Alternate history: What if Napoleon had won at Waterloo? What if Hitler had never been born? If the South had won the Civil War, what would the United States look like today? To revel in these speculations, we turn to the "alternate history" genre.

While historians focus on what actually happened in the past, authors who write alternate history explore what could have happened had events taken just a slightly different turn and historical figures responded just a little bit differently to their altered circumstances. Harry Turtledove, for example, widely acknowledged as the master of the genre, imagines in Ruled Britannia (2002) that the Spanish Armada defeated the British navy in 1588. Under the resulting fanatical Roman Catholic regime, Elizabeth I is taken prisoner in the Tower of London and underground resistance playwright William Shakespeare writes dramas that could win back England's freedom--or spell his own death.

In other alternate history novels, authors envision a world where the Black Death wiped out European civilization; the Roman Empire never even stumbled; and the American Revolution was somehow averted. World War II is undoubtedly the most popular "point of divergence," or point at which the writer's world becomes different from our own. One author even wrote a study of what these many stories mean for our culture (Gavriel D. Rosenfeld in The World Hitler Never Made). Other novelists, like some of the best writers in science fiction or fantasy, simply wonder at the possibilities of the universe. (Many alternate histories are, in fact, shelved with science fiction or fantasy.)

Alternate histories allow the author and his or her readers to celebrate the belief--or the fantasy--that a single person can change the course of human history and that every decision, no matter how small, matters. Many academic historians today tend to play down the actions of individuals and explain events through telescopic lenses. That may make for good scholarship, but it's often no way to tell a good story. Here are a few of those good stories, organized by their points of divergence.

The Man in the High Castle

By Philip K. Dick (1962)

Dick's novel was one of the first to explore a world where the Axis powers won the war, and it is still considered one of the classics of the genre. But unlike more recent books, Dick does not elaborately develop alternate geopolitics or posit a decades-long resistance to the Nazis. Instead, he considers the ordinary lives of Californians living under a Fascist puppet government--a reminder of the sad truth that human beings can acclimate to almost anything. Even readers who don't enjoy asking "what if " will appreciate the questions Dick raises about history's meaning--or the lack of it.

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The Children's War

By J. N. Stroyar (2001)

* SIDEWISE AWARD FOR ALTERNATE HISTORY

Stroyar's epic novel has been called one of the most detailed explorations of a world in which the Nazis won the war. The key players in the story belong to the Polish Resistance, which Stroyar spent years researching. After decades of fighting the Nazis, Stroyar's characters have little idea what they are fighting for. The lives of the principal characters--an English refugee with multiple identities and a Nazi official who is secretly a rebel leader--dramatize the emotional and moral dynamics of an exhausting but necessary resistance.

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The Plot Against America

By Philip Roth (2004)

* SIDEWISE AWAR D FOR ALTERNATE HISTORY, W. H. SMITH AWARD, SOCIETY OF AMERICAN HISTORIANS AWARD

Perhaps because of its family ties to science fiction and historical fiction, alternate history has often seemed too "genre" for literary types. But Roth's novel (EXCELLENT Nov/Dec 2004) of an isolationist America in the 1940s won acclaim from both highbrow critics and alternate history fans (Roth won the Sidewise Award for Alternate History even though he claimed to have never heard of the genre when he started writing the novel). Genre fans may be annoyed at some "literary" devices--the author appears as a character, for instance--but will still be fascinated by a world in which Charles Lindbergh defeats Franklin Roosevelt in the 1940 presidential election. For another recent "literary" crossover, see The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon (GOOD July/Aug 2007).

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The Summer Isles

By Ian R. MacLeod (2005)

* SIDEWISE AWARD FOR ALTERNATE HISTORY

The rise of Nazism often seems so singular that it's easy to forget its connections to earlier history. But Hitler himself wrote that he had borrowed ideas from the American eugenics movement and from British internment camps for Boers and black Africans in South Africa. MacLeod reminds us of those connections by showing how Fascism could have arisen in an entirely different culture--a Britain that suffered the same military and economic defeats that Germany did after World War I. While MacLeod is clearly writing about Fascism, the frightening aspect of his novel is just how familiar and English he makes it seem. Originally a 1998 novella that won both the World Fantasy Award and the Sidewise Award for Alternate History, The Summer Isles was expanded to book length.

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The Severed Wing

By Martin J. Gildron (2002)

* SIDEWISE AWARD FOR ALTERNATE HISTORY

Alternate histories of World War II tend to focus on the military and political consequences for the major powers of the time while ignoring perhaps the most tragic event of the war: the Holocaust. Gildron fills the gap by creating a world where the major cities of Europe still have thriving Jewish quarters and languages like Yiddish and Ladino still flourish. But all is not well in this alternate world: not only has the West failed to reject anti-Semitism as it did in our reality, but more subtle and sinister forces threaten this era that could have been.

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How Few Remain

A Novel of the Second War Between the States

By Harry Turtledove (1997)

* SIDEWISE AWARD FOR ALTERNATE HISTORY

Lincoln lives, but the Union dies. That is the key twist in Turtledove's tale of the North and the South. Turtledove hinges his history on the lives of people who became great in our world--not just Lincoln but Samuel Clemens, Frederick Douglass, Theodore Roosevelt, and others. As in many of his other novels, Turtledove considers how these great men's ambitions would have been reshaped by the broken Union and the America that resulted. How Few Remain is the prelude to Turtledove's magnum opus, ten additional novels that take the Union and the Confederacy through the tumultuous 20th century.

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Stars & Stripes Forever

By Harry Harrison (1998)

Most alternate histories of the Civil War begin with Southern victory. Harrison takes a more original tack. In the real world, the Union seizure of a ship bearing two Confederate envoys to the United Kingdom nearly resulted in a British declaration of war. Harrison supposes that it did, but through a series of diplomatic and military mishaps, the Union and Confederacy wind up as allies against a British invasion. Stars & Stripes and its two sequels, Stars & Stripes in Peril (2000) and Stars & Strips Triumphant (2002), have been criticized for being unrealistic and rabidly anti-British; nonetheless, they tap into an irresistible theme: the explosion of total world war decades before our own era.

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Bring the Jubilee

By Ward Moore (1953)

Like The Man in the High Castle, Moore's book was one of the first to put alternate history on the map. In his world, the Confederacy wins at Gettysburg and becomes a world power, while the United States misses out on the Industrial Revolution and remains a backwater vassal state. Hodge Backmaker, a young man trying to make the best of it in New York City, falls in with a radical Union nationalist group, the "Grand Army," though he only wants to be a scholar. When he finally realizes his dreams, he discovers that he may still have a chance to change history.

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1812

The Rivers of War

By Eric Flint (2005)

Most Americans don't consider the War of 1812 as a pivotal conflict, if they think of it at all. But the survival of the nation was at stake for those who fought it, including larger-than-life figures like Andrew Jackson and Sam Houston. By tinkering with these men's fates, Flint creates a world where the Trail of Tears never occurred and an independent, multiracial republic arises in the region of Arkansas. Together with its sequel, 1824: The Arkansas War (2006), Flint asks how the United States could have dealt with its racial divide sooner.

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The Probability Broach

* LIBERTARIAN FUTURIST SOCIETY 'S PROMETHE US AWARD

By L. Neil Smith (1980)

Every high school student learns how the Founding Fathers' brilliant statecraft and the Federalists' elegant and energetic prose saved the budding nation from anarchy. But Smith would have it otherwise; in his alternate world, the Whiskey Rebellion led to the collapse of the federal government and the reinstatement of the Articles of Confederation. The result is a world in which a lack of government intervention has accelerated North American industry, science, and medicine. While a bit optimistic about the fruits of libertarianism, Smith's series of novels are nevertheless considered a classic of the genre.

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Resurrection Day

By Brendan DuBois (1999)

* SIDEWISE AWARD FOR ALTERNATE HISTORY