Alternatehistory Forum (2025)

FAQs

What is the point of alternate history? ›

Often described as a subgenre of science fiction, alternative history is a genre of fiction wherein the author speculates upon how the course of history might have been altered if a particular historical event had an outcome different from the real life outcome.

Alternate history includes the hypothetical plot of certain negated events, which is the fictional scenario of what if the event would have happened differently that allows the writer to create fictional figures in addition to the historical actors.

Choose your historical era and event. Research is crucial for creating a credible alternate history narrative. Familiarize yourself with the political, social, and cultural context of your chosen era, along with any significant characters involved.

In one interpretation, alternative histories as a result of time travel are not parallel universes: while multiple parallel universes can co-exist simultaneously, only one history or alternative history can exist at any one moment, as alternative history usually involves, in essence, overriding the original timeline ...

Counterfactual history seeks by "conjecturing on what did not happen, or what might have happened, in order to understand what did happen." It has produced a literary genre which is variously called alternate history, speculative history, allohistory, and hypothetical history.

The difference between alternate history and uchronia is that the former focuses on (description of) a (fictional) historical process, while the latter focuses on (description of) a (fictional) historical (or future) time period.

An alternate history describes a "what if" of history and the consequences that ensue from a different result. Other names that may apply to the genre include alternative history, allohistory, counterfactuals, if-worlds, uchronia and uchronie, parallel worlds, what-if stories, abwegige geschichten, etc.

A “point of divergence”, often abbreviated as POD, is simply the point in an alternate history where it first becomes different from real history. An alternate world matches our world up until the point of divergence, which is when it first becomes different and heads down an allohistorical path.

At various times, other alternative theories have also been offered as challenges to the prevailing view of the origin of the universe in a hot big bang: the cold big bang theory (to account for galaxy formation), symmetric matter-antimatter cosmology (to avoid an asymmetry between matter and antimatter), variable G ...

Fantasy – a story about characters that may not be realistic and about events that could not really happen.

What is the alternate theory of the creation of mankind? ›

The “parallel evolution” theory holds that several dispersed populations of Homo erectus (or closely related species) evolved into archaic forms of Homo sapiens at roughly the same time within the last several hundred thousand years. The arrows suggest that intermingling of these regional populations was going on.

An alternate history describes a "what if" of history and the consequences that ensue from a different result. Other names that may apply to the genre include alternative history, allohistory, counterfactuals, if-worlds, uchronia and uchronie, parallel worlds, what-if stories, abwegige geschichten, etc.

What narrative history gets wrong are its explanations of what happened. And the same goes for biography—the history of one person over a lifetime. Biographers can get all the facts from birth to death right. What they inevitably get wrong is why their subjects did what they accurately report them as having done.