Genre of speculative fiction, where one or more historical events occur differently
Not to be confused with Counterfactual history.
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A painting by Jakub Różalski depicts an alternate history of the 1920s, in which rural peasants must contend with giant mechanical walking tanks.
Alternate history (also referred to as alternative history, allohistory,[1]althist, or simply AH) is a subgenre of speculative fiction in which one or more historical events have occurred but are resolved differently than in actual history.[2][3][4][5] As conjecture based upon historical fact, alternate history stories propose What if? scenarios about crucial events in human history, and present outcomes very different from the historical record. Some alternate histories are considered a subgenre of science fiction, or historical fiction.
Since the 1950s, as a subgenre of science fiction, some alternative history stories have featured the tropes of time travel between histories, the psychic awareness of the existence of an alternative universe by the inhabitants of a given universe, and time travel that divides history into various timestreams.[6]
^"Allohistory". World Wide Words. 4 May 2002. Retrieved 25 November 2012.
^Cite error: The named reference Collins was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
^Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction (Oxford University Press, 2007) notes the preferred usage is "Alternate History", which was coined in 1954; "Alternative History" was first used in 1977, pp. 4–5.
^Morton, Alison (2014). "Alternative history (AH/althist) handout" (PDF). alison-morton.com/. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2022-10-09.
^"AH". The Free Dictionary. Archived from the original on 3 February 2013. Retrieved 2 January 2009.
^"Time Travel, Alternate Histories, & Parallel Universes". Madison Public Library. 21 May 2020. Retrieved 6 September 2023.
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