13. Can anybody recommend a good book about alternative history?
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This article is from the soc.history.what-if FAQ, by Anthony Mayer anthonyemayer@yahoo.co.uk with numerous contributions by others.
13. Can anybody recommend a good book about alternative history?
About alternative history itself? There are a number of anthologies, but
only one also includes non-fiction material about the genre, to wit an
essay and a bibliography (by Gordon B. Chamberlain). It is:
Waugh, Charles, G., & Martin H. Greenberg (eds), ALTERNATIVE
HISTORIES: ELEVEN STORIES OF THE WORLD AS IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN (Garland
1986)
Unhappily, the book was only published in hardback and can be difficult to
find. The most likely place for you to locate it is at a reasonably
well-stocked public or university library.
Another recommendation is the following:
Geoffrey Hawthorn, PLAUSIBLE WORLDS: POSSIBILITY AND UNDERSTANDING IN
HISTORY AND THE SOCIAL SCIENCES (Cambridge University Press, 1991)
Several dissertations have been written about alternative history as a
literary sub-genre. Some examples are:
Collins, William Joseph, PATHS NOT TAKEN: THE DEVELOPMENT, STRUCTURE,
AND AESTHETICS OF THE ALTERNATIVE HISTORY (University of California,
Davis 1990).
Gevers, Nicholas, MIRRORS OF THE PAST: VERSIONS OF HISTORY IN SCIENCE
FICTION AND FANTASY (University of Cape Town 1997).
McKnight, Ed, ALTERNATIVE HISTORY: THE DEVELOPMENT OF A LITERARY GENRE
(University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill 1994) available from UMI
Dissertation Services as order number 9508228.
The proceedings of a 1995 Berkeley conference have been published as
COUNTERFACTUAL THOUGHT EXPERIMENTS IN WORLD POLITICS: LOGICAL, METHODO-
LOGICAL, AND PSYCHOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES, eds. Philip E. Tetlock and Aaron
Belkin (Princeton 1996). The papers focused on how counterfactual
arguments should be generated, used, and judged by students of world
politics.
A British historian, Niall Ferguson, edited VIRTUAL HISTORY: ALTERNATIVES
AND COUNTERFACTUALS (Picador 1997, etc) a collection of articles on
"counterfactuals" written by and for academic historians. This book
discusses and defends alternative history as a tool for understanding real
history; it is not interested in alternative history as a genre of
fiction. It includes a lengthy introduction in which Ferguson tries to
justify alternative history as a tool for historical studies.
A better recent book of the same type (though without a general
introduction) is WHAT IF? THE WORLD'S FOREMOST MILITARY HISTORIANS IMAGINE
WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN (Putnam 1999), edited by Robert Cowley. Expanded from
a special issue of MHQ: THE JOURNAL OF MILITARY HISTORY, the book almost
deserves its subtitle, assembling by far the most formidable array of
historians ever to consider alternative histories.
WHAT IF? is only the most prominent of a number of recent academic AH
books or collections based on military history; see the next Question. It
was successful enough for a sequel, WHAT IF? 2: EMINENT HISTORIANS IMAGINE
WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN (Putnam, 2001), which concentrates on non-military
alternatives.
Finally, arguments for and against "counterfactual" history as a tool for
historians and (especially) history teachers may be found in Alexander
Demandt's HISTORY THAT NEVER HAPPENED: A TREATISE ON THE QUESTION, WHAT
WOULD HAVE HAPPENED IF--? (MacFarland 1993), translated by Colin D.
Thompson from the third edition of the original German (Vandenhoek &
Ruprecht 1984, etc).
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