Classic alternate-history fiction tends to follow a formula. It asks “what if” about a few key moments in history: what if a pivotal war had a different outcome? What if a different man had been elected president?
Granted, there are plenty of excellent alternate-history novels that ask one of those two age-old questions. But after two centuries of consistent popularity, the genre has seen plenty of novels that ask even more fascinating questions. What if a devastating plague wiped out half of the Wild West? What if the Underground Railroad had an actual train? What if Queen Victoria married Dracula?
This genre is adjacent, of course, to historical fiction. But its best offerings also share significant overlap with other adventurous genres, like sci-fi, fantasy, political thrillers, and even horror. The best alternate-history stories are those that do all of the above and zoom in, filtering the massive historical changes they’ve proposed through the microcosm of one narrator or family’s experience. In other words, they present fictional history the way we experience actual history.
The Man in the High Castle
By Philip K. Dick (1962)
The Man in the High Castle is alternate-history fiction at its most fundamental: a famous war has a different outcome, causing a dystopian present, with a sci-fi twist. It’s also a brilliant novel about alternate-history novels.
Dick’s novel poses what would become one of the most popular questions in the alternate-history canon: what if the Axis powers won WWII? His answer: they took over the United States. But 20 years later, a disparate cast of subjugated Americans start to question their reality when they grow obsessed with an alternate-history novel in which the Axis powers lost the war. Lucky for them, that book’s mysterious author may hold the key to righting their timeline.
Part tense spy thriller, part sprawling sci-fi, The Man in the High Castle won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1963, shot its author to hard-earned literary fame, and later inspired one of the best sci-fi shows of all time. More importantly, it fine-tuned the sprawling, dystopian tropes that came to dominate the genre.
You can purchase The Man in the High Castle here.
Anno Dracula
By Kim Newman (1992)
Alternate-history novels tend to favor heavy subject matter, imagining dark, dystopian versions of our world where history’s worst figures reign supreme. Anno Dracula is not that. Instead, this first novel in Kim Newman’s alternate-history vampire series has the distinction of being one of the most outrageously fun alternate histories ever written.
Set in 1888, Anno Dracula asks: what if a widowed Queen Victoria decided to remarry? What if her second husband was Vlad the Impaler, still alive nearly 500 years after his birth? What if, soon after Vlad’s arrival in London, the never-identified serial killer Jack the Ripper happened to make his first kill? Newman takes us a winding, bloody, but always entertaining ride to answer those questions.
You can purchase Anno Dracula here.
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell
By Susanna Clarke (2004)
Susanna Clarke is a master of building stories that feel like looking into a curio cabinet: every tiny detail is perfectly strange, impeccably considered, and works together to build something so enchanting you never want to look away. This novel, which launched her career and later inspired a TV adaptation, is evidence of that.
Set in an alternate England at the turn of the 19th century, in Jonathan Strange, magic and its practitioners once reigned supreme, but the practice has disappeared entirely—until two men revive it. With all the intricacy of Piranesi and the mysticism of her fairy-tale-inspired short story collection The Ladies of Grace Adieu, this novel is hypnotizing in its fantastical vision of 19th-century England. It may be set far in the past, but to this day, it still feels like a fresh, exciting take on what alternate history can do.
You can purchase Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell here.
The Plot Against America
By Philip Roth (2004)
In the 22 years since its publication, The Plot Against America has never stopped feeling prescient. Inspired by Roth’s childhood and narrated by the author’s younger self, this novelimagines a United States where millionaire Nazi sympathizer Charles Lindbergh defeats FDR in the 1940 presidential election and blocks the country from entering WWII.
Xenophobia and political violence run rampant nationwide in this alternate America, but Roth’s true genius lies in his focus on a microcosm. He interprets the entire political landscape through the lens of one Jewish family—his own—as they navigate a changing landscape in Newark, resulting in a story that’s as much a poignant family saga as a gripping political thriller. It’s the most celebrated novel of his career for a reason.
You can purchase The Plot Against America here.
Never Let Me Go
By Kazuo Ishiguro (2005)
There’s hardly a genre Kazuo Ishiguro hasn’t mastered, and his approach to alternate history is deliciously coy. Set in England in the 1990s, this novel makes a meal out of sneaking up on its readers. Ishiguro’s careful pacing in rolling out the alternate history he’s built for this novel is just one example of the kind of literary brilliance that earned Never Let Me Go a spot on the Booker Prize shortlist, a film adaptation, and, years later, contributed to Ishiguro’s Nobel Prize in Literature. Something about this narrator’s world is very, very different from our own, but Ishiguro is endlessly careful and precise in revealing exactly how.
We know this: Kathy is a caretaker for organ donors, but spends her days reminiscing about her adolescence at an elite, isolated boarding school, where a harsh fate awaited students upon graduation. That fate is coming for her. Revealing more would betray Ishiguro’s quiet, brilliant build-up to the big reveal.
You can purchase Never Let Me Go here.
11/22/63
By Stephen King (2011)
After 50 years of dominating horror fiction, it’s always entertaining when Stephen King experiments with new genres. Here, the master of scares turns his talents to a story he’d long wanted to write: a research-dense period thriller that reimagines one of the most pivotal moments in American history.
With 11/22/63, King answers a question that, according to him, he’d been contemplating since he started writing: what if a time traveler returned from the future to stop the assassination of John F. Kennedy? The answer is as elaborate and terrifying as the best of King’s work—and inspired one of his best page-to-screen adaptations to date.
You can purchase 11/22/63 here.
The Underground Railroad
By Colson Whitehead (2016)
The Underground Railroad earned Colson Whitehead a National Book Award, a Carnegie Medal of Excellence, and a Pulitzer Prize, and inspired a Peabody-winning TV adaptation helmed by Barry Jenkins. It only takes a few pages to see why. This is straightforward historical fiction with one major twist: the titular underground railroad is not the one you learned about in school. Instead, it’s a fully functional pseudo-subway that shepherds enslaved people to escape.
For one enslaved woman on the run from a bloodthirsty bounty hunter, this railroad is the start of a terrifying, action-packed odyssey through the American South. Think the high-stakes adventure saga of The Road meets the cat-and-mouse revenge fantasy of Moby-Dick. This is how Whitehead proves himself a master of the genre: his alternate history is so intricate and vivid it hardly feels fictional at all.
You can purchase The Underground Railroad here.
Ring Shout
By P. Djèlí Clark (2020)
Plenty of American alternate history novels focus on imagining an opposite outcome for one of two wars that shaped the country’s history: the Civil War and WWII. But Ring Shout makes a powerful argument for the midpoint between those two eras being just as pivotal. Set in Macon, Georgia, in 1922, the novel is dense with historical research, but it reads like a blend of magical-realist coming-of-age story, revenge fantasy, and straight-up horror.
Clark builds on a real moment in American history—the revival of the KKK after the release of The Birth of a Nation in 1915. Here’s the twist: he imagines that the creatures under the hoods are not men at all, but demons, and that a ragtag group of Black teenagers who can see the dead may be the only ones who can stop them. The fate of the American South is in their hands.
Inspired by classic Southern Gothic novels, hip-hop, Gullah culture, real ex-slave narratives, and the titular ring shout ritual, Clark does more than imagine a version of our world with one key historical difference. He crafts an entirely new one.
You can purchase Ring Shout here.
Outlawed
By Anna North (2021)
The Handmaid’s Tale meets True Grit in Anna North’s feminist alt-Western. In this vision of the 1830s American West, a plague has decimated the population and women are required by law to bear children. Narrator Ada’s infertility means certain death or exile. Instead, she joins a ragtag group of outcasts, traversing the open desert in search of a place to build their new utopia.
Outlawed’s premise may rest on a major twist in American history, but at its core, the story feels as fundamentally Western as any work of straightforward historical fiction in the genre. It’s full of misfit heroes finding belonging on rugged terrain, reflects on big ideas about justice and freedom, and most importantly, it’s brimming with adventure.
You can purchase Outlawed here.
You Dreamed Of Empires
By Àlvaro Enrigue, translated by Natasha Wimmer (2024)
You Dreamed of Empires is so many different novels at once that it almost feels like a spoiler to call it “alternate history.” But perhaps no genre better encapsulates everything Enrigue accomplishes in this story about the days leading up to a fateful meeting between Aztec emperor Moctezuma and Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés.
This is a mournful kind of historical fiction: every page drips with the sense that Enrigue has chosen to reimagine this pivotal chapter in Mexico’s colonial history because the truth feels too massive and brutal to put to paper without some kind of surreal twist. Luckily, Enrigue is a master of surreal twists.
So, between the novel’s historical beginning and its psychedelic, bloody, ahistorical ending, You Dreamed of Empires takes you on a hundred different side quests. It’s a haunted house novel, then a cat-and-mouse game, then an acid trip, then a swashbuckling adventure epic, then a dark satire. It’s alternate history at its best.
You can purchase You Dreamed of Empires here.
Leave a Reply