When novels change history

Alternative history, or 'unchronie', seems to be going through something of a boom. How could it be otherwise?
Another time … Rutger Hauer in the film version of Robert Harris's Fatherland. Photograph: Cine Text/Allstar

As with so many concepts in literature, the French have an elegant word for it: uchronie. For Anglophone readers and writers, we have to make do with such unwieldy terms as "counterfactual novels", "alternate timelines" and "allohistories" to describe these books. Uchronie is a neologism modelled on Utopia – a "no-time" rather than a "no-place", used for "what if" books where significant historical events are changed. In its pure form, a uchronic novel involves a specific moment of divergence: in Kingsley Amis's The Alteration (Philip Pullman fans should check out the winking similarities between Lyra's universe and Amis's) it is that the Reformation never happened; in Philip Roth's The Plot Against America it is that Franklin Roosevelt loses the presidential election of 1940 to Charles Lindbergh. It is a kind of literature that seems to be on the increase – my evidence for this is gut instinct, triggered by reading a spate of them including Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union, Andrew Crumey's Mobius Dick and the trade collection of Geoff Johns's Flashpoint, but a quick browse around the website Uchronia seemed to confirm the hunch.

Most sources agree that the first "what if" moment is in Book IX of Livy's History of Rome, in which he pondered what would have happened if Alexander the Great had turned west towards Rome rather than east towards Persia. There's then a gulf of centuries until Joanot Martorell's romance Tirant lo Blanc (in which the level of satire is as yet undecided) which reverses the loss of Constantinople to Mehmet II – although theologians from Augustine to Aquinas regularly pondered the question of whether the Incarnation would have been necessary even if Adam and Eve had decided against eating the apple. These examples show two distinct strands of uchronic writing. The theologians all agreed the Incarnation would still have happened; ie if something changes, then nothing changes. In Tirant lo Blanc we get uchronia as palliative fantasy, the "if only" rather than "what if".

"If only" is certainly the prevailing mood with the writer whose sole claim to literary immortality is as the author of the first modern uchronic novel. Most pseudonyms tend to be more exciting than the author's real name, but "Louis Geoffroy" was in reality Louis-Napoléon Geoffroy-Château, and his book, The Universal Monarchy: Napoleon and the Conquest of the World (1836), shows how after defeating Russia in 1812 and subduing Britain in 1814, Napoleon ushers in an age of unprecedented scientific and aesthetic sublimity, including "writing pianos" (that is, typewriters), and the discovery of the planet Vulcan (to be fair, at the time, Neptune hadn't been discovered, and the name "Vulcan" had no associations of live long and prosper).

Quite swiftly, the comedic potential of the form became evident. Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story "P's Correspondence" is a weird vision of an alternative early 19th century. In P's version, Dickens has suffered an untimely death and Burns is still hale and hearty at the age of 87; Shelley has been reconciled to the Church of England and "has come to the metropolis to superintend the publication of a volume of discourses treating of the poetico-philosophical proofs of Christianity on the basis of the Thirty-nine Articles", Keats is writing Paradise Regained and Coleridge has finally finished Christabel (although thankfully, Wordsworth died before finishing The Excursion). What this little bagatelle brings me back to is how cataclysmic the early 1830s must have seemed in British literary circles: Keats, Byron, Shelley, Scott and Coleridge all dead, and Wordsworth seemingly silent. The late Edwin Morgan has a delightful poem in the same vein, imagining Byron at the age of 65. He is, of course, obsessed with his daughter's contribution towards Babbage's Analytical Engine, the precursor of the computer.

In the 20th century, it is unsurprising that writers including Hilaire Belloc, GK Chesterton and HG Wells all tried their hand at uchronias; it is perhaps more surprising that Winston Churchill did, and did so so well. Churchill contributed to John Squire's If It Had Happened Otherwise with a brilliant piece entitled "If Lee Had Not Won The Battle Of Gettysburg". The daring conceit is that it is written by an historian in a universe where the South won the Civil War (or the Northern War of Aggression), and Churchill's glorious knot of counterfactuals then unpicks all the deterministic readings of history in which this form of writing glories. The alternative Churchill's vision of a world where the North won is as unbelievable as the version where the South won – it is utterly contingent and arbitrary: it's as if he is disavowing any theory or narrative of history, like a precursor to John Gray. I always wondered why Churchill won the Nobel prize for literature: "If Lee Had Not Won..." is the answer.

I'm sure that you'll all correct me, but I'm rather surprised that there are no meta-literary uchronias: Jean Rhys brilliantly interpolated a story into Jane Eyre, but what about a story where Jane Eyre marries St John Rivers? Or where Tess takes a dagger to Alec at the outset? Or where Leopold Bloom comes home early (Sliding Doors on Eccles Street)? I'd hope it would be more interesting than just adding in a paragraph about zombies. The only uchronia I personally dream of is Bonnie Prince Charlie deciding to press on at Derby. The Hanoverian dynasty is exiled, to Westphalia or somewhere, and Charles III – no, not that one – gets to sit on the throne long enough to see the events in France, which would naturally spread here, toiling as we were under a similar dynastic power, and Tom Paine becomes First Consul of the Republic of Britain. But then Robespierre sends over the guillotine …

The novel most frequently cited as uchronia par excellence is Philip K Dick's The Man In The High Castle, where the Nazis won the second world war (a conceit developed later by Robert Harris in Fatherland). Dick's novel was published in 1962, and I wish it could be proven that Vladimir Nabokov read it before writing Ada or Ardor (1969) – both include the horror that in the alternate universe, there is knowledge of a different path taken by history elsewhere (that is, where we exist). But the ends and means of writing are profoundly different. Nabokov's "Anti-Terra" is shot through with a sense that true happiness – real, enduring and political happiness – might only be possible in "Anti-Terra"; that is, fundamentally, as a form of fiction. Dick is more dangerous: a suspicion runs through his work that it's all just allegory. The Axis Overlords just have different uniforms here.

This division runs through contemporary uchronias as well, whether it's Naomi Novak's history with added dragons or Jonathan Lethem's slyly alternative Chronic City. It also gets to the problem with uchronia: either we're stuck with this world, or we're not. Andrew Crumey, who has the scientific chops to back up his speculations, has wondered whether the multiverse version (based on Hugh Everett's parallel universe theory, and an idea frighteningly backed up by early results from the success of Yale's rudimentary boron qubit device and Bristol's achievement in running Shor's algorithm on a silicon qubit chip) might not just be the awful entanglement of writers and scientists who grew up reading about parallel universes with an etiolated capitalism where choice has to extend even to other dimensions.