"...there are no correct alternate histories; there are only plausible
alternate histories."
--Will Shetterly, in "The Captain's Story"
The Usenet Alternate History List is an annotated list of novels, stories and essays involving alternate histories (a.k.a. what-ifs, allohistories, uchronias or counterfactuals), writings in which a past event is altered and its effect on later history somehow described. Alternate histories are a distinct subset of parallel worlds/alternate universe stories in which some emphasis has been put on an historical element. In case all this sounds a bit confusing, the following will probably clear things up; probably the two most common alternate history themes are "What if the Nazis won World War II?" and "What if the South won the Civil War?". Plausible answers to these questions appear in Robert Harris's Fatherland and Harry Turtledove's The Guns of the South: A Novel of the Civil War, respectively. (The latter, by the way, also counts as a time-travel story.)
This Usenet Alternate History List is copyright 1993, 1994 by R.B. Schmunk, except for appendix A, which is copyright 1993, 1994 by R.B. Schmunk and Evelyn C. Leeper. License is hereby granted to republish via electronic or other media for which no fee is charged (except for the media used) provided that this copyright notice is attached intact to any and all republished portion or portions. It may not be sold for profit or incorporated in commercial documents without the written permission of the copyright holder.
A text version of the Usenet Alternate History List is posted quarterly (Jan, Apr, Jul, Oct) to the Usenet newsgroups rec.arts.sf.written, alt.history.what-if, rec.answers, alt.answers and news.answers.
This HTML-ized version of the Usenet Alternate History List is divided into
nine parts, numbered 0 through 8.
The contents are:
Note: if you notice a formatting error in this Web version of the Usenet Alternate History Bibliography, please notify me (altworld@panix.com) of the error.