"Alternate History" in The Cambridge Companion

Earlier today, I e-mailed everyone a copy of the chapter I wrote on alternate history in The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction (Cambridge University Press, 2003), to give some background on one of the genres that Chabon is working in.

I quote Harry Turtledove on the relationship between alternate history and science fiction:

Both seek to extrapolate logically a change in the world as we know it. Most forms of science fiction posit a change in the present or nearer future and imagine its effect on the more distant future. Alternate history, on the other hand, imagines a change in the more distant past and examines its consequences for the nearer past and the present. The technique is the same in both cases; the difference lies in where in time it is applied.

Some excerpts from my article:

An alternate history is not a history at all, but a work of fiction in which history as we know it is changed for dramatic and often ironic effect.

Often an alternate history dramatizes the moment of divergence from the historical record, as well as the consequences of that divergence. ...

Alternate histories don’t always dramatize their moments of divergence, however. Often the story or novel begins many years after that moment has occurred. The reader is immediately in a different world, so that a pleasure of the reading becomes the discovery not only of what will happen but also of what already happened, to make this ‘alternate world’ the way it is. ...

The one invariable rule of alternate history is that the difference between the fictional timeline and the real one must be obvious to the reader. An alternate history about, say, 19th-century Chinese immigration to California would be harder to write than an alternate history about the outcome of the American Civil War because so many fewer readers know anything about it. ...

The best alternate histories ... focus not on battle maneuvers but on the daily strivings of individual human beings – any of whom might have existed, had things gone differently. Their strange half-life in the reader’s mind is more poignant, somehow, than the lives of other fictional characters, since we, too, create and destroy alternate versions of ourselves through our actions every day. ... At its best, the alternate history reminds us that we all change the world.