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What are the Differences between Alternate History and...
"Outdated" Fiction? (top)
Often, people will voice the opinion that a great many works of fiction written in the past should qualify as alternate histories. This is simply because when the books were written they were set in the present or the future, but by virtue of the passage of time they are set in our past. It is sometimes said that by virtue of showing worlds where things happened in the past that did not happen in our own world, they should be considered alternate histories. In some technical sense this might be true, but it is not a very meaningful one. First, most works of fiction will never be alternate history because they do not deal with events large scale enough to constitute a meaningful change in history, even though the events are set in the past and did not happen. Most fiction written in the past could be considered in the same category as historical fiction written today. It shows historical events that did not happen, but those events are not shown to result in substantial departures from actual history. Some works, on the other hand, do result in significant changes from real history. The fact that they were not intended to be alternate history, however, leads to some important practical differences between them and real history. Most obviously, the authors knew nothing of the real history they wrote an "alternative" to, because it was still in their future. They lacked the benefit of hindsight and the ability to compare to real history, so their books tend to look more like simple outdated prediction rather than like well constructed alternate history. Outdated fiction might be called alternate history, but if so in the great majority of cases it would be worse alternate history than what is deliberately written as such. Real alternate history also has the benefit of being able to explicitly target and consider differences between the real and alternate worlds, giving the reader a much better sense of "it could have happened that way".