"Some men see things as they are and ask ‘Why?’ I dream things that never were and ask ‘Why not?’"
— Robert F. Kennedy (paraphrasing George Bernard Shaw)
Alternate History has numerous associated tropes, answering questions of how history could have happened differently.
See also Alternate Universe, This Index Is Anachronistic, and Time Travel Tropes.
Tropes:
Main topic:
Sub-categories:
- Advanced Ancient Humans
- Airstrip One
- Alien Space Bats
- Allohistorical Allusion
- Alternate History – Nazi Victory
- Alternate History Wank
- Alternate Landmark History
- Alternate Self
- Alternate Techline
- Alternate Timeline
- Ancient Astronauts
- Artistic License – History
- Balkanize Me
- Been There, Shaped History
- Beethoven Was an Alien Spy
- Bizarro Universe
- Black Vikings
- Butterfly of Doom
- Close-Enough Timeline
- Conspiracy Theories
- Day of the Jackboot
- Dead Alternate Counterpart
- Demon King Nobunaga
- Dewey Defeats Truman
- Different States of America
- Different World, Different Movies
- Double-Blind What-If
- Famously Mundane, Fictionally Magical
- Fictional Country
- Fictional Political Party
- Fictionalized Death Account
- Flash Sideways
- For Want of a Nail
- Ghostapo
- Giving Radio to the Romans
- Historical-Domain Character
- Historical Fantasy
- Interdimensional Travel Device
- Istanbul (Not Constantinople)
- Love Transcends Spacetime
- Mass Teleportation
- Mexico Called; They Want Texas Back
- Middle Eastern Coalition
- Mirror Self
- Mirror Universe
- Modern Mayincatec Empire
- Never Was This Universe
- No Historical Figures Were Harmed
- Non Sequitur Causality
- One-Man Industrial Revolution
- Point of Divergence
- Politically Correct History
- Putting on the Reich
- Real Event, Fictional Cause
- Richard Nixon the Used Car Salesman
- Rubber-Band History
- Schizo Tech
- Secret History
- Sliding Scale of Alternate History Plausibility
- Soviet Superscience
- Space-Filling Empire
- Stock Unsolved Mysteries
- Suppressed History
- Take Over the World
- Tesla Tech Timeline
- Those Magnificent Flying Machines
- United Europe
- Weird Historical War
- Weird West
- What If?
- World War III
- Zeppelins from Another World
