The Best Alternate History Stories of the 20th Century

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Most science-fiction ideas don’t come naturally. Most take a degree of intellectual sophistication that came only with the Industrial Revolution. It’s hard to write about the effects of technology before there’s much in the way of technology to write about. But alternate history isn’t like that. It’s as natural as those two mournful little words up there. What if…

What if I’d married Lucy instead of Martha, George instead of Fred? What would my life be like? Would I be richer? Happier? What would our kids have been like, if we’d had kids? What if there hadn’t been that traffic accident that clogged three lanes of the freeway, so I wasn’t late to the interview? How would things have looked if I’d got that job? Or—let’s not think small—what if I won the lottery? How would I live if I had sixty million dollars in the bank?

In our own lives, we endlessly imagine these scenarios. We can’t help it. There’s always the feeling that we’re inside God’s pinball machine, bouncing through life and off bumpers at random, and that we could have ended up elsewhere as easily as where we did.

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