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"Well, everyone knows Custer died at Little Big Horn. What this book presupposes is... maybe he didn't ."
A type of Speculative Fiction, also referred to as Uchrony, set in a world where one or more historical events unfolded differently than they did in the real world. Often set some time after the event (called a "point of divergence", or PoD, by fans of the genre), such stories typically describe a Present Day world vastly changed by the difference, or follow another major historical event in light of the change. Sometimes linked with a Time Travel story — the point of divergence is often caused by travelers from "our" timeline seeking to effect a desired change. The protagonists may be original characters or actual historical figures. Lampshade Hanging occurs often in these types of stories; often, a character will stop to muse on what the world would be like if history had gone the way it did in the real world.
The setting of an alternate history is often described as a What If. Popular alternate history settings include:
- What if Germany had won World War II? (Or, for more truly "alternate" and less "hellish" potentials, World War I?)
- What if the South had won the American Civil War?
- What if Christianity had never taken hold in Rome?
- What if Napoleon had won the battle of Waterloo?
- What if the Roman Empire (or some other empire) never had fallen?
- What if a certain technological development (firearms, television, space travel) had been made earlier, or later, or not at all?
- What if a particular presidential election had turned out differently?
- What if this wiki was never invented?
Often, the change's ultimate source is For Want Of A Nail. If "historically unimportant" characters are involved, expect In Spite Of A Nail.
A secondary type, sometimes called "honorary alternate history", consists of Speculative Fiction stories written a considerable period of time ago, and set in a time period which has since passed. This is what happens to stories set Twenty Minutes Into The Future when the twenty minutes have passed. Robert A Heinlein's Future History series of stories is an example of this type, as is everything that fell victim to The Great Politics Mess Up.
Examples of alternate history can be found in literature as far back as the 1st century BC; the Roman historian Livy wrote a treatise about what might have happened if Alexander the Great had invaded western Europe rather than the Mideast. The genre has become increasingly popular since the late 20th century, perhaps because it was a tumultuous century rich in "what if" opportunities, though TV and movie versions are less common.
In real life, Counterfactual History is a real discipline, looking at reasonable conjectures. For example, historians have carefully examined the threat of invasion of Britain by Germany in 1940 and suggested that, though British defense was rushed and rudimentary at that point, so were German attack plans. Thus, Germany would almost certainly have established a beach head, but would not have succeeded in maintaining it.
For less drastic changeovers (such as slight differences between their world and ours), see Trans Universe. Some settings will undo these changes with Rubber Band History.
Examples:
Anime
- Code Geass takes place in a timeline where things went really well for British imperialism; the Celts kicked Julius Caesar and the Romans off the island, Elizabeth I had male heirs, "Washington's Rebellion" failed... all with the cumulative effect of making "Britannia" the only superpower on the planet as of the early 21st century. They were defeated by Napoleon, though, forcing them to relocate to what had been the colonies — that is, North America, which is entirely under their control.
- The Place Promised In Our Early Days takes place in a timeline where Japan is divided after losing WWII, between "Union" and the US.
- The finale of the manga version of Chrono Crusade reveals that it falls under this genre. Demon's homeworld—a spaceship/fish/...thing called Pandaemonium—is called out of the depths of the Atlantic ocean by Aion, which causes a tidal wave that destroys New York City. Chrono goes after Aion to try to stop him, and they end up fighting in Pandaemonium. At some point in the process, it blows up, creating a ring around the Earth that's visible in the sky even in the 1990's.
- The Super Dimension Fortress Macross was broadcasted in 1982 but featured an alternate history of humanity after 2009 when humans and aliens fight a devestating war over a transforming mecha battleship. It's 2009 now, and we haven't even fought World War III and built mecha like they did in the series - we're behind schedule, in other words.
Comic Books
- Back around 1994, the Epic Comics series Lawdog revolved around the idea of travel, sometimes accidental, between alternate histories and alternate worlds, and a square-jawed tough cop who patrols the roads between the worlds and tries to protect the more civilized and peaceful Earths from things like invasion by technologically advanced Nazis who won World War II in some timelines, or contamination by aggressive and dangerous lifeforms from an Earth where evolution took some very different turns one or two billion years back.
- The comics Alan Moore created for America's Best Comics lean toward Alternate History. Tom Strong, for example, lives in a city designed by architect Winsor McCay (in our world, the cartoonist creator of Little Nemo in Slumberland.)
- The existence of costumed vigilantes (and one actual superpowered being) in Watchmen caused several major differences from real-world history (e.g. the United States won the Vietnam War; Richard Nixon is still President in 1985).
- Being steampunk, The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen comics also fall under this trope.
- Give Me Liberty, by Dave Gibbons and Frank Miller, about the United States under the more and more authoritarian Republican president Erwin Rexall, which eventually fall apart after an assassination attempt leaves him in a coma.
- Marvel's ongoing series Exiles is made of this trope, but with their main timeline as the base one instead of reality. Every character in the titular team is from a different alternate reality, and they travel between even more alternate realities fixing things. They've busted Magneto out of a zero-superhuman-tolerance's world's prison, stopped Galactus on a world where the Skrulls conquered Earth, and stopped Curt Conners from blowing up an entire half-continent populated by his genetically altered Lizard-people. Oh, and they bought the right cheese Danish that one time. Among other things.
- Speaking of Marvel, they have a series dedicated to exploring these types of situations within their own comics, appropriately titled What If? Examples include classics such as "What If...Spider-Man Had Joined The Fantastic Four", as well as more recent events like "What If...Civil War Ended Differently". The idea seems quite popular, what with over one-hundred issues and all.
- DC Comics' Tangent books take place in a world where the Cuban Missile Crisis ends in Florida and Cuba nuking each other at roughly the same moment, turning the Cold War hot. The resulting world, compared to ours, is ahead of the times technologically (paper books are seen as antiquated and quaint) but behind the times culturally (the hippie movement has only recently begun). Despite being published by DC, this alternate reality was not an alternate DC universe; Amazons, the Justice Society, Gotham City, there's nary a concept from the DCU to be seen. This is due to the premise of the world, which takes DCU names and applies them to entirely different concepts.
- Arrowsmith, by Kurt Busiek and Carlos Pacheco, is a fantasy take on this trope. At the forging of the Peace of Charlemagne (the Pax Nicephori in the real world), the various hidden magical races of the world decided to make their existence openly known to humanity, also joining in the peace treaty. The series takes place during this world's version of World War I. Dryads, trolls, dwarves, etc. live among humanity, magic co-exists side-by-side with technology. The Industrial Revolution is causing a magical revolution, as spells become mass-produced for the first time in human history.
- Omega Complex is set in a world in which US president John F Kennedy wasn't assassinated; he ends the Vietnam War and gets elected for a second term, during which he sponsors research into the effects of radiation on humans.
Film
- Its A Wonderful Life takes this trope on in a smaller scale: the protagonist wishes he had never been born, so his guardian angel gives him a tour of an Alternate History where he never existed. It turns out he was much more important to the financial and emotional health of his hometown than he realized.
- It Happened Here, a 1966 film positing a Nazi-occupied Britain.
- Back To The Future Part II had an alternate history where the 2015 version of Biff Tannen had given the 1955 Biff a sports almanac with all the sports results until 2000. Using this, Biff became rich and powerful, murdered Marty's dad and married his mom. Marty and Doc had to go back to 1955 to set history back on track — whilst avoiding their previous selves from the first film.
- The 2004 film CSA Confederate States Of America takes the notion of the South winning the American civil war and plays it to the hilt. Though instead of forming its own country, the entire USA goes Confederate. The turning point comes when England and France aide the Confederacy and turn the tide at Gettysburg. All non-Christian religions are outlawed save for Judaism (Jews live in a reservation on Long Island). They advocate enslaving all non-whites, and TV ads catering to slave-owning middle class members are commonplace.
- The 1980 movie The Final Countdown (unrelated to the song of the same name) has the USS Nimitz transported back to just before the attack on Pearl Harbor. The Nimitz doesn't get to stop the attack on Pearl, having to return just as they got the IJN aircraft in view, and the only real departure from OTL seems to be a late 20th century USN officer trapped back in WW 2, when stranded on a desert island where they had decided to leave an influential senator whose death to the guns of two A6Ms (scouting ahead of the IJN formation) they prevented.
- Good Bye Lenin! toys with this trope— the protagonist's mother is a dedicated East German socialist who is in a coma when the Berlin Wall falls. When she reawakens, he constructs an elaborate alternate history to avoid shocking her into another heart attack with the news that her beloved East Germany is no more.
- District 9 takes place in a world where an alien ship landed in South Africa in 1982, interrupting Apartheid in favor of something almost exactly the same as Apartheid...with explosions.
- While the exact setting is ambiguous, 9 takes place in an alternate version of the early 20th Century (according to brief shots of newspapers that apparently show a date in the 1930's) in which the Industrial Revolution never ended, resulting in advanced robotics and artificial intelligence occurring nearly a century ahead of schedule (unfortunately, it doesn't end well).
Literature
- Even if the trope itself is Older Than You Think, writers apparently weren't expecting readers to understand what it meant as late as 1967, when an alternate reality story in "Dangerous Visions" spent ten pages explaining what an alternate reality story is to The Watson.
- Winston Churchill (yes, that Winston Churchill) penned a short story in 1932 called "If Lee Had Not Won The Battle of Gettysburg" — narrated by a historian in an alternate history where the South won the American civil war.
- This was published in an anthology of such stories called "If It Had Happened Otherwise". Other speculations included the Islamic state of Granada surviving in southern Spain, forming a long-lasting alliance with Spain's other great enemy, England, and ultimately sending troops to the trenches in World War One.
- Ward Moore's Bring the Jubilee is a novel in which a time-traveler from a 20th Century in which the South won the American civil war accidentally alters the outcome of the Battle of Gettysburg and finds himself trapped in what becomes our world.
- Ray Bradbury's A Sound of Thunder is another example of alternate history by time-travel; stepping on a butterfly millions of years in the past alters the outcome of a presidential election (along with other details, though not as many as you'd think.
- Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle, a Germans-Win-WWII story, is a seminal work in the genre.
- Further complicating this is the novel features its own Alternate History novel, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, whose plot involved the Axis losing World War II, with the post-war world dominated by a cold war between America and... the British Empire.
- One of PKD's short stories involves a woman who, in running a small hardware store in a small American town, discovers how to time-travel to some people repairing a rocket ship After The End. She sells then what they need, but hates the idea of losing their money when they leave. When they have the ship repaired, she selects a future where they crash again, but no-one is killed. They cannot escape her mercantile plans.
- Norman Spinrad's 1972 novel The Iron Dream purported to be a manuscript from an alternate history where Adolf Hitler was a science fiction author.
- Harry Turtledove has written dozens of alternate history novels. His best known include the "Timeline 191" (or How Few Remain) series, which begins with the South winning the American civil war in 1862, and follows this timeline through World War II and beyond; and the "Worldwar" series, wherein World War II is interrupted by an alien invasion by an empire of reptilians who have never before encontered "Mammals", and whose technology progresses so slowly, that they're shocked to find that humans aren't using the same technology as their probe showed them using 1,000 years ago.
- Turtledove's first major forays into Sci-Fi and Alternate History involved a Byzantine Imperial Agent in the 1300s, in a world where Muhammad converted to Christianity instead of founding Islam.
- Earlier, he wrote The Guns Of The South, in which South African white supremacists have stolen a time machine and, looking for a future ally, supply the American Confederacy with thousands of AK47s.
- Another Turtledove world is The Two Georges, where America never left the British Empire. Gun crime is unheard of, Los Angeles is "New Liverpool", airships are the fastest civilian transport, and Sir Martin Luther King is the Governor-General of the North American Union.
- Yet another book, Ruled Britannia, has the Spanish Armada succeeding in conquering England, though they are overthrown by a revolt inspired by William Shakespeare.
- The Man With The Iron Heart has Reinhard Heydrich surviving his 1942 assassination attempt and living to form a guerilla resistance movement after Germany's defeat. Not at all loosely a Take That at the Iraq War. Really.
- Speaking of Nazis, Turtledove's book In The Presence of Mine Enemies posits a world in which the U.S. remained isolationist throughout WWII, allowing Germany to defeat all the major European powers. World War III ends with the nuclear pacification of the US. Set in the year 2009, the book follows a sect of hidden Jews as they struggle to survive during a time of political upheaval. Scenery includes: a Japanese empire, the radioactive remains of the Liberty Bell in a German Museum, and a Nazi version of "The Producers" that involves a horrible play about Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill. Notable for its realistic presentation of these, alternative-universe, modern Nazis as being good people with a bad upbringing. And the ending bears no resemblance at all to the fall of the Soviet Union. Really, honest. Well, maybe a little
- This seems to be another example of Turtedove's fondness of Rubber Band History. (in the Timeline-191 series the South turns into an analogue of Nazi Germany after defeat in WWI.)
- In yet another version of World War II, Hitler's War posits what would happen if the Treaty of Munich had fallen through and Germany invaded Czechoslovakia in 1938. Long story short, the Germans expend so much energy invading the well-fortified Czechs that they fail to take Paris once they invade France. Meanwhile Stalin jumps the gun and invades Poland, bringing the Poles firmly onto the side of the Germans. Japan takes this opportunity to attack Siberia, while an unfortunate accident involving a passenger liner starts America thinking about joining the Allies.
- A short story collection takes place in an alternate set of Americas where homo erectus didn't become extinct and how colonization would be different. Including a lack of potatoes.
- And yet another where the Mississippi River expanded into a continental divide in prehistory, rendering eastern North America as a distinct continent which comes to be identified with Atlantis.
- An earlier take on America remaining in the Empire is Harry Harrison's A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah!
- Harrison's Stars & Stripes series envisions the Trent incident from the American civil war blowing up into a full-scale war between the United States and the British Empire. A navigational error brings the Confederacy in on the Union side, ending the civil war, and resulting in the British getting their asses handed to them by Generals Lee, Grant, Sherman, and Stonewall Jackson.
- In Harrison's Eden trilogy, the dinosaur killing asteroid never hits which allows an intelligent reptilian species to evolve.
- Robert Harris's Fatherland takes place in a Nazi-controlled Europe in the days leading up to Hitler's 75th birthday.
- Robert Conroy has written four alternate history novels: 1901, about a German invasion of America, 1862, about Britain entering the American Civil War, 1945, about an American invasion of the Japanese home islands and 1942 about the Japanese invasion of Hawaii (Not in the same timeline as 1945 btw).
- Lion's Heart and Zulu Blood by Steven Barnes are two alternate history novels in which Alexander the Great builds his empire not in Eurasia but in Africa. Thousands of years later, Africa is the seat of the world's most powerful nations and has colonized North America, using captives from the tribes of Darkest Europe as slave labor.
- Orson Scott Card's Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus reveals that our timeline is an Alternate History created by time travel. In the previous history, Christopher Columbus started a new crusade against Constantinople instead of sailing for the new world. This give the Native American Tlaxcalan empire enough time to develop iron-working, take over North America, then successfully invade Europe after gaining the secrets of firearms from captured Portuguese sailors. They eventually sent back a recording to convince Christopher Columbus to discover the new world, so that the Tlaxcalan empire would be stopped, creating our timeline. In our future, this is discovered and several agents are sent back, creating a third timeline where the Native Americans unite and visit Europe in peace (trading instead of invading) with no colonialism.
- The starting point for the hero in Roger Zelazny's Roadmarks is that he's trying to create alternate histories by changing significant events, such as by running guns to the Greeks at the battle of Marathon.
- John Birmingham's Axis of Time series combines this with Time Travel by exploring the consequences of a modern carrier group (including Prince Harry as the commander of its SAS detachment) being transported from Twenty Minutes Into The Future to the Battle of Midway.
- Notably features the USS Hillary Clinton, the "most stalwart wartime President in American history".
- Since Barack Obama made her Secretary of State in 2009, as of this writing she's number 4 in the line of presidential secession. This may be a Funny Aneurysm Moment.
- The Wild Cards setting deviates from history around 1946, when the titular alien virus falls on New York City, killing many and giving some humans superpowers. Juan and Eva Peron are deposed by an American fighting force, a superpowered Islamic militant unites the Arabic countries under a caliphate, and Buddy Holly never takes the fateful flight with the Big Bopper and ends up a washed-up has-been who manages to literally tear himself to pieces and then re-build himself on-stage during one story, becoming a modern-day shamanic figure.
- One of the most extreme examples is the illustrated fictional-science book The New Dinosaurs by Dougal Dixon, which presents an alternate timeline in which the Cretaceous extinction event never happens, dinosaurs remain the Earth's dominant lifeforms, mammals remain tiny insectivores, and no sentient species ever comes into existence.
- The (regrettably defunct) Speculative Dinosaur Project
 , aka Specworld, explores a similar scenario.
- This page presents a few more alternate evolution ideas, mainly focusing on different ways sentient species could have come about.
- Len Deighton's SS-GB is set in a Nazi-occupied Britain. America remained isolationist, but sends a crew to destroy an experimental nuclear reactor. For deniability, they've been transferred to the Canadian Army.
- Shelley Jackson's 2006 novel Half Life takes place in an America that tested nuclear weapons on native soil much longer and more extensively. The result has been a sharp spike in mutation. Specifically, conjoined twins have become a large and proud minority somewhat analogous to LGBT people in our timeline.
- Michael Dobson and Douglas Niles's novels, Fox on the Rhine and Fox on the Front explore what would have happened if the plot to assassinate Hitler had succeeded.
- Naomi Novik plays with the speculative fiction version of this trope in her Temeraire series, which asks such questions as "What if dragons existed and were used as early aircraft — early as in becoming necessary weapons of the great powers by the time of the Napoleonic Wars?"
- Neil Gaiman's short story A Study in Emerald is a re-imagining of A Study in Scarlet in an alternate Earth where HP Lovecraft's Cosmic Horrors took over centuries ago and now constitute the ruling caste.
- Diana Wynne Jones's Witch Week takes place in a world where Guy Fawkes succeeded in blowing up the Houses of Parliament. It doesn't achieve his aims (he got the timing wrong), but nonetheless, it has quite a knock-on effect...
- John Scalzi's humorous short story Alternate History Search Results explores the different outcomes of not just when Hitler is killed, but how.
- Kim Stanley Robinson's Years Of Rice And Salt takes its starting point with the Black Death killing virtually the entire European population. The story is of China and Islam's domination of the world spread across the next thousand years as seen through the same group of characters who are endlessly reincarnated.
- In Jo Walton's Small Change novels, Farthing, Ha'Penny, and Half A Crown, Britain made peace with Hitler in 1941. The first two books are set in 1949. The Reich still exists and controls all of continental Europe, though they're still fighting the Russians. A political cadre called the Farthing Set takes over the British government and starts heading down the slippery slope to totalitarianism, justifying the restriction of civil liberties by claiming the country is in danger from Jewish and communist terrorists. The US isn't a major player at all, having never recovered from The Great Depression, but there are occasional mentions of "President Lindbergh".
- S. M. Stirling's The Draka series (aka The Domination) is about a brutal, expansionist, enslaving empire of depraved but ruthless Nietzsche Wannabes conquering the Earth. He also writes the Emberverse series, where in 1999 "the Change" strikes worldwide, sending Nantucket Island into the past, and causing electricity, gunpowder and steam engines to stop working.
- Related is the Nantucket series, featuring the Nantucket Island which vanished from the Emberverse making its way in the Bronze Age. Technology works just fine there.
- He's also written a couple of what (so far) are one-offs: The Peshawar Lancers set in a world where an asteroid hits the earth during the Victorian era and the struggle to survive locks the dominant culture tachnologically and culturally in the 19th cent. The other is Conquistador where shortly after WWII a group of veterans discover and exploit a portal into a world where Europe never discovered the New World. The ending results in the portal between the worlds shifting yet again and instead of our world one is opened to a world where it looks like the First Nations never came over either.
- In his Lords of Creation series, thanks to Sufficiently Advanced aliens Mars and Venus are habitable and in fact inhabited by offshoots of humanity.
- In the 1632 series by Eric Flint, the modern day US town of Grantville is transported back to the year 1632, right in the middle of the Thirty Years War in Germany.
- In another Eric Flint Series, starting with 1812: Rivers of War, the PoD is much more subtle than dropping a city in the past with handwavium. In 1812, during the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, Sam Houston leads an attack against the Indian stronghold. Instead of taking an arrow between the goalposts, as he did in the original history, he slips when stepping over a rise, and gets nicked on his outer thigh by the arrow instead.
- In the same Ring of Fire universe as 1632 is Time Spike which sends a modern maximum security prison along with Spanish conquistadors and various groups of Indians into the Age of Dinosaurs.
- The Attolia series of books occur in a world in which Ancient Greek civilization has persisted into what would be the Renaissance in our world. People still worship a version of the Greek pantheon, and there are several rival city-states/kingdoms. However, they have developed many technologies that the Greeks didn't have, like
Fantasy Gun Control rifles and pocket watches.
- Randall Garrett's Lord Darcy series takes place in a modern day Europe with a balance of power between an Anglo-French Empire and the Kingdom of Poland, as well as the widespread use of magic. The divergence from our own world? Instead of dying at the siege of Chaluz, Richard I (the Lionhearted) survived and returned to England to rule.
- One of the originals is L Sprague De Camp's Lest Darkness Fall, about a modern man going back to 6th century Rome and attempting to reestablish civilization, as well as combating Gothic and Byzantine armies.
- Also DeCamp's Wheel of Time in which a man from our world is sent into the body of the person he would have been in a world where Pelagius' vision of Christianity beat out Augustine's and compounded by Charles Martel losing the Battle of Tours.
- Fyodor Berezin wrote the Red Stars duology, dealing with strange contacts between our world and a parallel one, where history took a radically different turn because Hitler delayed "Operation Barbarossa" by a month, giving Stalin enough time to launch his own (much more successful) offensive. The first book details a lengthy battle between a US carrier battle group from our world and a Soviet carrier battle group from the other world, with both fleets using technology and tactics unheard of by the other (for example, the other world's Soviets do not have stealth or satellite technology, while the US Navy was really surprised to see battleships and ekranoplans in the Soviet arsenal).
- Resurrection Day by Brendan DuBois supposes that the Cuban Missile Crisis sparked off a nuclear war. The United States is a virtual third-world country under military dictatorship, dependent on aid from Great Britain and treated by the rest of the world as a rogue state. An alternate history novel is mentioned by the protagonists in which WW 3 was averted, though needless to say it doesn't have the Kennedy's being assasinated either.
- An example of "honorary alternate history" is the 1980's series The Zone by James Rouch about World War III in Europe.
- Two books edited by Robert Cowley speculate on certain military events taking a different turn: What If?: The World's Foremost Military Historians Imagine What Might Have Been 1 and 2.
- These books were collected, along with other non-military essays, in The Collected What If?. The book has essays by such great historians as Caleb Carr, John Lukacs, John Keegan, James Bradley and Stephen Friggin' Ambrose.
- The Neanderthal Paradox, a trilogy of novels by Robert J. Sawyer (Hominids, Humans, and Hybrids), concerns an alternate Earth in which Homo sapiens died out, leaving Homo neanderthalensis as the world's dominant species. (Of course, since Homo Sapiens Are Bastards, their world is close to a utopia.) The story begins with a neanderthal scientist being pulled into our world and dealing with the considerable culture shock.
- The novel Synco takes place in a universe where the Chilean coup d'etat of 1973 was unsuccessful and Chile has become a successful communist state and the project synco has provided instant communication amongst the citizens. Synco was actually a real project in the 70's, abandoned after the coup. The novel includes many fictional versions of real-world characters.
- Baen Books publishes a series of anthologies titled "Alternate Generals", which are collections of short stories with various departures from the reader's timeline, from ancient Roman times to modern history.
- The parallel world in Mary Hoffman's Stravaganza books diverged from our world when Remus defeated Romulus, instead of vice versa.
- Michael Chabon's "The Yiddish Policemen's Union," which is set in an alternate history where Jewish people settled in Alaska rather than in Palestine after World War Two.
- Pasquale's Angel by Paul J Mc Auley is set in a 16th century Florence where, thanks to Leonardo Da Vinci concentrating on technology instead of dividing his attention between science and art, the Industrial Revolution came early and is centered in Italy rather than Great Britain.
- David Gerrold's The Man Who Folded Himself has the protagonist, a young man with a time machine, very briefly exploring alternate histories including one where Christianity is never founded.
- Orson Scott Card's Alvin Maker series takes place in an alternate North America where magic works (in different ways among the races - Whites have inherent powers called "knacks", Native Americans have a mystic connection with the land and Africans work their magic through artifacts), Great Britain is run by the Protectorship founded by Oliver Cromwell, New England is a semi-independent colony of same, the Stuart descendants of Charles I run the southern coastal states from Charleston (called Camelot), and Napoleon rules most of Continental Europe due to never having invaded Russia.
- In the Belisarius Series, by Eric Flint and David Drake, 6th century AD history is turned on its head by the arrival of two time travelers from the far future. One of the arrivals is a sentient crystal sent to aid the titular Roman general against a future traveler engaging in a genocidal campaign on the Indian subcontinent bent on world domination, seeking to generate a "pure" race, instead of the energy beings that mankind had evolved into in the crystal's time.
- This page has gone how long now, and Larry Niven's The Return of William Proxmire hasn't been mentioned? For shame.
- In an alternate history, it already was.
- Taylor Anderson's Destroyermen series involves two WWII destroyer crews (although their ships are really old, dating back to the WWI era) slipping through to a world where dinosaurs never went extinct and humans never evolved. Instead they encounter the Grik, who evolved from raptors, and the "cat-monkey" Lemurians.
- Frederik Pohl's The Coming of the Quantum Cats features a whole plethora of alternates. The one we see the most of has a United States that is culturally dominated by the Arabs and in which Ronald Reagan is a liberal activist (more likely than you might think).
- Poul Anderson's A Midsummer Tempest happens in a world where Shakespeare's plays are history, not invention. As a result things like mechanical clocks and cannon existed much earlier and England's Civil War occurs at the same time as its Industrial Revolution. Also Faeries and magic exist (thus the title).
- Charles Stross in his Merchant Princes series has a world were Christianity never existed, and is thus at a medieval level of development with the east coast of America ruled by Germanic kingdoms descended from a second viking settlement of the Americas. As of book 2 there is also a second world where France successfully invaded England in the 16th century but the heir to the British throne was in the colonies at the time so all of the Americas is New Britain, a constitutional monarchy. Socially it's in the 19th century, non-universal suffrage, the King still has actual power. Technologically, it's between the early 20th century, cars are new and run on steam, and the mid 20th century, France just detonated a "corpuscular petard." As of book 4 they discover a 4th world. Not much is known except it is completely uninhabited except for dead bodies and technology that suggests this world was very advanced, including the fact that the dead bodies have totally perfect teeth, all 32 no crowns.
- Thursday Next . Winston Churchill was never born, nobody knows who wrote Shakespeare, the Crimean War lasted 135 years, and reading is the national pastime, as opposed to television.
- In A. Bertram Chandler's Kelly Country, Australian outlaw Ned Kelly leads a successful rebellion against the British.
- One of Terry Pratchetts earlier works, Strata, has a few divergences, Remus wins instead of Romulus, hence the Reman empire, the Vikings stayed in America, calling it Valhalla and controversially the Earth was created old, with fossils and everything.
- The short story "Living Space" by Isaac Asimov plays with this trope: Our Earth (Earth Prime) has an official population of roughly one trillion, but most of those people live in a house on an alternate Earth where life never came into existence — a different alternate Earth for every single family. The story picks up where one homeowner complains that there is someone or something else living on their alt-Earth. Turns out Nazis from another alt-Earth where Hitler won WWII had the same idea, only instead of giving each family its own Earth, they decided to build entire cities. Oddly enough, the protagonist gets the Nazis to leave pretty easily — they agree that since his Earth built on this alt-Earth first, it properly belongs to his Earth. However, the story ends with a report of aliens appearing on another alt-Earth, and it's implied that this may be bad news for Earth Prime.
- Cyril M. Kornbluth's novel Not This August was written as being Twenty Minutes Into The Future, but could be read as an alternate history in which China and the Soviet Union take over the United States.
- Robert Silverberg wrote a number of stories in a universe in which Rome never fell, taking place over the course of several thousand years, and collected in a book called Roma Eterna.
- Moon of Ice by Brad Linaweaver is another one where Hitler wins the Second World War. Joseph Goebbel's daughter has escaped to a libertarian United States to publish her late father's diaries, which expose the truth about the regime, as well as an SS plot to seize power and commit genocide with bioweapons of all non-Aryan races.
- Elizabeth Bear's New Amsterdam is the name of New York City in her alternate world where the thriteen colonies still belong to Great Britain by the early 20th century, are bounded by a Canada still controlled by the French, and the Iroqouis Nation on the West and magic, were-creatures and vampires all exist.
- Newt Gingrich and William Forstchen have written several alternate history novels together. 1945 (Not to be confused with the Robert Conroy book above) has Hitler not declaring war on the US after Pearl harbor which results in a much quicker Pacific War with Japan but also results in our staying out of the European war and Germany winning with a Cold War on the verge of heating up between the United States and Germany in the title year. They have also written a trilogy about a Battle of Gettysburg that ends differently and thus rings several changes in the Civil War.
- James Herbert's 48 is set in a London which is almost uninhabited due to a plague released by the Germans in the last stages of WWII which proved more effective than they anticipated and killed most humans except for those with AB type blood.
- Lance Parkin's "Warlords of Utopia" features a universe where Rome never fell creating alliances with other similar universes (including one that was Amazonian and another where the Dinosaurs never became extinct) goes to war against multiple universes where the nazis won and created an interuniversal Axis empire. The Romans won because the nazis forgot the importance of training their soldiers to fight someone with a sword and a (kevlar lined) shield. Throw in some steampunk (clockwork robots FTW) and you've a very fun story.
- Robert Heinlein's Job: A Comedy of Justice takes it's protagonist through several alternate world's but starts in one where William Jennings Bryan became president, leading to a fundamentalist Christian dominated United States.
- In the world of The Big One and it's sequels by Stuart Slade a legal, bloodless coup by Lord Halifax against Churchill leads to Britain opting out of WWII in 1940 leading to, among other things, it's lasting until 1947 and ending in the United States nuking Germany.
Live Action TV
- The TV series Sliders used this as its entire premise.
- Some fanon interpretations of plot elements in Power Rangers postulate that the series is set in an alternate history where Britain, rather than Spain, colonized the American southwest. (Hence "Angel Grove" rather than "Los Angeles.")
- Thou art too kind. The "plot elements" in question were British redcoats wandering around the Vasquez Hills. Sounds like Did Not Do The Research at best.
- One of two Star Trek episodes that this troper has ever seen featured the crew landing on a planet that was an exact duplicate of earth, circa whenever the episode was made, the big difference being Rome never fell.
- One episode of Enterprise is set in a parallel universe where time-traveling aliens had armed the Nazis with an arsenal of devastating energy weapons. It features a highly-entertaining alternate universe propaganda clip. The "point of Divergence" was the assassination of Lenin before he could turn Russia communist.
- For that matter, the Star Trek timeline originally called for a Eugenics War in the 1990's although the Voyager episode Future's End has the crew going back to The Present Day which is 1996 so they might have ditched that.
- Also, the latest Star Trek movie officially kicks off a new continuity with the death of Kirk's dad and the destruction of Vulcan
- In Star Trek: First Contact the Enterprise is briefly confronted with an alternate reality where the Borg have assimilated Earth but fortunately the rift protects them from the changes long enough to Set Right What Once Went Wrong.
- The Star Trek Enterprise episode dealing with the alternate evil universe (one of their better ones) implies in its opening that the point of divergence was during first contact with the Vulcans when Zephram Cochran decides to shoot the Vulcan ambassadors and storm their ship. It really reminds this troper of Knights Of The Dinner Table.
- When you stop and look at it this makes the entirety of the Star Trek timeline one massive alternate reality, with the bearded reality the true history, altered solely by the Borg going back and bringing the Enterprise with them
- Saturday Night Live parodied this. "What if Eleanor Roosevelt could fly?"
Tabletop Games
- Players in the card game Chrononauts each represent a character from a different timeline altering crucial events in modern history in an attempt to set things back to what his or her own present. One character is a sentient cockroach whose present requires starting World War III.
- Alternate histories are a key element of the Feng Shui Tabletop RPG, with old timelines being erased and new ones being created as various factions gain or lose power in a conflict known as the Secret War. Most people don't notice when history changes, because their own histories have been rewritten to conform to the timeline alterations as well. However, Secret Warriors who have been to The Netherworld, an alternate dimension that facilitates Time Travel, retain memories of their former lives when these changes, known as "Critical Shifts," take place.
- The entire premise of the GURPS: Infinite Worlds campaign is based on one version of Earth discovering the means of traveling to hundreds of other alternate dimensions as reliably and economically as domestic air-travel is today, and engaging in a trans-dimensional cold war with a different version of Earth with similar technology. Steve Jackson Games published two sourcebooks for the 3rd edition of the game, which detailed at least ten distinct worlds and offered seeds for dozens of variations.
- The tabletop and video game Crimson Skies exists in an alternate history where the United States broke up during the Depression and zeppelins actually succeeded as a transport product.
- The Xbox version also blurs the distinctions between the two World Wars, with concentration camps and Fascists in the Great War (WW 1 to us people in Real Life).
- Not really, as the Fascists are not referred to save for by the Big Bad during a cutscene of A Team Firing to describe Die Spinne, his likely German organization in North America. As such, it can probably be assumed that WWI still had the "good" old German Empire whose collapse led Von Essen and his merry little band to flee West (for reasons I cannot possibly get around to fathoming, given the high likelihood at the time that war crimes tribunals for gentlemen like the good doctor were much discussed), after which he invented/lifted Die Spinne's ideology.
- The Tabletop RPG Traveller originally came out in the mid 1970s. The rather optimistic timeline of its official background universe, in which antigravity was invented in the 1980s and FTL travel in the 1990s, quickly became alternate history (and now seems to be officially accepted as AH, instead of trying to retcon it away).
- Similar to the above, Battletech's timeline originally began with the fall of the Soviet Union... in 2011. After several messy attempts to retcon it to the Russian Federation or a re-established USSR, the writers have just declared it official AH as well.
- Timemaster. Members of the Time Corps (based in AD 7192 Earth) try to prevent their opponents, an alien race called the Demoreans, from changing human history to make it more to their liking.
- Deadlands starts by asking, "What if things that went bump in the night appeared in the middle of the American Civil War?" Their answer? Said war drags on for a decade longer than it "should," human technology springs forward in leaps and fits, and humanity potentially winds up dropping supernatural nuclear weaponry on itself. Better Than It Sounds? Damn right.
Video Games
- Probably the most dramatic use of this trope in a video game is the Fallout series. In the Fallout universe, The Sixties never occured, and the sociopolitical standards of The Fifties continued well into the 21st century, with all the extenuating political, artistic, and scientific implications;
- The Cold War never ended, and China became the United States' ultimate enemy.
- The US annexed Canada.
- Computing evolved to the degree at which robots and sentient computers were commonplace; however, said computers are still powered by vacuum tubes and have monochromatic monitors, and there is no such thing as the Internet.
- Cold fusion was discovered, and even cars run on nuclear batteries (as evidenced in Fallout 3, when you blow up a car and a mushroom cloud forms).
- There are minor changes in the history of the Fallout universe pre-WWII as well; witness, for example, Abraham Lincoln's gold-plated repeating rifle.
- Command And Conquer: Red Alert is set in a timeline where Adolf Hitler was assassinated by a time-traveling Albert Einstein before coming to power, and World War II was instead fought between the Soviet Union and a European coalition. The main Command And Conquer series, set Twenty Minutes Into The Future at the time of its release, may be considered honorary alternate history. Though the Word Of God has indicated that it's what happens if the Soviet side wins in the Red Alert series, which would make it an alternate alternate history.
- Kane making a cameo in the Soviet campaign (especially the final cutscene) might be a pretty clear hint.
- Fanon indicated that it was a result of a Soviet victory, to explain away how Red Alert 1 was supposed (when released) to be a prequel to the original Command And Conquer (retroactively making the series not only honorary alternate history, but actual alternate history), despite RA2 making it much harder to make a consistent timeline leading from an Allied victory to the Brotherhood of Nod running around in the open by 1996. Word Of God didn't say much until it said they were now entirely separate series. Of course, that doesn't stop Fan Wank from finding ways to connect at least RA1 with the Tiberian series...
- Red Alert 3 confuses the situation even more, when a Soviet time travel experiment causes Einstein to be killed in the 20's, causing a 3-way war between the Allies, the Soviets, and the Japanese.
- World In Conflict is based on a scenario where the Cold War didn't end like it did, with the USSR attacking Europe and the US.
- The old Play Station 2 game Ring of Red asks what if the atomic bombs were never dropped, and instead, the US and Soviet Union invaded Japan... Oh, and what if Humongous Mecha were developed in the war.
- The game Freedom Fighters takes place in an alternate history in which two key things changed — first, the Soviets invented the atomic bomb and used it to end the War in Europe of World War II, and secondly, the Cuban Missile Crisis was resolved in their favor. The strategic and political repercussions of these changes allowed the Soviet Union not only to survive, but to begin an invasion of the US in the early 21st century.
- Resistance: Fall of Man takes place in an alternate history where, in the 30s, The Virus appeared and swept across Europe in place of the Nazis. The game takes place in the early 50s, by which time it's reached England.
- The Role Playing Game Lionheart is set in the 16th century, in a timeline where an event in the Third Crusade caused all variety of mythical creatures to become real.
- Used quite often in Dark Cloud 2. The Big Bad erases the Origin Points; Events/places/people where history began thus altering the intended future, however the heroes restore the Origin Points but instead of creating the intended history, they create alternate versions of it; for example in the intended history Aeroharmonics was never perfected, but after the heroes defeat Dr. Jaming, Aeroharmonics was developed and mastered.
- After completing The World Ends With You, you can access the "Another Day" chapter, which takes place in an alternate storyline in which the main characters take on completely different lives; Neku's passion in life is a Mini Game that has become Serious Business, Higashizawa is a booth babe, Konishi is Beat's teacher, among other things. Collecting Secret Reports reveals that Another Day is an alternate, parallel timeline, one of many that people of higher powers can jump to.
- Iron Storm was an FPS that came out durring the early glut of WWII themed games. It's set durring WWI in 1964. A number of changes include steampunkish assault rifles and powered armor.
Webcomics
- Radioactive Panda makes a throwaway joke about how George Lucas suffered a fatal heart attack in 1993; the characters lament that they "only" got to see Spielberg's vision of the prequel trilogy, which won 14 Oscars.
- Speaking of George Lucas, Darths And Droids takes place in an Alternate History where the Star Wars films were never made and instead the plot was used as an RPG campaign.
- In Roswell, Texas Davy Crockett survived the Alamo, assassinated Santa Anna and used his influence to keep Texas an independent nation. A running gag is historical figures with very different life stories. Just a couple of examples: Meir Kahane, Malcolm Little (Malcolm X) and George Lincoln Rockwell are all Texas Rangers. Walt Disney is President of California with Marion Michael Morrison (John Wayne) as his Army Chief of Staff
- Girl Genius takes place in a world more or less like our own in the 1800s or so, except for the presense of 'Sparks'- natural mad scientists who are compelled to build amazing technological wonders and pretty much rule the world- not very well mind you. There's at least one Spark who's noticed this and is trying to wipe out the rest (though he's understandably considered Ax Crazy and not the hero). The storyline of the comic is theorised to be their world's equivalent of the Napoleonic Wars with Magnificent Bastard Klaus Wulfenbach in the Napoleon role.
- Also it's hinted that the Queen of England is undead of some kind.
- Templar Arizona takes place in, to quote the author, "a slightly irregular Arizona that fell off the back of a truck somewhere, and now all the power outlets are a weird shape and a couple of wars never happened."
Web Original
- Shattered World starts with a war between Nazis and Soviets in, which goes better for the Soviets as Stalin didn't purge the officer corps. A very short ceasefire occurs, just before a WORSE World War Two that is still ongoing in 1949, with nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons being commonly used. There's even a wiki for it.
- Decades Of Darkness (see here and here) is a very long story about a universe where seven US states (the New England states, New York and New Jersey) separate from the US in 1810 and formed the Republic of New England, after the premature death of Thomas Jefferson. As a result, the USA keep slavery as an institution long into the 20th century, and became generally nastier. (The author describes DoD as "Draka, but realistic".) If printed, it would qualify as a doorstopper. A novel playing in the world of DoD is planned.
- A World of Laughter, a World of Tears by statichaos is an ATL where Eisenhower suffers a heart attack on the campaign trail, forcing the Republican Party to search for a fresh candidate in the 1952 Presidential Election. Who do they pick? Walt Disney. Don't let the premise fool you, though — this timeline is extremely dark, and every update turns it more and more into a World Half Empty. Currently incomplete.
- Holding Out For A Hero: Gustav Stresemann Survives by Faeelin. Germany doesn't turn militant in the 1930s, yet the world is not all sunshine and rainbows. Very detailed.
- Superpower Empire: China 1912 — The attempt to turn China into a republic after the fall of the Qing dynasty peters out, and instead a neo-imperial regime is set up. By preempting China's fall into warlordism, civil war and revolutionary upheaval, it fast-forwards its resurgence as a great power.
- No Spanish Civil War in 1936 by Dr. Strangelove. Francisco Franco receives an answer to a letter that went unanswered in our world, there is no military rebellion against the government, and the shaky Spanish democracy survives long enough to join the allies in WWII. All sort of hijinks ensue, including an anarchist as president of Spain, Leon Trotsky creating a new revolutionary ideology, Galeazzo Ciano leading Fascist Italy until the 70's, the Japanese invading Australia, the germans reaching Moscow... only to be utterly defeated at the gates of the Kremlin and much more.
- This editor read a short but entertaining scenario on a messageboard in which the Mongols were repelled from China and instead crossed the Bering Straits into North America. They migrate southward, conquering everything in their path and picking up Native American culture (and introducing their own culture, including horses and metalworking a few centuries early), until finally coming into conflict with the Aztecs, whom they conquer/absorb/merge with. Eventually, the, uh, for lack of a better word, "Mongtecs" and other technologically advanced Native Americans repel the European invaders and Mexico, the U.S., and Canada never come into being.
- A sadly defunct-for-years website contained rules for a tabletop RPG set in alternate world where, in the Old World, the hominid family tree branched out into half a dozen sentient species that were all analogous to various fantasy races (elves, dwarves, gnomes, halflings, orcs, goblins, and of course humans), while in the New World dinosaurs never went extinct and gave rise to several races of intelligent saurians (all with culture similar to the Aztecs). Also, dragons. Completely illogical, but fun.
- Look To The West, a timeline which begins with a very minor For Want Of A Nail and so far has got an imperial America, a very different Steam Punk French Revolution, and Russians and Lithuanians conquering Japan.
- For All Time starts with FDR dying two weeks after Pearl Harbor, and leads into what is perhaps the ultimate Crapsack World. The equivalent of NATO falls apart, the Soviets gain ground everywhere (they take Italy, Austria, Turkey, Iran, all of Korea, and Hokkaido, among others), France collapses after a string of inept fascist dictators (capped off by Jean-Bedel Bokassa) American race relations take a long dive off the cliff, nuclear weapons proliferate and are used to the point where they would outweigh any effects of global warming, the Reverend Jim Jones gets elected US President, and to top it all off, the Soviets get Andrei Chikatilo as their last General Secretary. Emphasis on "last" — he destroys Soviet Russia in a nuclear civil war, but not before nuking China and the Middle East.
- The Chaos Timeline is called by its author Max Sinister "the Mount Everest of Alternate History": A realistic timeline which starts with the death of Genghis Khan, thus erasing his conquests from history, and continuing it until the present. With the result that history changes a lot compared to our world, although some patterns seem to reappear.
- Many of the above can be found on the website AlternateHistory.com, which was also the inspiration for the AH-themed AH Dot Com The Series.
- Ansem Retort has one, where Ronald Reagan turned into the Incredible Hulk to tear down the Berlin Wall, Jimmy Carter did not exist, the Flying Spaghetti Monster created time, and a time-travelling Sinistar ate the Challenger.
- Il Bethisad is a world that diverged rather often since Roman times. The Holy Roman Empire never fell, the USA don't exist as such and nuclear weapons are used a bit more freely. History is still remarkably similar. For example, the Second World War is started by the German chancellor Hessler.
- We'll Meet Again, where America stays within the British Empire...just...only to lead to a world ruled by sadists, dominated by war and genocides everywhere...
- "A Day in Time" takes place in an Alternate History were the bombing if Hiroshima drew the attention of hostile aliens, which invaded Earth and attempted to wipe out humanity. The protagonists are refugees living on the moon. Now that one of them has gone back in time to World War Two, it seems likely that we're going to see a new alternate alternate history as well.
Western Animation
- Justice League featured a relatively conventional version of this, with Vandal Savage going back in time, overthrowing Hitler, and designing awesome weapons of war to help the Axis powers. Luckily for the timeline, Hitler wasn't killed — just turned into a Human Popsicle — so when Savage was defeated, Adolf could be thawed out and set the timeline right.
- The early '90s X Men animated series — like the comics at the time — asked the question of "What would happen to the Marvel Universe if Professor Xavier died in the '60s?" The answer? Horrible horrible things.
- Much more lighthearted: Freakazoid found himself flung back in time a little before 07 December 1941, and saw a few Japanese planes coming towards Hawaii. The end result after he interferes? The Cubs win the World Series, world peace breaks out, and President Brain rules over the US.
- In Evil Con Carne, the League of Nations never disbanded and the world is fairly peaceful, save for the Villain Protagonist leading a terrorist group trying to Take Over The World. Since it pretty much shares canon with The Grim Adventures Of Billy And Mandy, it seems that the Soviet Union never fell either.
Other
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