alternative history speculative fiction -- what if [thing] diverged [time]?

[Darren Dirt]

Uchronia: The Alternate History List is a bibliography of over 3100 novels, stories, essays and other printed material involving the "what ifs" of history.

The genre has a variety of names, but it is best known as alternate history. In an alternate history, one or more past events are changed and the subsequent effects on history somehow described. This description may comprise the entire plotline of a novel, or it may just provide a brief background to a short story. Perhaps the most common themes in alternate history are "What if the Nazis won World War II?" and "What if the Confederacy won the American Civil War?"

By author+series
http://www.uchronia.net/bib.cgi/series.html


By YEAR OF DIVERGENCE -- imo a far more interesting way of skimming what's out there -- because a lot of what we take for granted as being part of our reality is based on stuff that happened A Long Time Ago, so hey creative mind let's imagine what would history be like with the details of that long-past event changed OR even GONE -- like the existence of our moon?

http://www.uchronia.net/bib.cgi/diverge.html



(Nice to see that a series I found a few years ago at Wee Book Inn -- but only finally read a few weeks ago -- is listed in there; overall very much worth a read as it is an excellent and not-too-heavy examination of... well, virtually everything that we presume to be part of being "human" -- The Neanderthal Parallax by Robert J. Sawyer. (happy to lend it out to anyone interested) )



I never heard of this site until someone mentioned it in an IMDB discussion thread re. "Valkyrie" (with the topic being "What If The July 20th Coup Had Succeeded In Killing Hitler...")

[Mr. Analog]

I really enjoy divergent history fiction, like the Fallout universe that's mostly like our own world from the late 40s and then significantly changes around the late 50s onward. It's endlessly fascinating.