The course of history was...not that of a billiard-ball, which, once it has been hit, ran along a definite course; on the contrary, it was like the passage of clouds, like the way of a man sauntering through the streets - diverted here by a shadow, there by a little crowd of people... - finally arriving at a place that he had neither known of nor meant to reach. There was inherent in the course of history a certain element of going off course.

- Robert Musil, The Man without Qualities

The ancient Greeks, the first writers of history in the West, believed in fate: history was predestined, and nothing could swerve it from its course. For much of the intervening two millenia, there has been little disagreemernt with this, and historians have rejected speculation that things may have turned out differently. This was particularly true of 19th Century historians in England, who tended to see British history as pointing towards the creation of the Victorian system. In recent years though, this has changed.

One of the major factors behind the change could well be the formulation of Chaos Theory, and the realisation that nothing in the Universe is perfectly predictable, especially if it is part of a complex system. There are few systems more complex than that of history. History is subject to myriad potentially dramatic forces acting on it: the decisions made by individuals, the weather, the outcome of battles. Consider the speculation by Arthur C. Clarke in his novel The Fountains of Paradise that if Charles Martel had lost the battle of Tours in AD 732 Europe would have become Muslim rather than Christian, and that Islamic science may have produced an Industrial Revolution 1000 years before the one in our history.

Such ideas have been eagerly siezed upon by writers of fiction, with particular emphasis on the Second World War, in Dystopias such as Fatherland, SS-GB, and The Man in the High Castle. However, almost every era of history has had some alternative history fiction written about it, from a Byzantium where Mohammed became Christian to a 1990's where Elvis Presley never left the army. Such fiction is often vivid, satirical, and unrealistic, although some, such as Fatherland produce remarkably convincing impressions of life in alternative worlds.

Nor is such speculation merely the province of writers. In Virtual History the historian Niall Ferguson and others used alternative history as a means of analysing our own, from the prospects of Charles I succesfully creating a system of personal rule in England, to whether a USSR without Gorbachov would have lasted beyond 1991. The field of cliometrics has used alternatives to examine real-world economies: what would the effect on the U.S. economy have been if railways had not been constructed, for example.

This page is designed largely for me to put forward my own ideas on alternative history, not only in a series of timelines speculating on various changes in history, but also in other articles, such as one on the film It Happened Here, perhaps the only true alternative history film ever made. Whether you agree with my decisions or not, I hope you find them of interest.

My Alternative Histories

Other Articles