Alt-History: Exploring the What If?

Alt-History Threads in Fiction

Uchronia. That is today’s vocabulary word. Uchronia is a genre of speculative fiction that explores "what if" scenarios by altering a key point in past history and tracing the consequences. The term was coined by philosopher Charles Renouvier in 1876 as the title of his novel Uchronie. For anyone interested in the etymology, the word is composed of the Greek prefix ou- (meaning "not") and chronos (meaning "time") and modeled after the word utopia.

Some novels fall into the alt-history genre, while others, like The Silvering, contain an alt-history thread. What is the difference? In the first, the altered world is the story’s stage. In the second, the historical deviation functions as the backdrop, while the story itself focuses on a personal or character-driven plot.

My novel, The Silvering, contains a deep alt-history thread. In The Silvering, the history of our Earth stays intact, except for a layer of secret history. The Earth with an altered history exists alongside ours as a parallel Earth.

As I finish my final line edits, I want to share what I learned while writing my novel, with help from two writers who explored alt-history concepts brilliantly.

The Man in the High Castle

Let us start by exploring Philip K. Dick's 1962 novel, which won the Hugo Award the following year. The Man in the High Castle remains the book most people picture when they hear the words "alternate history." Its point of divergence is February 1933. Instead of missing Franklin Roosevelt, Giuseppe Zangara’s bullet kills him. Without the New Deal, the Great Depression drags on. Without Roosevelt, the U.S. remains isolationist and rearms too late. Pearl Harbor destroys the Pacific fleet, and the Axis powers win the war.

In this alt-history world, rockets carry passengers from Berlin to San Francisco in under an hour, Germans have reached Mars, and the Mediterranean has been drained for farmland. Throughout the book, Dick does not dramatize these events. Instead, his worldbuilding arrives in passing, through characters who take them for granted. For example, a San Francisco dealer sells prewar Americana, including Mickey Mouse watches and Civil War pistols, to Japanese collectors. In Dick's world, these ordinary items have become luxury collectibles.

Tucked inside the novel is a banned book, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, that imagines the Allies winning, though its version of that victory is not quite ours. In it, Roosevelt’s successor builds a different postwar order. Britain becomes the dominant world power, and the U.S. and Britain end up rivals. Dick refuses to let the reader feel at home. Even the “correct” timeline is a story with its own distortions.

Fatherland

Robert Harris took a different approach in 1992. Unlike Dick, Harris has no single point of divergence as a hinge. The backstory accumulates in fragments. Fatherland opens in Berlin in April 1964, the week before Hitler's seventy-fifth birthday, in a Germany that won the war in Europe. Xavier March, a detective, is called to a body pulled from a lake. The case leads him toward the one thing his government has erased from every record: the Holocaust. The novel runs on dramatic irony. Its protagonist, March, doesn’t know about the Holocaust, but the reader does, and that gap creates the dread. The horror hides in euphemisms like “resettlement,” which bury the murders in paperwork.

In Fatherland, Harris uses Albert Speer’s and Adolf Hitler’s actual architectural plans for Berlin as the foundation for his worldbuilding. Hitler’s planned capital, Germania, exists. Because the plans were real, the novel carries documentary weight. Harris didn’t invent the Nazi vision; he completed it.

What Makes The Silvering Different

The Silvering borrows worldbuilding ideas from both books. Like Dick, I reveal my regime, Das Auslesereich, the “Realm of Selection,” through mundane daily life. An owl-shaped sugar jar and a watercolor painting seem harmless at first, but they slowly reveal the extent of the horror. Like Harris, I build that horror through paperwork and euphemism. The sick are called “assets,” and state-ordered deaths are hailed as a “Final Contribution.”

But The Silvering does three things neither book does.

1)      It is a family story first. Underneath the portal and the politics, The Silvering is about family dysfunction. It is a case study in the consequences of lying, both outright and by omission, and in the human obsession with staying young. It explores how one family’s choices bleed across three generations and two worlds. This novel was an ambitious undertaking. I set out to combine the deep characterization of literary fiction with the momentum of a thriller. It exists for readers of Blake Crouch who want more character and for readers of Kazuo Ishiguro who want more plot.

2)      It keeps both worlds. Most alt-history stories replace our world. The Silvering sets them side by side. Ellen’s 1984 has junk food, cigarette smoke, and Stevie Wonder on the radio. The other 1984 has prescription food dispensaries, Reich-approved clothing, and instrumental music. At all times, the reader holds our history in one hand and the altered one in the other.

3)      The point of divergence is a secret in our world. In The Silvering, our own world is hiding a dark political secret. When Ellen finally discovers the truth, it changes everything she thought she knew about her family and her history.

A Couple of Tips for Writing a Successful Alt-History Story

1)      Choose your point of divergence. Select a pivotal event in world history that you are passionate about. Learn as much as you can about it. If an alternate history thread loses its credibility, it becomes fantasy. Research your timeline thoroughly. Alternate histories succeed when they are believable, so make sure your story grows logically from the point of divergence.

2)      Master your worldbuilding. Alt-history worldbuilding is not the same as fantasy worldbuilding. The rules of history are still at play. If you add speculative elements, they must follow their own logic just as strictly. Let ordinary life reveal the history. Language matters too. Regimes rename things, and their euphemisms tell readers more about the world than any explanation. Resist the urge to info-dump. Let the world reveal itself through dialogue and description.

Here is my question for you: If you were to write an alt-history book, what single moment in history would you choose to change? Why?