Science fiction

fiction. It s a genre of fiction consisting of stories in which one or more historical events occur differently from reality.

points in history and present an outcome of events alternative to historical record. The stories are the product of conjecture, but are sometimes based on scientific fact.

Vika P.: Alternate history can be seen as a subgenre of literary fiction, science fiction, and/or historical fiction; different alternate history works may use tropes from any or all of these genres. Another term occasionally used for the genre is "allohistory"

large extent, merged with science fiction tropes involving time travel between alternate histories, psychic awareness of the existence of one universe by the people in another, or time travel that results in history splitting into two or more timelines. Cross-time, time-splitting, and alternate history themes have become so closely interwoven that it is impossible to discuss them fully apart from one another.

Vika D.: It is interesting to know in French, Italian, Spanish, Catalan and German, the genre of alternate history is called uchronie / ucronia / ucronía / Uchronie, which has given rise to the term Uchronia in English. This neologism is based on the prefix ου- (which in Ancient Greek means "not/not any/no") and the ancient Greek χρόνος (chronos), meaning "time." A uchronia means literally "(in) no time."

alternate history book list, uchronia.net. The Collins English Dictionary defines alternative history as "a genre of fiction in which the author speculates on how the course of history might have been altered if a particular historical event had had a different outcome."

Semenov: Several genres of fiction have been misidentified as alternate history. Science fiction set in what was the future but is now the past, like Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odysseyor George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, is not alternate history because the author did not make the choice to change the past at the time of writing.[6] Secret history, which can take the form of fiction or nonfiction, documents events that may or may not have happened historically but did not have an effect on the overall outcome of history, and so is not to be confused with alternate history.

history. This term is used by some professional historians to describe the practice of using thoroughly researched and carefully reasoned speculations on "what might have happened if..." as a tool of academic historical research, as opposed to a literary device.
Vika P.: Now we’ll dwell on the history of alternative history literature. The earliest example of alternate (or counterfactual) history is found in Livy's Ab Urbe Condita Libri (book IX, sections 17–19). Livy contemplated an alternative 4th century BC in which Alexander the Great had expanded his empire westward instead of eastward.
Semenov: he asked, "What would have been the results for Rome if she had been engaged in war with Alexander?"[9][10][11] Livy concluded that the Romans would likely have defeated Alexander. There were some other examples of alternative fiction works in medieval age, of course.

in large quantities for the reception of a large audience may be Louis Geoffroy'sHistoire de la Monarchie universelle: Napoléon et la conquête du monde (1812–1832) (History of the Universal Monarchy: Napoleon And The Conquest Of The World) (1836), which imagines Napoleon's First French Empire emerging victorious in the French invasion of Russia in 1811 and in an invasion of England in 1814, later unifying the world under Bonaparte's ruleVika P.: In the English language, the first known complete alternate history is Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story "P.'s Correspondence," published in 1845. It recounts the tale of a man who is considered "a madman" due to his perceptions of a different 1845, a reality in which long-dead famous people, such as the poets Burns, Byron, Shelley, and Keats, the actor Edmund Kean, the British politician George Canning, and even Napoleon Bonaparte, are still alive
Semenov: The late 1980s and the 1990s saw a boom in popular-fiction versions of alternate history, fueled by the emergence of the prolific alternate history author Harry Turtledove, as well as the development of the steampunk genre and two series of anthologies—the What Might Have Been series edited by Gregory Benford and the Alternate ... series edited by Mike Resnick., Howard Waldrop, and others.
Vika D.: This period also saw alternate history works by S. M. Stirling, Kim Stanley Robinson, Harry Harrison.

world by dwelling on the

It's America in 1962. Slavery is legal once again. The few Jews who still survive hide under assumed names. In San Francisco the I Ching is as common as the Yellow Pages. All because some 20 years earlier the United States lost a war, and is now occupied jointly by Nazi Germany and Japan. This harrowing, Hugo Award-winning novel is the work that established Philip K. Dick as an innovator in science fiction while breaking the barrier between science fiction and the serious novel of ideas. In it Dick offers a haunting vision of history as a nightmare from which it may just be possible to awake.

War 2 extended to 1947 and was won by the Axis powers (Imperial Japan, Fascist Italy and Nazi German). The story is set 15 years after the War's end, and one of the main plot elements is centered on a pre-emptive Nazi nuclear strike against the Japanese Home Islands. The Nazis develop extremely quick air travel and colonize the moon, Venus, and Mars. The novel begins with Hitler's successor, Fuhrer Bormann dying (Hitler dies of syphilis in this world), after draining the Mediterranean Sea and converting it to farmland. Joseph Goebbels, Reinhard Heydrich, and Herman Goring battle to become the new Reichskanzler (Imperial Chancellor). The novel deals with themes of the interpretation and confusion of true and false realities, justice, cultural inferiority and identity, and the effects of fascism and racism on culture.

where the Axis powers have won World War II. Instead of focusing on the machinations of the new Nazi regime, “The Man in the High Castle” is more interested in a handful of unremarkable Americans — an antiques store owner, a wayward judo instructor — whose lives would most likely be as mundane and lonely had the Allies been victorious. All these characters suspect that history was not meant to unfold this way, and cannot bring themselves to engage in a world where time’s arrow consistently points to their insignificance. “Why struggle, then?” Dick writes. “Why choose? If all alternatives are the same. ...”
He teases and torments his characters with intimations of an artificial America where superficial appearances say nothing about the underlying truth of a thing, or a person; where a Swedish plastics salesman is really a German spy; where a Mickey Mouse watch is really a priceless artifact; and where “the word ‘fake’ meant nothing really, since the word ‘authentic’ meant nothing really.” And when guilt cannot be eradicated from the human soul, it can be channeled into new and better forms — even items as modest as pieces of jewelry one character calls “the new life of my country.”