Photograph: Allstar/MGM/Sportsphoto Steampunk is one of the most entertaining of theĭirectly inspired by Dick’s novel, The Alteration by Kingsley Amis takes place in a 1970s England where the Reformation never happened and where the all-powerful Catholic Church is in a cold war with the Ottoman Empire. Miranda Richardson and Rutger Hauer in the 1994 adaptation of Robert Harris’s alternative history novel Fatherland. In a nice touch, Dick believed that he had only dictated the novel, and that it had really been created by the I Ching to prove the existence of other Earths. Subtle, menacing and utterly brilliant, this is Dick’s masterpiece.
Abendsen, with the help of the Chinese book of prophecy, the I Ching, has written an alternative history novel set in a world in which the Nazis lost the war. Juliana Frink, a judo instructor, discovers that there is a resistance movement to the Axis, inspired by a novelist called Hawthorne Abendsen. The book is set in the early 1960s, when the victorious Germans and Japanese have divided North America between them. Here, the butterfly moment was the successful assassination of Franklin Roosevelt in 1934. The Man in the High Castle is still the best what-if-the-Axis-had-won novel.
The second world war and its aftermath really got the AH genre going in earnest and inspired many Sprague de Camp homages such as Fatherland, SS-GB, The Plot Against America and The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. The first real AH bestseller was L Sprague de Camp’s 1939 novel Lest Darkness Fall, in which a modern time traveller attempts to prevent the collapse of the western Roman Empire by introducing steam engines, pencils, double-entry book-keeping and other exciting innovations.
Some writers, such as Harry Turtledove, SM Stirling, Jasper Fforde and Ken Flint, have spent nearly their entire careers writing alternative histories, but others, such as Kingsley Amis, Iain Banks, Stephen Fry, Stephen King, Jo Walton, Kim Stanley Robinson and Philip Roth have also dabbled in the genre.
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