small Press Award for best story of the preceding year.  Chris’s own fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Black Static, The Leading Edge, Allen K’s Inhuman, and A Field Guide to Surreal Botany (Two Cranes Press), among many other venues.  His poetry has been featured in Star*Line.  He is a 2006 Clarion graduate, a 2007 Taos Toolbox graduate, and a member of the Manhattan-based Tabula Rasa writing group.  Toiling away at his first novel, he lives in Brooklyn, NY, with his wife, his almost-two-year-old son, and a puffer fish named Spiny Norman.

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