Alternate History

"In 1963's The Man in The High Castle, Philip K Dick imagined the assassination of FDR as a "point of divergence," in history, triggering a domino of events starting with a weak Vice President Garner taking office. Unlike FDR, Garner maintains the stance of isolationism through the war. The Allies lose without America's help and, shortly thereafter, the Axis powers turn their attention to conquering the U.S. Which they do, in 1948."

- Cracked.com

A type of Speculative Fiction set in a world where one or more historical events unfolded differently than they did in the real world. Often set some time after the event (called a "point of divergence", or PoD, by fans of the genre), such stories typically describe a Present Day world vastly changed by the difference, or follow another major historical event in light of the change. Sometimes linked with a Time Travel story -- the point of divergence is often caused by travelers from "our" timeline (OTL in Alt-history parlance) seeking to effect a desired change. The protagonists may be original characters or actual historical figures. Lampshade Hanging occurs often in these types of stories (an Allohistorical Allusion); often, a character will stop to muse on what the world would be like if history had gone the way it did in the real world. Which, we suppose, is Truth in Television... after all, lampshading this trope is the entire point of alternate histories.

The setting of an alternate history is often described as a What If. Popular alternate history settings include:
 * What if Germany had won World War II? (Or, for more truly "alternate" and less "hellish" potentials, World War I?)
 * What if The Soviet Union had won The Cold War?
 * What if the South had won The American Civil War?
 * What if Christianity had never taken hold in Rome?
 * What if Napoleon Bonaparte had won the battle of Waterloo?
 * What if the Roman Empire (or some other empire) never had fallen?
 * What if the Aztecs had defeated Cortez?
 * What if a certain technological development (firearms, television, space travel) had been made earlier, or later, or not at all?
 * What if a particular presidential election had turned out differently?
 * What if the K-T asteroid had never hit, or hit at a different time?
 * What if one small and seemingly irrelevant detail was changed?
 * What if something completely unforeseeable occurred?
 * What if this piece of alternate history was never written?

Often, the change's ultimate source is For Want of a Nail. If "historically unimportant" characters are involved, expect In Spite of a Nail.

A secondary type, sometimes called "honorary alternate history", consists of Speculative Fiction stories written a considerable period of time ago, and set in a time period which has since passed. This is what happens to stories set Twenty Minutes Into the Future when the twenty minutes have passed. Robert A. Heinlein's Future History series of stories is an example of this type, as is everything that fell victim to The Great Politics Mess-Up.

Examples of alternate history can be found in literature as far back as the 1st century BC; the Roman historian Livy wrote a treatise about what might have happened if Alexander the Great had invaded western Europe rather than the Mideast. The genre has become increasingly popular since the late 20th century, perhaps because it was a tumultuous century rich in "what if" opportunities, though TV and movie versions are less common. And given the material, it's not beyond the imagination to consider them Fan Fiction of history itself.

In real life, Counterfactual History is a real discipline, looking at reasonable conjectures. For example, historians have carefully examined the threat of invasion of Britain by Germany in 1940 and suggested that, though British defense was rushed and rudimentary at that point, so were German attack plans. Thus, Germany would almost certainly have established a beach head, but would not have succeeded in maintaining it. Unlike its literary equivalent, scholarly counterfactual history tends to focus on the short-term effects, as extrapolating long-term trends into the future has proven to be tricky even for what did happen.

For less drastic changeovers (such as slight differences between their world and ours), see Never Was This Universe. Some settings will undo these changes with Rubber Band History.

The plausibility and realism of Alternate History is measured on the Sliding Scale of Alternate History Plausibility, an analogue of the Mohs Scale of Sci Fi Hardness. More examples are on the Alternate History Literature page. See Also the Alternate History Tropes index.

Closely related to Alternate Universe. A lot of times, this can result in OCs, if written as fanfiction.

Anime and Manga

 * Code Geass takes place in a timeline where things went really well for British imperialism; the Celts kicked Julius Caesar and the Romans off the island, Elizabeth I had male heirs, "Washington's Rebellion" failed... all with the cumulative effect of making "Britannia" the only superpower on the planet as of the early 21st century. They were defeated by Napoleon, though, forcing them to abandon Britain and relocate to what had been the colonies -- that is, North America, which is entirely under their control. Napoleon's Europe-spanning empire also laid the foundation for a faux-EU before he died (likely of poisoning by one of Queen Bessie's spies). The calendar is all messed up as well, being at least 55 years behind our calendar. Technology, in the meantime, is vastly more advanced, with powerful mecha, existing in their 2010 (our 1955).
 * In other words, the main bulk of the story takes place in what our world would know as The Sixties, given how ATB 2017-18 translates to AD 1962-63.
 * It bears mentioning that there are certain factors present in the world of Code Geass that indicated that perhaps it Never Was This Universe. Such as Sakuradite and Geass itself.
 * The Place Promised in Our Early Days takes place in a timeline where Japan is divided after losing WWII, between the (Soviet?) "Union" and the US.
 * Full Metal Panic follows a present day where the Cold War never ended (due to Mikhail Gorbachev having been assassinated, and thus, the political reforms which led to the breakup of USSR never came to pass) and the arms race led to combat mechs on the battlefield.
 * Some dialogue and theories in the books, suggest it may have been  Of course, that leaves open a lot of possibilities.
 * The finale of the manga version of Chrono Crusade reveals that it falls under this genre.
 * The anime ending averts this by trying to stick to OTL.
 * The Super Dimension Fortress Macross was broadcasted in 1982 but featured an alternate history of humanity after 2009 when humans and aliens fight a devestating war over a transforming mecha battleship. It's 2009 now, and we haven't even fought World War III and built mecha like they did in the series - we're behind schedule, in other words.
 * Kiki's Delivery Service takes places in a Europe where WWII never happened.
 * The Kerberos saga takes place in a world where Nazi Germany won in Stalingrad. It eventually leads to a total Axis victory...in Europe. Japan still falls in 1945. But it's the Germans who occupy and morph the country into a fascist dictatorship.
 * Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade takes place further down that alternate timeline. Things didn't work out as great for Japan as you might think.
 * The Demon Wars of 1918 changes Japan's history in Sakura Taisen.
 * The 2003 anime version of Fullmetal Alchemist is set in a version of our world where alchemy worked.
 * Read or Die takes place in a British-dominant world, complete with hidden superpowers.
 * By the sequel, however, the Empire had completely collapsed, leaving the world at the mercy of various secret organizations and the United States.
 * In at least some early Universal Century timelines, it's implied that the circumstances leading up to the founding of the Earth Federation itself was due to an alternate outcome of the Cold War. This could also apply to Mobile Suit Gundam Wing, given the show's rather Anachronism Stew atmosphere and the After Colony calendar starting in the 1970s.
 *  Strike Witches takes place in a world where aliens invaded in 1939 before World War 2 and forced the world to unite in order to stop them. Also the only way to stop them are by using magical imbued schoolgirls wielding rocket legs with characters like Winston Churchill and George S Patton making cameos. Officially the alternate history goes back further, with BC standing for Before Caeser, the German monarchy never losing power, and giving Japan a more active role in past events.

Comicbooks

 * Back around 1994, the Epic Comics series Lawdog revolved around the idea of travel, sometimes accidental, between alternate histories and alternate worlds, and a square-jawed tough cop who patrols the roads between the worlds and tries to protect the more civilized and peaceful Earths from things like invasion by technologically advanced Nazis who won World War II in some timelines, or contamination by aggressive and dangerous lifeforms from an Earth where evolution took some very different turns one or two billion years back.
 * Some of the comics that Alan Moore created for America's Best Comics and DC Comics lean toward Alternate History. Tom Strong, for example, lives in a city designed by architect Winsor McCay (in our world, the cartoonist creator of Little Nemo in Slumberland.)
 * The existence of costumed vigilantes (and one actual superpowered being) in Watchmen caused several major differences from real-world history (e.g. the United States won the Vietnam War; Richard Nixon is still President in 1985; the threat of the Cold War going hot is all too real even in the late 80s; electric-powered cars became commonplace in the US).
 * Watchmen has two points of divergence, the first is the publication of Action Comics #1.
 * In the movie beginning, the divergence is shown when government troops shoot down the Hippies.
 * The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen initially starts out as a steampunk crossover of characters of Victorian literature, but in following volumes all of fiction begins to intertwine with actual history. Half-fairie Queen Gloriana rules instead of Elizabeth I, postwar Britain sees the rise and fall of the Ingsoc regime and there's a war in Qumar in the Noughties.
 * Give Me Liberty, by Dave Gibbons and Frank Miller, about the United States under the more and more authoritarian Republican president Erwin Rexall, which eventually fall apart after an assassination attempt leaves him in a coma.
 * DC Comics' Tangent books take place in a world where the Cuban Missile Crisis ends in Florida and Cuba nuking each other at roughly the same moment, turning the Cold War hot. The resulting world, compared to ours, is ahead of the times technologically (paper books are seen as antiquated and quaint) but behind the times culturally (the hippie movement has only recently begun). Despite being published by DC, this alternate reality was not a divergent DC universe; Amazons, the Justice Society, Gotham City, there's nary a concept from the DCU to be seen. This is due to the premise of the world, which takes DCU names and applies them to entirely different concepts.
 * Arrowsmith, by Kurt Busiek and Carlos Pacheco, is a fantasy take on this trope. At the forging of the Peace of Charlemagne (the Pax Nicephori in the real world), the various hidden magical races of the world decided to make their existence openly known to humanity, also joining in the peace treaty. The series takes place during this world's version of World War I. Dryads, trolls, dwarves, etc. live among humanity, magic co-exists side-by-side with technology. The Industrial Revolution is causing a magical revolution, as spells become mass-produced for the first time in human history.
 * Omega Complex is set in a world in which US president John F Kennedy wasn't assassinated; he ends the Vietnam War and gets elected for a second term, during which he sponsors research into the effects of radiation on humans.
 * Vertigo's DMZ is a variant that alters recent American history, in that the reaction to 9/11 and the ensuing change in U.S. foreign policy, was a far more violent and self-destructive one and led to the USA erupting into a second civil war. The end result is a less than perfect union, with the resultant factions being the so-called Free States, the United States and the titular DMZ (formerly known as Manhattan).
 * Samaritan from Astro City prevents the Challenger disaster and destroys his own timeline. He apparently remains in existence because of his connection to the fundamental forces of the universe.
 * Jonathan Hickman's Pax Romana assumes that in our future the dying Roman Catholic church develops time travel and decides to send a small army back in time to Rome 312 AD. The intention was to set right what the church once did wrong, but the results are unexpected.
 * Ian Edginton and D'Israreli's Scarlet Traces and Scarlet Traces: The Great Game both involve a Great Britain where it became an even greater world power through the reverse engineering of the failed Martian invasion technology, which later leads to a war on Mars. However, the world is a Crapsack World, with many in poverty, and a increasingly fascist state developing.
 * Jour J
 * Ministry Of Space by Grant Morrison is an alternate history in which the UK captures all the WWII German rocket scientists before the US and USSR can. Thanks to this and the iron will of Space Ministry head John Dashwood (who funds research with stolen Nazi gold), the UK space program reaches the moon by 1960, and has colonies on Mars and the asteroid belt before the end of the 20th century.
 * Pat Mills' Invasion, which ran in the 80s, was a straightforward story in which the USSR is conquered by the renegade Volgan republic which then launches an invasion of all Western Europe in the then near future of 1990. When the series was resurrected in the 2000s and set in what had become modern times, it was simply declared an alternate history in which, during the 90s, Russian dissidents break away and form the Volgan republic, which then manages to conquer all of Russia, and thus the events of Invasion occur in the 90s. Each Story Arc of Savage opens with the words "Another Britain" to reinforce this.

Fan Fiction

 * Downfall is a Bleach AU where Unohana ruthlessly leads Hueco Mundo, Aizen opposes her along with his loyal compatriots of the Gotei 13. What makes it truly inspiring is not just the current differences, but the roots of said changes. Many individuals dead in canon are alive, some who were alive are dead, and others will soon die if  is any indicator.
 * In Aeon Entelechy Evangelion history starts to diverge in 1930, when the discovery of the Elder Thing City (which causes the USA to drop its Isolationist policy and join the League of Nations) and the prolonged World War II (The War ends in 1946 with the atomic bombing of Berlin by the western allies to deny the Russians).
 * Many AARs on the Total War, Civilization and Paradox series inevitably result in alternate histories of varying types.
 * Notable examples include A Scotsman in Egypt and I Am Skantarios.
 * Similarly, although less commonly, games where you can have all sides played by an AI can be used as "random history generators". These tend to be less protagonist-based than AARs stemming from a player nation, but usually a lot wackier, because A Is are stupid.
 * The Hogwarts Exposed Timeline on Alternate History Dot Com posits the impact of the events of the Harry Potter books happening in our world...and exposed to the public in the late 1990s.
 * Axis Powers Hetalia has a good deal of alternate histories and universes within its collective. One notable, though dark, example is All He Ever Wanted
 * * The Nineteen Eighty Three Doomsday Stories is a Broad Strokes Alternate Universe crossover series between Axis Powers Hetalia and Nineteen Eighty Three Doomsday, history diverging in 1983 when the Cold War turned into a catastrophic nuclear hell. The stories are told entirely through the eyes of the Nations themselves, more specifically those around what had been Central Europe.
 * Battlefield Gallia is essentially a World War 2 story that imagines the world of Valkyria Chronicles existing alongside ours. For the Axis, Allies and Soviets, at least, things get weird very quickly.
 * It's not the focus of the story, but there is a Watchmen fanfic where Dr Manhattan is monologuing about various alternate incarnations of himself he is aware of, with one world having a noteable divergence in the past, where "It is Mithraism that becomes the driving force of western civilization, and the people of the city we know as New York wear golden bulls around their necks, and it is Christianity that lies forgotten in the dusts of history."
 * The Son of the Emperor is basically what happens when you combine the Napoleonic Wars with My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic. Historical hijinks and world-changing events ensue.

Films -- Live-Action

 * It Happened Here, a 1966 film positing a Nazi-occupied Britain.
 * The 2004 film CSA Confederate States of America takes the notion of the South winning the American civil war and plays it to the hilt. Though instead of forming its own country, the entire USA goes Confederate. The turning point comes when England and France aide the Confederacy and turn the tide at Gettysburg. All non-Christian religions are outlawed save for Judaism (Jews live in a reservation on Long Island). They advocate enslaving all non-whites, and TV ads catering to slave-owning middle class members are commonplace.
 * Frankly, the mockumentary seemed to be spitting in the collective eye of white Christian Republicans in the United States in the early 21st century (ostensibly the Confederates' Spiritual Successors, although the attributes don't quite match up) rather than the Confederates themselves.
 * Goodbye Lenin plays with this trope-- the protagonist's mother is a dedicated East German socialist who is in a coma when the Berlin Wall falls. When she reawakens, he constructs an elaborate alternate history to avoid shocking her into another heart attack with the news that her beloved East Germany is no more.
 * District 9 takes place in a world where an alien ship landed in South Africa in 1982, interrupting Apartheid in favor of something almost exactly the same as Apartheid...with explosions.
 * While the exact setting is ambiguous, 9 takes place in an alternate version of the early 20th Century (according to brief shots of newspapers that apparently show a date in the 1930s) in which the Industrial Revolution never ended, resulting in advanced robotics and artificial intelligence occurring nearly a century ahead of schedule (unfortunately, it doesn't end well).
 * Inglourious Basterds, and by extension the entire universe of Quentin Tarantino movies,
 * The back story of the South Korean film Two Thousand and Nine Lost Memories has a time traveler prevent the assassination of Ito Hirobumi in 1909, which sees Japan retain its imperial conquests (including Korea) and ally with the United States in World War II.
 * Fatherland, the movie adaptation of Robert Harris' novel with Rutger Hauer, features this with Nazi Germany winning World War Two and covering up the Holocaust. Better than it sounds.
 * The Rocketeer is revealed to be one of these. The Hindenburg disaster never happened, which means the Nazis are still using them in 1938.
 * Back to The Future Part II: Biff Tannen created an alternate version of 1985 when he gave the Timeline-Altering MacGuffin to his younger self in 1955. As a result, he became "the luckiest man on Earth" by betting on everything from horse racing to boxing and always winning due to the answers in the almanac. He founded Biffco, a company that dealt with toxic waste reclamation. He bought out police departments, and altered the state of international history, by prolonging the Vietnam War and getting Richard Nixon elected to his fifth term.
 * The Man in The Iron Mask is implied in the end to take place in one. With the basically ousted from power, his  proceeds to become the greatest monarch in French history and possibly prevent the circumstances leading to the French Revolution in the process.

Literature

 * Cherie Priest's Clockwork Century novels are set in a Steampunk American Civil War that went on much longer than ours did, leading to Zeppelins From Another World, a walled-off Seattle, Diesel Punk mecha, and zombies.
 * Even if the trope itself is Older Than You Think, writers apparently weren't expecting readers to understand what it meant as late as 1967, when an alternate reality story in Dangerous Visions spent ten pages explaining what an alternate reality story is to The Watson.
 * Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke is an Alternate History set in Regency England where magic is real and magician Jonathan Strange uses it to aid his country in the Napoleonic Wars.
 * Winston Churchill penned a short story in 1932 called "If Lee Had Not Won The Battle of Gettysburg" -- narrated by a historian in an alternate history where the South won the American civil war.
 * This was published in an anthology of such stories called "If It Had Happened Otherwise". Other speculations included the Islamic state of Granada surviving in southern Spain, forming a long-lasting alliance with Spain's other great enemy, England, and ultimately sending troops to the trenches in World War One.
 * Battle Royale. It's set in an alternate timeline where Imperial Japan won World War II and remained a fascist dictatorship. The first "Battle Royale Program" was held as early as 1947.
 * It should be noted that The Movie didn't give politics as large a part in its story as the book. Instead, The Movie takes place Twenty Seconds Into The Future.
 * Ward Moore's Bring the Jubilee is a novel in which a time-traveler from a 20th Century in which the South won the American civil war accidentally alters the outcome of the Battle of Gettysburg and finds himself trapped in what becomes our world.
 * Hector Bywater's The Great Pacific War was actual written as fiction (it was published in 1925, the war in the book takes lasts from 1931 - 1933), but the naval conflict has so many similarities to the actual Pacific war that happened soon after, than the book now seems like an alt-history novel.
 * Ray Bradbury's A Sound of Thunder is another example of alternate history by time-travel; stepping on a butterfly millions of years in the past alters the outcome of a presidential election (along with other details, though not as many as you'd think.
 * Philip K. Dick's The Man in The High Castle, a Germans-Win-WWII story, is a seminal work in the genre.
 * Further complicating this is the novel features its own Alternate History novel, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, whose plot involved the Axis losing World War II, with the post-war world dominated by a cold war between America and... the British Empire.
 * For Want of a Nail by Robert Sobel. Burgoyne wins at Saratoga, the American Revolution fizzles out, and the American colonies eventually evolve into a sort of uber-Canada. The rebels who weren't hanged migrate to Texas Jefferson and meld into a Spanglish Mexico, which gives rise to an ur-state global corporation in Kramer Associates.
 * Interesting also in that Sobel (a professor of business history) wrote it in the form of an undergraduate-level textbook, complete with realistic footnotes and a dismissive review by an academic peer in the final chapter.
 * Norman Spinrad's 1972 novel The Iron Dream purported to be a manuscript from an alternate history where Adolf Hitler was a science fiction author.
 * Harry Turtledove has written dozens of alternate history novels. His best known include the "Timeline-191" (or How Few Remain) series, which begins with the South winning the American civil war in 1862, and follows this timeline through World War II and beyond; and the "Worldwar (Literature)" series, wherein World War II is interrupted by an alien invasion by an empire of reptilians who have never before encountered mammals, and whose technology progresses so slowly that they're shocked to find that humans aren't using the same technology as their probe showed them using 1,000 years ago.
 * Turtledove's first major forays into Sci-Fi and Alternate History involved a Byzantine Imperial Agent in the 1300s, in a world where Muhammad converted to Christianity instead of founding Islam.
 * Two other early Alternate History novels by Turtledove are A World of Difference, in which Mars (called Minerva in the book) is a habitable (and inhabited) world, and The Case of the Toxic Waste Spell Dump, set in a world in which magic actually works; the latter book is really more of an excuse for a continuous stream of Incredibly Lame Puns.
 * The novel that made Turtledove's reputation is The Guns of the South, in which South African white supremacists have stolen a time machine and, looking for a future ally, supply the American Confederacy with thousands of AK47s, superior tactical knowledge about the Union's deployments and nitroglycerin pills for General Lee's heart condition.
 * Another Turtledove world is The Two Georges (co-written with the actor Richard Dreyfuss), where America never left the British Empire. Gun crime is unheard of, Los Angeles is "New Liverpool", airships are the fastest civilian transport, and Sir Martin Luther King is the Governor-General of the North American Union.
 * Yet another book, Ruled Britannia, has the Spanish Armada succeeding in conquering England, though they are overthrown by a revolt inspired by William Shakespeare.
 * The Man With The Iron Heart has Reinhard Heydrich surviving his 1942 assassination attempt and living to form a guerilla resistance movement after Germany's defeat.
 * Speaking of Nazis, Turtledove's book In The Presence of Mine Enemies posits a world in which the U.S. remained isolationist throughout WWII, allowing Germany to defeat all the major European powers. World War III ends with the nuclear pacification of the US. Set in the year 2009, the book follows a sect of hidden Jews as they struggle to survive during a time of political upheaval. Scenery includes: a Japanese empire, the radioactive remains of the Liberty Bell in a German Museum, and a Nazi version of "The Producers" that involves a horrible play about Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill. Notable for its realistic presentation of these, alternative-universe, modern Nazis as being good people with a bad upbringing. And the ending
 * This seems to be another example of Turtledove's fondness of Rubber Band History. (in the )
 * In yet another version of World War II, Hitler's War posits what would happen if the Treaty of Munich had fallen through and Germany invaded Czechoslovakia in 1938. Long story short,
 * A Different Flesh, a short story collection taking place in a world where Homo erectus made it to the Americas instead of the predecessors of the native American peoples. Differences include the theory of evolution being discovered by Samuel Pepys (since the "sims" are an obvious link between humans and our own great apes), a wider range of North American fauna (at least until the Jamestown settlers start cutting through the sabertooth tigers) and significant political differences (the Founding Conscript Fathers hew closer to The Roman Republic when they establish Alt!USA, while the Spanish colonies in Central and South America grow more slowly without the infrastructure of earlier civilizations to build upon).
 * And yet another where the Mississippi River expanded into a continental divide in prehistory, rendering eastern North America as a distinct continent which comes to be identified with Atlantis.
 * An earlier take on America remaining in the Empire is Harry Harrison's A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah!
 * Harrison's Stars & Stripes series envisions the Trent incident from the American civil war blowing up into a full-scale war between the United States and the British Empire. A navigational error brings the Confederacy in on the Union side, ending the civil war, and resulting in the British getting their asses handed to them by Generals Lee, Grant, Sherman, and Stonewall Jackson.
 * In Harrison's West of Eden trilogy, the dinosaur killing asteroid never hits, which allows an intelligent reptilian species to evolve.
 * His Hammer and the Cross trilogy has a more organized and benevolent form of the Norse religion coming into conflict both with the more traditional Norse religion and Christianity.
 * Robert Harris's Fatherland takes place in a Nazi-controlled Europe in the days leading up to Hitler's 75th birthday, where Berlin is built to Speer's designs and the main character is trying to uncover the big hushed up project regarding the Jews. The book is one of the more realistic visions of a Nazi victory world.
 * Robert Conroy has written six alternate history novels none of which, despite the similarity of the Idiosyncratic Titles occur in the same universe.:
 * 1901, about a German invasion of America,
 * 1862, about Britain entering the American Civil War,
 * 1945, about an American invasion of the Japanese home islands,
 * 1942 about the Japanese invasion of Hawaii
 * 1945: Red Inferno, about a hypothetical war between the Soviet Union and the Western Allies in the spring and summer of 1945, just as World War II was ending in Europe.
 * Himmler's War in which Hitler is accidentally killed shortly after the invasion of Normandy, Himmler takes over and Germay's proffesional military is given a much freer hand.
 * Lion's Blood and Zulu Heart by Steven Barnes are two alternate history novels in which Alexander the Great builds his empire not in Eurasia but in Africa. Thousands of years later, Africa is the seat of the world's most powerful nations and has colonized North America, using captives from the tribes of Darkest Europe as slave labor.
 * Orson Scott Card's Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus reveals that our timeline is an Alternate History created by time travel. In the previous history, Christopher Columbus started a new crusade against Constantinople instead of sailing for the new world. This give the Native American Tlaxcalan empire enough time to develop iron-working, take over North America, then successfully invade Europe after gaining the secrets of firearms from captured Portuguese sailors. They eventually sent back a recording to convince Christopher Columbus to discover the new world, so that the Tlaxcalan empire would be stopped, creating our timeline. In our future, this is discovered and several agents are sent back, creating a third timeline where the Native Americans unite and visit Europe in peace (trading instead of invading) with no colonialism.
 * The starting point for the hero in Roger Zelazny's Roadmarks is that he's trying to create alternate histories by changing significant events, such as by running guns to the Greeks at the battle of Marathon.
 * Thomas Harlan's Oath of Empire series is set in the early 7th century, where magic works, Rome never fell, and Christianity never appeared.
 * His other series, In the Time of the Sixth Sun has the Mongols successfully invading Japan. The Japanese flee, to America. They trade horses and steel for food and land on the West Coast. The Mexica then proceed to conquer the planet - and beyond.
 * John Birmingham's Axis of Time series combines this with Time Travel by exploring the consequences of a modern carrier group (including Prince Harry as the commander of its SAS detachment) being transported from Twenty Minutes Into the Future to the Battle of Midway.
 * Notably features the supercarrier USS Hillary Clinton, whose "murdered namesake" was the "most stalwart wartime President in American history".
 * Much of the entertainment value of the books, particularly the first one, is in reading of the culture clashes - occasionally violent - between the people of 1942 and the visitors from the 21st century.
 * In his Without Warning an energy field of unknown type and origin descends on North America wiping out all life in most of the continental US (Seattle is the only major city to survive), about half of Canada (the more populated eastern half), 90% of Mexico and about three-quarters of Cuba including Havana just before the Iraq War is due to kick off in 2003. This leads to, among other things, a rather different Iraq War since Saddam proclaims this a sign from Allah and goes on the offensive and is later joined by Iran.
 * The Wild Cards setting deviates from history around 1946, when the titular alien virus falls on New York City, killing many and giving some humans superpowers. Juan and Eva Peron are deposed by an American fighting force, a superpowered Islamic militant unites the Arabic countries under a caliphate, and Buddy Holly never takes the fateful flight with the Big Bopper and ends up a washed-up has-been.
 * One of the most extreme examples is the illustrated fictional-science book The New Dinosaurs by Dougal Dixon, which presents an alternate timeline in which the Cretaceous extinction event never happens, dinosaurs remain the Earth's dominant lifeforms, mammals remain tiny insectivores, and no sentient species ever comes into existence.
 * The (regrettably defunct) Speculative Dinosaur Project, aka Specworld, explores a similar scenario.
 * This page presents a few more alternate evolution ideas, mainly focusing on different ways sentient species could have come about.
 * Len Deighton's SS-GB is set in a Nazi-occupied Britain. America remained isolationist,
 * Shelley Jackson's 2006 novel Half Life takes place in an America that tested nuclear weapons on native soil much longer and more extensively. The result has been a sharp spike in mutation. Specifically, conjoined twins have become a large and proud minority somewhat analogous to LGBT people in our timeline.
 * Michael Dobson and Douglas Niles's novels, Fox on the Rhine and Fox on the Front explore what would have happened if the plot to assassinate Hitler had succeeded.
 * Naomi Novik plays with the speculative fiction version of this trope in her Temeraire series, which asks such questions as "What if dragons existed and were used as early aircraft -- early as in becoming necessary weapons of the great powers by the time of the Napoleonic Wars?"
 * One consequence of her scenario is that
 * Neil Gaiman's short story A Study in Emerald is a re-imagining of A Study in Scarlet in an alternate Earth where HP Lovecraft's famous monsters took over centuries ago and now constitute the ruling caste.
 * Diana Wynne Jones's Witch Week takes place in a world where Guy Fawkes succeeded in blowing up the Houses of Parliament. It doesn't achieve his aims (he got the timing wrong), but nonetheless, it has quite a knock-on effect...
 * John Scalzi's humorous short story Alternate History Search Results explores the different outcomes of not just when Hitler is killed, but how.
 * Kim Stanley Robinson's Years of Rice and Salt takes its starting point with the Black Death killing virtually the entire European population. The story is of China and Islam's domination of the world spread across the next thousand years as seen through the same group of characters who are endlessly reincarnated.
 * In Galileo's Dream a group of Knight Templar time travelers try to arrange for Galileo to be burnt at the stake believing this would lead to the complete discrediting of religion and the triumph of science.
 * The Lucky Strike, a short story by Robinson, takes place in a WW 2 wherein the Enola Gay and its crew were lost before the bombing of Hiroshima. The War still ends as OTL
 * But from that point in the 1950s, the timeline splits into three possible futures that Robinson discusses in A Sensitive Dependence on Initial Conditions. One among them is.
 * In Jo Walton's Small Change novels, Farthing, Ha'Penny, and Half A Crown, Britain made peace with Hitler in 1941. The first two books are set in 1949. The Reich still exists and controls all of continental Europe, though they're still fighting the Russians. A political cadre called the Farthing Set takes over the British government and starts heading down the slippery slope to totalitarianism, justifying the restriction of civil liberties by claiming the country is in danger from Jewish and communist terrorists. The US isn't a major player at all, having never recovered from The Great Depression, but there are occasional mentions of "President Lindbergh".
 * Most of S.M. Stirling's output.
 * The Draka series (aka The Domination) is about a brutal, expansionist, enslaving empire of depraved but ruthless Nietzsche Wannabes conquering the Earth.
 * The Emberverse series, where in 1998 "the Change" strikes worldwide, sending Nantucket Island into the past, and causing electricity, gunpowder and steam engines to stop working.
 * Related is the Island in The Sea of Time series, featuring the Nantucket Island which vanished from the Emberverse making its way in the Bronze Age. Technology works just fine there.
 * He's also written a couple of one-offs:
 * The Peshawar Lancers is set in a world where an asteroid hits the earth during the Victorian era and the struggle to survive locks the dominant culture technologically and culturally in the 19th century.
 * In Conquistador, shortly after WWII a group of veterans discover and exploit a portal into a world where Europe never discovered the New World.
 * In The Lords of Creation series,  Mars and Venus are habitable and in fact inhabited by offshoots of humanity.
 * In the 1632 series by Eric Flint, the modern day US town of Grantville is transported back to the year 1632, right in the middle of the Thirty Years War in Germany. See the tropes page on this series for details on all the changes; suffice it to say that the course of the war takes some very dramatic turns, including
 * In another Eric Flint Series, starting with The Rivers of War, the PoD is much more subtle than dropping a city in the past with Handwavium. In 1812, during the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, Sam Houston leads an attack against the Indian stronghold. Instead of taking an arrow between the goalposts, as he did in the original history, he slips when stepping over a rise, and gets nicked on his outer thigh by the arrow instead.
 * In the same Ring of Fire universe as 1632 is Time Spike which sends a modern maximum security prison  into the Age of Dinosaurs.
 * His Heirs of Alexandria series, co-written with Mercedes Lackey and David Freer has a somewhat more tolerant (both of other religions and magic) Christianity set in the mid-16th century with the point of departure springing from the Library of Alexandria not being destroyed by Christians in 391. Among the differences are a larger, more centralized Holy Roman Empire, a Christianity in which neither the schism between Catholicism and the Orthodox Church or the Protestant Reformation occured and a still existing Byzantine Empire.
 * The Attolia series of books occur in a world in which Ancient Greek civilization has persisted into what would be the Renaissance in our world. People still worship a version of the Greek pantheon, and there are several rival city-states/kingdoms. However, they have developed many technologies that the Greeks didn't have, like rifles and pocket watches.
 * Randall Garrett's Lord Darcy series takes place in a modern day Europe with a balance of power between an Anglo-French Empire and the Kingdom of Poland, as well as the widespread use of magic. The divergence from our own world? Instead of dying at the siege of Chaluz, Richard I (the Lionhearted) survived and returned to England to rule. The general technological level in this alternate Europe is pretty much equivalent to the late nineteenth century of our own timeline, owing to the fact that scientific resources have been applied to the study and development of magical technology.
 * One of the originals is L Sprague DeCamp's Lest Darkness Fall, about a modern man going back to 6th century Rome and attempting to reestablish civilization, as well as combating Goth and Byzantine armies.
 * Also DeCamp's The Wheels of If novelette in which a man from our world is sent into the body of the person he would have been in a world where Pelagius' vision of Christianity beat out Augustine's and compounded by Charles Martel losing the Battle of Tours.
 * Fyodor Berezin wrote the Red Stars duology, dealing with strange contacts between our world and a parallel one, where history took a radically different turn because Hitler delayed "Operation Barbarossa" by a month, giving Stalin enough time to launch his own (much more successful) offensive. The first book details a lengthy battle between a US carrier battle group from our world and a Soviet carrier battle group from the other world, with both fleets using technology and tactics unheard of by the other (for example, the other world's Soviets do not have stealth or satellite technology, while the US Navy was really surprised to see battleships and ekranoplans in the Soviet arsenal).
 * Resurrection Day by Brendan DuBois supposes that the Cuban Missile Crisis sparked off a nuclear war. The United States is a virtual third-world country under military dictatorship, dependent on aid from Great Britain and treated by the rest of the world as a rogue state. An alternate history novel is mentioned by the protagonists in which WW 3 was averted, though needless to say it doesn't have the Kennedy's being assassinated either.
 * An example of "honorary alternate history" is the 1980s series The Zone by James Rouch about World War III in Europe.
 * Two books edited by Robert Cowley speculate on certain military events taking a different turn: What If?: The World's Foremost Military Historians Imagine What Might Have Been 1 and 2.
 * These books were collected, along with other non-military essays, in The Collected What If?. The book has essays by such great historians as Caleb Carr, John Lukacs, John Keegan, James Bradley and Stephen Ambrose.
 * The Neanderthal Parallax, a trilogy of novels by Robert J. Sawyer (Hominids, Humans, and Hybrids), concerns an alternate Earth in which Homo sapiens died out, leaving Homo neanderthalensis as the world's dominant species. (Of course, since Homo Sapiens Are Bastards, their world is close to a utopia.) The story begins with a neanderthal scientist being pulled into our world and dealing with the considerable culture shock.
 * The novel Synco takes place in a universe where the Chilean coup d'etat of 1973 was unsuccessful and Chile has become a successful communist state and the project synco has provided instant communication amongst the citizens. Synco was actually a real project in the '70s, abandoned after the coup. The novel includes many fictional versions of real-world characters.
 * Baen Books publishes a series of anthologies titled "Alternate Generals", which are collections of short stories with various departures from the reader's timeline, from ancient Roman times to modern history.
 * The parallel world in Mary Hoffman's Stravaganza books diverged from our world when Remus defeated Romulus, instead of vice versa.
 * A second, minor divergence. The connection is between modern Britain and 1600s Talia (Italy). So when one of the main characters from our world learns that Britain is still Catholic, he asks why. Apparently all three of Henry VIII's children were born to Katherine of Aragon, so he didn't need to start the Anglican Church in order to remarry.
 * Alan Goldsher's "Paul is Undead" is what if John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison were zombies and Ringo Starr was a ninja
 * Michael Chabon's "The Yiddish Policemens Union," which is set in an alternate history where Jewish people were settled in Alaska rather than in Palestine after World War Two.
 * Pasquale's Angel by Paul J. McAuley is set in a 16th century Florence where, thanks to Leonardo DaVinci concentrating on technology instead of dividing his attention between science and art, the Industrial Revolution came early and is centered in Italy rather than Great Britain.
 * David Gerrold's The Man Who Folded Himself has the protagonist, a young man with a time machine, very briefly exploring alternate histories including one where Christianity is never founded.
 * Orson Scott Card's Alvin Maker series takes place in an alternate North America where magic works (in different ways among the races - Whites have inherent powers called "knacks", Native Americans have a mystic connection with the land and Africans work their magic through artifacts), Great Britain is run by the Protectorship founded by Oliver Cromwell, New England is a semi-independent colony of same, the Stuart descendants of Charles I run the southern coastal states from Charleston (called Camelot), and Napoleon rules most of Continental Europe due to never having invaded Russia and declaring a unilateral peace with Britain.
 * In the Belisarius Series, by Eric Flint and David Drake, 6th century AD history is turned on its head by the arrival of two time travelers from the far future. One of the arrivals is a sentient crystal sent to aid the titular Roman general against a future traveler engaging in a genocidal campaign on the Indian subcontinent bent on world domination, seeking to generate a "pure" race, instead of the energy beings that mankind had evolved into in the crystal's time.
 * Larry Niven's The Return of William Proxmire.
 * Taylor Anderson's Destroyermen series involves two WWII destroyer crews (although their ships are really old, dating back to the WWI era) slipping through to a world where dinosaurs never went extinct and humans never evolved. Instead they encounter the Grik, who evolved from raptors, and the "cat-monkey" Lemurians.
 * Frederik Pohl's The Coming of the Quantum Cats features a whole plethora of alternates. The one we see the most of has a United States that is culturally dominated by the Arabs and in which Ronald Reagan is a liberal activist (more likely than you might think).
 * Poul Anderson's A Midsummer Tempest happens in a world where Shakespeare's plays are history, not invention. As a result things like mechanical clocks and cannon existed much earlier and England's Civil War occurs at the same time as its Industrial Revolution. Also Faeries and magic exist (thus the title).
 * Charles Stross in his Merchant Princes series has a world where Christianity never existed, and is thus at a medieval level of development with the east coast of America ruled by Germanic kingdoms descended from a second viking settlement of the Americas. As of book 2 As of book 4
 * It's also gradually revealed that the "main" universe, where we start, is not quite our own. In that universe, "Chemical" Ali overthrew Saddam Hussein in a (fruitless) attempt to avert the U.S. invasion.
 * The Thursday Next series. Winston Churchill was never born, Wales is an independent socialist state, the Crimean War lasted 135 years, cheese is a controllled substance and reading is the national pastime, occupying the cultural space of television, sport and religion in our world.
 * While they have heard of William Shakespeare, literature is such Serious Business that the real-life conspiracy theories about Shakespeare's authorship are taken much more seriously - your preference for Ben Jonson, Kit Marlowe or whoever else is like their equivalent of your favourite football team.
 * In-universe, Thursday
 * In A. Bertram Chandler's Kelly Country, Australian outlaw Ned Kelly leads a successful rebellion against the British.
 * One of Terry Pratchett's earlier works, Strata, has a few divergences,, and controversially.
 * Also Venus has a moon which is clearly visible to the naked eye, so the Geocentric model never takes off. The plot involves finding a flat copy of Earth
 * The short story "Living Space" by Isaac Asimov plays with this trope: Our Earth (Earth Prime) has an official population of roughly one trillion, but most of those people live in a house on an alternate Earth where life never came into existence -- a different alternate Earth for every single family. The story picks up where one homeowner complains that there is someone or something else living on their alt-Earth. Turns out
 * Cyril M. Kornbluth's novel Not This August was written as being Twenty Minutes Into the Future, but could be read as an alternate history in which China and the Soviet Union take over the United States.
 * Robert Silverberg wrote a number of stories in a universe in which Rome never fell, taking place over the course of several thousand years, and collected in a book called Roma Eterna.
 * Moon of Ice by Brad Linaweaver is another one where Hitler wins the Second World War. Joseph Goebbel's daughter has escaped to a libertarian United States to publish her late father's diaries, which expose the truth about the regime, as well as an SS plot to seize power and commit genocide with bioweapons of all non-Aryan races.
 * Elizabeth Bear's New Amsterdam is the name of New York City in her alternate world where the thriteen colonies don't rebel against Great Britain until the early 20th century, are bounded by a Canada still controlled by the French, and the Iroquois Nation on the West and magic, were-creatures and vampires all exist. In the novellette "Seven For A Secret" she revisits the world in 1938 (the original story was set in 1903) set in a Britain occupied by the Prussian Empire.
 * Newt Gingrich and William Forstchen have written several alternate history novels together. 1945 (Not to be confused with the Robert Conroy book above) has Hitler not declaring war on the US after Pearl harbor which results in a much quicker Pacific War with Japan but also results in our staying out of the European war and Germany winning with a Cold War on the verge of heating up between the United States and Germany in the title year. They have also written a trilogy about a Battle of Gettysburg that ends differently and thus rings several changes in the Civil War.
 * James Herbert's 48 is set in a London which is almost uninhabited due to a plague released by the Germans in the last stages of WWII which proved more effective than they anticipated and killed most humans except for those with AB type blood.
 * Lance Parkin's "Warlords of Utopia" features a universe where Rome never fell creating alliances with other similar universes (including one that was Amazonian and another where the Dinosaurs never became extinct) goes to war against multiple universes where the nazis won and created an interuniversal Axis empire. The Romans won because the Nazis forgot the importance of training their soldiers to fight someone with a sword and a (kevlar lined) shield. Throw in some steampunk and you've a very fun story.
 * Robert Heinlein's Job: A Comedy of Justice takes its protagonist through several alternate worlds but starts in one where William Jennings Bryan became president, leading to a fundamentalist Christian dominated United States.
 * In the world of The Big One and it's sequels by Stuart Slade a legal, bloodless coup by Lord Halifax against Churchill leads to Britain opting out of WWII in 1940 leading to, among other things, it's lasting until 1947 and ending in the United States nuking Germany.
 * He also authored The Salvation War, where on 11 January 2008 ... which to say the least is not taken well.
 * Sergey Lukyanenko's Seekers of the Sky duology takes place in a world where Jesus Christ was killed as a baby during the Massacre of the Innocents. Despite Jesus pleading God to allow him to return to Earth, God instead leaves another baby on Mary's doorstep. This child becomes God's Stepson, known to the people as the Redeemer, and God also grants him the Word, a divine power to put any number of objects into another dimention known as the Cold. Using this power, the Redeemer becomes the next Roman Emperor but eventually grows disillusioned with humanity upon the realization that humans will never give up on war. He then orders his disciples to tie him to a pole (as opposed to a cross), which he takes into the Cold along with himself and most of the world's iron (in attempt to prevent future wars). The novels take place 2000 years later in a world where iron is treated as gold, firearms are a rarity afforded to the nobility, only a select few know the Word, and the World Wars never happened.
 * The author even attempts to make the novels seem contemporary (despite taking place in an Alternate Reality) by adding several characters who could be considered duplicates of real-life people, including Arnold Schwarzenegger (a trigger-happy, square-jawed officer of the Guard), Antoine de Saint Exupery (a nobleman, a retired pilot, and an amateur poet), and Gerard Depardieu (thief-turned-bishop, miracle worker).
 * The Novel Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld shows what might have happened if Darwin had discovered Genetic engineering, showing the start of World War I between Lego Genetics 'Darwinists' (the Entente Powers) and Steampunk 'Clankers' (The Central Powers).
 * While this scenario is not particularly likely, an unopened copy of Gregor Mendel's paper on genetics was found in Darwin's study after his death. Darwin had tried and failed to come up with an effective mechanism for evolutionary change, and yet the answer had been sitting right in front of him the whole time.
 * Actually not true. Darwin did not have a copy of Mendel's paper since it was a very low profile journal that published it, however he did own a few books that referenced Mendel's work in passing. Not as ironic but Darwin probably would have noticed it if he had read the right book in his library.
 * The Strange Affair of Spring-Heeled Jack uses this to explain the Steampunk setting it features; in this world a time-traveler, attempting to prevent his ancestor from attempting to kill Queen Victoria, instead causes the death of Victoria just three years into her rule. That and some leaked knowledge of future technology changes the world into a world with genetically modified animals, geothermic power, helicopters and more, all in 1861.
 * Pride and Prejudice And Zombies is an alternate version of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice in which the undead roam Britain.
 * In the first The Edge novel, the Weird's history is significantly different from the Broken's. For one thing, their version of North America has multiple kingdoms the size of a few states, like the Republic of Texas.
 * In Keith Laumer's Worlds of the Imperium series, the protagonist goes from our Earth to one where WWI and the Russian Revolution never happened, one where Neanderthals ruled, one where Napoleon beat the British, and finally one where rats became the dominant sentient species.
 * Mary Gentle's Ash a Secret History presents an alternate late-medieval Europe where things are rather different in countless ways; unlike most alternate history, there is no obvious past point of divergence,.
 * Affinity Bridge by George Mann takes place in Victorian London. Nothing notable except for the Steampunk...and zombies... and airships.
 * In Leo Frankowski's The Cross Time Engineer series, a 20th Century engineer is sent back to 13th Century Poland where, using his technical knowhow and with covert help from the future that sent him there he prevents the Mongol invasion, jump starts the Industrial Revolution and turns Poland into the major European power.
 * Nineteen Forty Et Si La France Avait Continue La Guerre a.k.a. France Fights On is about an alternate WW 2 in which France evacuates its army to North Africa rather than sign an armistice with Germany in June 1940.
 * Jules Verne's Paris in The Twentieth Century is of the honorary variety -- written in the 1860s, and set in the 1960s. Its description of the future is surprisingly accurate, all things considered, though it does imagine a world that runs largely on compressed air.
 * Sophia McDougall's book Romanitas is set in the modern day in a world where the Roman Empire never fell. It now spans most of the globe, with many countries having different names and borders based on Latin names. There are still slaves, crucifixion and worship of the old gods, but they also have televisions and telephones (called longscreens and longdictors, respectively).
 * An early example is Murray Leinster's 1934 novella Sideways In Time, in which an unknown phenomenon switches random chunks of the Earth's surface with pieces from alternate histories, leading to Vikings and Roman legions appearing in different American cities, Native Americans who have never seen a European, and a region where the South won the American Civil War.
 * In Kit Whitfield's In Great Waters Venice makes an alliance with merfolk which leads to a brief empire that spans Eurasia in the 9th Century. After it falls apart the main difference is that just about all the royalty of Europe are part merfolk.
 * Dale Brown books have touches of this. For example, the mess with Libya in Wings of Fire started when apparent Big Bad Zuwayy carried out a coup against the Real Life ruler Gaddafi in the backstory.
 * L. Neil Smith's The Probability Broach features a "North American Confederacy" which diverged from our timeline when Albert Gallatin, rather than brokering a peace to end the Pennsylvania Whiskey Rebellion leads an army against Washington and overthrows the U.S. government. The result is a government requiring the "unanimous consent" of the governed, relegating the state to only a few sparse actions taken in defense of the NAC throughout its history.
 * In Tim Doyle's Go Mutants a parody that melds Teen Wangst 50s movies and 50s sci-fi movies Aliens and humans went to war in the 50s resulting in four US states and France being wiped out. Among other things Nixon won in 1960 and was a three-termer and Ronald Reagan is Vice-President in 72 (when the story occurs).
 * George Mann's Ghosts of Manhatten takes place in a 1926 where the United States and the British Empire (which is substantially bigger) had a falling out after WWI and are currently engaged in a cold war.
 * Philip Roth's The Plot Against America features an alternate history in which an isolationist and anti-Semitic Charles Lindbergh defeats Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1940 presidential election.
 * Patricia C Wrede's The Thirteenth Child is the first of her new series taking place in a 1800's United States frontier times where western expansion is held back by dragons and other magical creatures. While mostly our world with magic, the alternate politics and nations are sometimes touched upon.
 * The Celestial Empire books by Chris Roberson take place in an alternate history where the Chinese rose to dominance during the Middle Ages. They, alongside their enemies the Aztec, are the dominant cultures in the world in present day. And there are space ships.
 * Time and Again by Jack Finney plays with this. There is evidence, in his universe, of alternate histories: a newspaper from 1916 with no evidence that the world is in the midst of war; a man who has a campaign button for JFK's second term; an old man who swears he saw the Titanic pull into New York harbor when he was 12 years old. There are a select few people who, with special training, can travel back in time. They attempt first to avert the war, and then to stop the Titanic from sinking, and fail in both attempts. In fact, their slight alteration of the Titanic's course is what caused the ship to hit the iceberg. Oops.
 * In the Vampire Empire series, vampires rise up in 1870 and drive humans out of much of the northern hemisphere.
 * Otto Basil's The Twilight Men is set in rather bleak version of the Europe in 1960's. The Third Reich won the World War II and rules large part of the Continental Europe facing the war with its former ally, Imperial Japan. The National Socialism mutated into National Materialism (described as nihilistic dictatorship) while sprouting underground, mystical cult worshiping Hitler as an Odin-like figure. The Führer himself dies of natural causes at the onset of the plot.
 * While it's non-fiction, the book Why the West Rules, For Now by Ian Morris includes a couple of vignettes, one positing a world where China discovered the New World and went on to dominate the globe and another, possibly in the same universe, Prince Albert is sent to Peking as a hostage after the British fleet is destroyed by the Chinese.
 * Red Plenty by Francis Spufford postulates that the Soviet Union decided to outdo their capitalist rivals by creating an efficient planned economy with the help of computers and linear programming. Subverted however in that we never see the bountiful communist society of The Eighties; after Premier Khrushchev is forced into retirement his successors are more interested in maintaining the status quo than carrying out risky economic reforms, and therefore history proceeds similar to our own.
 * The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, shows a world in which Charles Babbage succeeded in developing his Difference Engine, and later developed an Analytical Engine(i.e. a functioning computer) during the late 1800s. As a result, the Computer Revolution took place at the same time as the Industrial Revolution, and Great Britain is now one of the most powerful nations on Earth. One of the first books ever to be called Steampunk
 * In The Age of Unreason series by Gregory Keyes, Sir Isaac Newton discovered the fundamental laws of alchemy instead of physics, resulting in a world where transmutation weapons tilt the balance of the Revolutionary War.
 * Stephen Baxter's Time's Tapestry series is essentially one of different alternate histories, all tied to one character.
 * Kim Newman's Anno Dracula novels are a sort of Alternate Fiction; What if Dracula was real ... and more competent than Bram Stoker's version? It gets meta when he establishes that in the AD universe, Stoker invented Alternate History with his wish-fulfillment novel of Dracula getting distracted by Mina Harker and killed by van Helsing and his Ragtag Band of Misfits.
 * Newman is also co-writer of Back In The USSA with Eugene Byrne, in which the Communist revolution happens in America instead of Russia, and wrote the two "Alternate Major" stories (a Dystopia where John Major is the leader of Nazi Britain, and a Utopia where he cheerfully remains a bus conductor).
 * Newman being Newman, USSA is Alternate Fiction too to an extent; the counterpart to the Tsar is Citizen Kane. Not to mention alternates of Tom Joad and Terry Collier and Bob Ferris, among others.
 * In Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ichiguro, the question asked is "What if human cloning was invented sooner? What if cancer was curable, but only with the use of these clones?"
 * Bitter Seeds by Ian Tregillis tells of an alternate WWII where the Nazis have psychic child soldiers and the British have sorcery.
 * In Mike Resnick's The Buntline Special the western border of the United States in 1881 is the Mississipi due to Indian magic.
 * Killing Ground, by Bruce Powe, is about what could have happened had the volatile situation with Québec separatists in the 1960's exploded into full-blown civil war.
 * In a real life-ish example, one of the essays in James Bond in the 21st Century has sci-fi author Mark W. Tiedemann imagining a world where Sean Connery wasn't Bond in Dr. No.
 * The Kingsley Amis novella The Alteration is set in a world where two events change the course of history: Martin Luther never sparked the Protestant Reformation and instead was reconciled with the Catholic Church (and is even elected Pope), and in England Prince Arthur Tudor lives long enough to produce an heir with Catherine of Aragon. The result is that most of western Europe is still under the influence of the Catholic Church and the Papacy, with the Republic of New England one of the few parts of the world where Protestantism has taken root.
 * The lurid and explicit dystopias peddled by the New English Library as hideous warnings of where Britain might end up are usually set Twenty Minutes Into the Future and so count as a sort of alternate history. A typically ludicrous example is Striker, where under the pressure of soccer riots, civil order has broken down to the extent where football hooligans run their own patchwork of anarchic states in what was formerly Great Britain...
 * In Celestial Matters Alexander the Great ended up conquering pretty much all of Europe and then went into a thousand year war with the Orient.
 * In Kathleen Anne Goonan's In War Times a group of time travelers extend FDR's life long enough for him to have a fifth term and prevent JFK's assassination in order to create a Mary Suetopia.
 * Another "honorary alternate history" is Whitley Strieber and James Kunetka's Warday (published in 1984) which depicts a "limited" nuclear war in 1988. In a case of Write Who You Know the authors recount their (fictional) experiences in the war and travel across a devastated and depopulated America to show the consequences of the war. The eastern half of the country has been destroyed by bombings on San Antonio, New York, and Washington, DC and the breakdown of order while California is pretty much untouched and has become an undeclared separate country with closed borders.
 * The Map Of Time takes place in a Britain where Jack the Ripper was caught.
 * In EON from The Way Series, the book ends with
 * In the 1986 novel Replay, the main character is stuck in a 25-year Groundhog Day Loop from 1963 to 1988. The timeline is changed only slightly on most replays, except for one where he and another replayer went public, which ended up drastically changed.
 * Stephen King's Eleven Twenty Two Sixty Three follows a man who finds a way to time-travel back to 1958 and plans to live in the past up to the titular date and stop JFK's assassination.
 * In novel, The Long Walk, the setting appears to be America in the 1980s, except for a few blink-and-you'll-miss-it details dropped in the narrative, namely the occurrence of the "German air-blitz of the American East Coast during the last days of World War II", and the existence of April 31st and a 51st state.
 * The Alaska Royals series by MaryJanice Davidson takes place in a world where the Seward Purchase of Alaska never took place and it became an independent kingdom ruled by the Baranov family. Subverted in that except for Alaska being an independent monarchy everything else seems to be exactly the same.
 * Joanna Russ' The Female Man takes place over several alternate worlds, one in which Hitler was assassinated in 1936, World War II never happened and the Depression never ended, one in which there is a literal "war of the sexes" going on in which men and women live in different nations and one in which all men were killed in a plague and women reproduce parthenogenetically. The last one is presented as a Mary Suetopia.
 * Count and Countess by Rose Christo presents an alternate history wherein Elizabeth Bathory served as Princess Regnant of Hungary. Most of the alternate history in the novel is a result of its plot device, though, wherein a very young Vlad Dracula and Elizabeth Bathory begin writing letters to one another despite the 100+ years standing between them.
 * James P. Hogan's The Proteus Operation begins in a 1975 where the Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan dominate the globe with only North America, Australia and New Zealand remaining free. The title project is an attempt to go back in time and prevent an Axis victory in WWII.
 * Kim Newman (again)'s Dark Future novels as Jack Yeovil are set in an alternate timeline where Kennedy's extra-marital affairs led to him losing the election to Nixon; the Cuban Missile Crisis never happened, Reagan carried on acting, the Bay of Pigs Invasion worked for America and the Vietnam War superpowers were the USSR and China. Russia never completed its manned space programme and the world is wracked by environmental collapse. Oh, and The King is still alive..
 * Larry Niven's Known Space series is an example of the "honorary alternate history" variant mentioned above. Many of its more fanciful aspects that happened in the late 20th century (legal rights and translators for dolphins, mining and colonies on Mercury and Venus) have changed from prediction into alternate history as the decades since the series started have passed. On the bright side, organ harvesting isn't nearly as bad as it predicted either.
 * In the Cory Doctorow novella "A Place So Foreign", trade up and down the timeline has resulted in the Seventies being a Raygun Gothic world while an unscrupulous Jules Verne has plagerized numerous other authors including H. G. Wells and Edgar Rice Burroughs.
 * The shared universe book Exile: Clan of the Claw, edited and created by Bill Fawcett (with S.M. Stirling, harry Turtledove, John Ringo and Jody Lynn Nye among the contributors) takes place in a world where the asteroid that wiped out te dinosaurs never happened (apparently there are very few asteroids in that solar system according to the introduction) resulting not only in sentient dinosaurs with Psychic Powers but in an intellingent mammalian species descended not from apes but from felines.
 * The short story "The Prophet of Flores" by Ted Kosmatka takes place in a world where intelligent design beat out evolution as the prevailing biological theory.
 * In Ian McDonald's Planesrunner, first of a trilogy, there are ten known alternate worlds, including ours. In Planesrunner only three are explained in any detail. E2 has an Islamic Britain due to the island being located a hundred miles west of the Straits of Gibralter instead of north of continantal Europe. Oddly enough Ireland is still where it belongs. E3 has elements of both Steampunk and Raygun Gothic. There's no oil in that world so everything is powered by coal but there are also no steam engines due to the electric motor being invented first (the very earliest was hand cranked). E4 is the most similar, 9/11 never happened, Al Gore ran again in 2004 and won. Also something odd and as yet unexplained happened to it's moon. Noone talks about E1 and it's quarantined.

Live Action TV

 * Spike TV ran a one-shot special, entitled "Alternate History", covering what would've happened if Hitler won World War Two. It wound up being a spectacular example of Artistic License History when covering how we get to that point. Some examples:
 * The biggest is the complete exclusion of the Russian Front. You know, where the German Army got ground down? Where some of the defining battles of the war, such as Stalingrad and Kursk, were fought? Even if the Germans had managed to repel the Allies at D-Day, they still had the whole issue of millions of pissed off Soviets marching on Berlin to deal with.
 * Speaking of D-Day, the rationale they give for a German victory is...deployment of the Me-262 jet fighter. Let's go through why this is flawed.
 * One of the key aspects of Operation Overlord was aerial supremacy. The Allies controlled the skies over the Channel.
 * Yes, being a jet aircraft, the Me-262 had some advantages over propeller based fighters. But the jet engines didn't make it a superplane (It's performance not being critically better than any other plane constructed) - by the end of the war, Allied forces had racked up several 262 kills.
 * By 1944, Germany was having several problems with manufacture of jet engines - namely, they no longer had the resources to make them properly. The engines they could manufacture didn't last - they had to be rebuilt after operation, and had a short operational life.
 * Then there's the whole "nuke the East Coast" bit. There's a reason the Civilization games have always made The Manhattan Project a world wonder - the effort to produce a viable nuclear weapon required a massive amount of research and resources; there's a famous anecdote that when General Groves asked for such-and-such a number of tons of silver from the U.S. Treasury, he got the starchy reply that "we do not speak of tons of silver at the Treasury. Our unit of measure is the troy ounce." (He did get the silver in the end.) The production of fissionable material alone took not only massive facilities to process the material, but large amounts of power to run said facilities (which is why the facilities were built in the Tennessee Valley.) Then there was figuring out how to make an atomic bomb actually work. And the US faced all that without any serious efforts to undermine the project - whereas Germany had their program hindered by several notable acts of sabotage, such as having a major shipment of heavy water scuttled. In addition, one of the great wastes of resources Germany committed was the whole driving out or killing of the Jewish scientists. You could say that in this "Alternate History" they didn't do that, but then they wouldn't really have been, well, Nazis. Aryan supremacy was a core plank of Nazi belief systems, and they were just not pragmatic enough to compromise on that.
 * Hell, even if they DID manage to win the war by forcing the US and Soviets to surrender over nuclear bombs, there is no way they would ever enforce their laws in the US. The militeristic and patriotic nature of the nations would force encourage an active rebellion against their controllers. Same goes with the United Kingdom. Controlling and patrolling a nation is much harder than forcing it to surrender (as has been evidenced several times in the Middle East). Germany would be burning through resources and money to no end trying to even establish a proper police force.
 * Korean drama The King 2 Hearts takes place in an alternate universe where modern day South Korea is a constitutional monarchy.
 * The TV series Sliders used this as its entire premise. Every episode our heroes slide into a new alternate present.
 * A two-part episode of Star Trek Enterprise is set in an altered timeline where time-traveling aliens had armed the Nazis with an arsenal of devastating energy weapons, leading to the rapid conquest of Europe, Asia and at least the eastern seaboard of the U.S. It features a highly entertaining alternate-universe propaganda clip describing the bright, shining future in store for America now that it's Germany's "partner". The point of divergence was the assassination of Lenin before he could turn Russia communist, though by the time of World War 2 itself, the aliens have become open allies of the Nazis.
 * For that matter, the Star Trek timeline originally called for a Eugenics War in the 1990s although the Voyager episode Future's End has the crew going back to The Present Day, which is 1996. Star Trek Enterprise then referred back to it as a 21st century war, while the Expanded Universe has given various explanations ranging from a Secret War to our world being the Alternate History.
 * Saturday Night Live parodied this. For some reason all the questions came from a ten-year old kid in New Jersey, starting with, "What if Eleanor Roosevelt could fly?"
 * "What if Spartacus had a Piper Cub?"
 * "What if Napoleon had a fully armed B-52 at the battle of Waterloo?"
 * "What if the Aztecs had had escalators?" (Apparently it allowed them to fight off Cortez)
 * In Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, the colony that would become California was founded by the British, rather than the Spanish. The only obvious consequence of the difference is that the action takes place in a city called "Angel Grove" rather than "Los Angeles".
 * The BBC serial ''An Englishman's Castle" is set in an alternate 1970s, in which Nazi Germany had invaded and occuppied Britain during WWII. The protagonist is the writer of a popular soap opera (also called "An Englishman's Castle") that is set during the Battle of Britain.
 * Aside from the whole "aliens crashlanding on Earth" part of the story, apparently Puerto Rico is a US state and the ERA passed in Alien Nation.

Tabletop Games

 * Players in the card game Chrononauts each represent a character from a different timeline altering crucial events in modern history in an attempt to set things back to what his or her own present. One character is a sentient cockroach whose present requires starting World War III.
 * Alternate histories are a key element of the Feng Shui Tabletop RPG, with old timelines being erased and new ones being created as various factions gain or lose power in a conflict known as the Secret War. Most people don't notice when history changes, because their own histories have been rewritten to conform to the timeline alterations as well. However, Secret Warriors who have been to The Netherworld, an alternate dimension that facilitates Time Travel, retain memories of their former lives when these changes, known as "Critical Shifts," take place.
 * The entire premise of the GURPS: Infinite Worlds campaign is based on one version of Earth discovering the means of traveling to hundreds of other alternate dimensions as reliably and economically as domestic air-travel is today, and engaging in a trans-dimensional cold war with a different version of Earth with similar technology. Steve Jackson Games published two sourcebooks for the 3rd edition of the game, which detailed at least ten distinct worlds and offered seeds for dozens of variations.
 * The tabletop and video game Crimson Skies exists in an alternate history where the United States broke up during the Depression and zeppelins actually succeeded as a transport product.
 * The Tabletop RPG Traveller originally came out in the mid 1970s. The rather optimistic timeline of its official background universe, in which antigravity was invented in the 1980s and FTL travel in the 1990s, quickly became alternate history (and now seems to be officially accepted as AH, instead of trying to Retcon it away).
 * Similar to the above, Battle Tech's timeline originally began with the fall of the Soviet Union... in 2011. After several messy attempts to Retcon it to the Russian Federation or a re-established USSR, the writers have just declared it official AH as well.
 * Timemaster. Members of the Time Corps (based in AD 7192 Earth) try to prevent their opponents, an alien race called the Demoreans, from changing human history to make it more to their liking.
 * Deadlands starts by asking, "What if things that went bump in the night appeared in the middle of the American Civil War?" Their answer? Said war drags on for a decade longer than it "should," human technology springs forward in leaps and fits, and humanity potentially . Better than it sounds.
 * When Shadowrun originally began in the late '80s it wasn't alternate history. But since it passed 1999 when a Supreme Court decision gave corporations the right to their own militaries and 2001 when they gained extraterritoriality, effectively making them independent nations it's become this. Still waiting on whether a dragon appears over Mount Fuji in 2011.
 * "Aces and Eightss" has a very in-depth alternate reality, just so players can't go about hunting down political figures just to say that they changed history.
 * Gear Krieg, a table-top game determined to answer the age old question, what would the world be like if Hitler had had a jetpack.

Video Games

 * Metal Gear Solid 3 does this by explaining that the Cold War happened because the Soviet Union, China and America originally plotted together to combat the Axis Powers and that after the war there has been a power struggle to reobtain the vast amount of wealth they have pooled. Other oddities created by this include the existence of the Cobra unit and mobile nuclear death machines.
 * Used subtly in Assassin's Creed, to explain the differences in construction styles from history (which to the expert border on Schizo-Tech, but to the layman are nearly invisible and easily justifiable through Scenery Porn and Rule of Cool) and also to insert the Assassins and the Templars into the political mix. So, you have several buildings in a Gothic style that wouldn't come in vogue for hundreds of years, and several people who died historically during the time of Assassin's Creed were "revealed" to have been killed by Altair (your targets in-game). Also, the Twenty Minutes Into the Future framing story, with plagues sending people illegally migrating to Mexico and year round hurricanes, not to mention the presence of the Animus itself, suggest a far different history than our own.
 * Sort of. Everyone thinks the history is the same in-canon, but it's a Templar lie. The immigration and hurricanes are because of a downward spiral where the Economy and Ozone are non-existent because Humans Are Bastards.
 * Further solidified in Assassin's Creed II, if the existence of is any indication, among other things.
 * No, it's a genre called Secret History.
 * Probably the most dramatic use of this trope in a video game is the Fallout series. In the Fallout universe, The Sixties never occured, and the sociopolitical standards of The Fifties continued well into the 21st century, with all the extenuating political, artistic, and scientific implications;
 * The Cold War never ended, and China became the United States' ultimate enemy.
 * The US annexed Canada.
 * Computing evolved to the degree at which robots and sentient computers were commonplace; however, said computers are still powered by vacuum tubes and have monochromatic monitors, and there is no such thing as the Internet.
 * What the use sure looks like Gopher, though.
 * Cold fusion was discovered, and even cars run on nuclear batteries (as evidenced in Fallout 3, when you blow up a car and a mushroom cloud forms).
 * There are minor changes in the history of the Fallout universe pre-WWII as well; witness, for example, Abraham Lincoln's gold-plated repeating rifle.
 * That actually existed. http://americanhistory.si.edu/Militaryhistory/collection/object.asp?ID=3
 * History isn't the only difference in Fallout, Word of God has it that there are actual differences in the laws of physics. Basically, the way that the universe operates is more along the lines of the "SCIENCE!" of '50s B movies than our own scientific knowledge.
 * Command and Conquer: Red Alert is set in a timeline where Adolf Hitler was removed from time by a time-traveling Albert Einstein before coming to power, and World War II was instead fought between the Soviet Union and a European coalition. The main Command and Conquer series, set Twenty Minutes Into the Future at the time of its release, may be considered honorary alternate history. Though the Word of God has indicated that it's what happens if the Soviet side wins in the Red Alert series, which would make it an alternate alternate history.
 * Kane making a cameo in the Soviet campaign (especially the final cutscene) might be a pretty clear hint.
 * Fanon indicated that it was a result of a Soviet victory, to explain away how Red Alert 1 was supposed (when released) to be a prequel to the original Command and Conquer (retroactively making the series not only honorary alternate history, but actual alternate history), despite RA2 making it much harder to make a consistent timeline leading from an Allied victory to the Brotherhood of Nod running around in the open by 1996. Word of God didn't say much until it said they were now entirely separate series. Of course, that doesn't stop Fan Wank from finding ways to connect at least RA1 with the Tiberian series...
 * Red Alert 3 confuses the situation even more, when a Soviet time travel experiment causes Einstein to be removed from time in the '20s, causing a 3-way war between the Allies, the Soviets, and the Japanese.
 * Several realistically-toned RTSes and SimulationGames released in the recent decade use the classic "The Cold War went hot" plot :
 * World in Conflict
 * Operation Flashpoint
 * Cuban Missile Crisis : The Aftermath
 * Wargame: European Escalation
 * The old Play Station 2 game Ring of Red asks what if the atomic bombs were never dropped, and instead, the US and Soviet Union invaded Japan... Oh, and what if Humongous Mecha were developed in the war.
 * The game Freedom Fighters takes place in an alternate history in which two key things changed - first, the Soviets invented the atomic bomb and used it to end the World War Two in Europe, and secondly, the Cuban Missile Crisis was resolved in their favor. The strategic and political repercussions of these changes allowed the Soviet Union not only to survive, but to begin an invasion of the US in the early 21st century.
 * Resistance: Fall of Man takes place in an alternate history where, in the 30s, The Virus appeared and swept across Europe in place of the Nazis. The game takes place in the early 50s, by which time it's reached England.
 * According to the website for the first game the point of divergence for the timeline was Spain declaring war on the United States before the USS Maine incident. For some reason after that event, the White Russians won the Russian Civil War, the United States did not pass the Smooth-Hawley Tariff Act so it only faced a recession instead of the Great Depression, and without economic collapse Germany stayed with the Weimar Republic until all of Europe fell to the Chimera.
 * The real POD was when The Virus came out of Russia shortly after the Tungaska incident.
 * The Role Playing Game Lionheart is set in the 16th century, in a timeline where an event in the Third Crusade caused all variety of mythical creatures to become real.
 * Used quite often in Dark Cloud 2.
 * Taken to a naturally epic extreme when.
 * After completing The World Ends With You, you can
 * Iron Storm was set in a Dystopian Alternate History where World War One had dragged on until 1964. A number of changes include dieselpunkish assault rifles and powered armor.
 * Chrome Hounds : The game is set in 2006, with the USSR still in existence, the US out of touch with mostly everyone, and most importantly: Humongous Mecha being deployed in warzones.
 * Mace the Dark Age exists in a world where neither Christianity nor Islam existed. Without these religions, Europe and Arabia is heavily Balkanized. Meanwhile in Asia, Genghis Khan's descendants continue to rule.
 * The 1946 expansion pack of the Il-2 Sturmovik combat flight sim series focused on an alternate World War Two, which got prolonged by a year due to a botched Operation Overlord. It featured many prototypes of CoolPlanes of both the Allies and Axis, most of which never got into the air or even off the drawing board due to the end of the war. A lot of these are early jet fighters.
 * The STALKER series, set in the infamous Exclusion zone around the ill-fated Chernobyl Powerplant in northern Ukraine. It became a Dark World version of itself after a second, unexplained catastrophical event at the plant occured some time in the early 1990s, apparently caused by some mysterious Applied Phlebotinum.
 * Virtually all grand strategy games made by Paradox Interactive allow this - to a very big degree. Brabant ruling half of North America and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth colonising Australia? With a bit of knowledge and some skill, it's certainly possible...
 * Creative Assembly's Total War series does the same, but with the additon of the most epic real-time historical battles in the history of gaming.
 * Ditto for Big Huge Games' Rise of Nations, which is essentially a blend of Age of Empires, Civilization and Risk. It features a Conquer the World campaign, which can often result in a Alternative History Wank or Space Filling Empire.
 * DEFCON is a tongue-firmly-in-cheek RTS that lets you spark World War Three and the following Endofthe World As We Know It. However, its underlying hidden message about Nuclear War is very serious in tone.
 * Date Warp involves a setting in which The American Revolution never happened, and the area equivalent to the USA is split into Atlanta, which is part of the British Commonwealth, and Eldorado, which isn't.
 * Battlestations Pacific, has an entire campaign based around this, ending in
 * According to Jumper, attempts at creating "ultimate soldiers" have began no later than 1888.
 * The tutorial campaign of Empire Earth 2 follows the Aztec Empire through an alternate history where it wins against the conquistadors, establishes an independent nation, helps the Americans defeat the British, and ends up fighting a war with a fascist Inca Empire in the 1930s.
 * Jeanne D Arc: The famous French Martyr was a Magical Girl who fought the Legions of Hell (and the English) to stop the King Henry (possessed by an Eldritch Abomination, no less!) from plunging the world into hell.
 * The Modern Warfare games take place in an alternate future where an ultra-nationalist Russia (nostalgic for the old USSR) battles it out with the United States. Apparently, history diverged around the events of Chernobyl.
 * If World at War and Call of Duty Black Ops are part of the same timeline as Modern Warfare, then the point of divergence goes back at least as far as October 1945, with Germany developing another super-weapon that just so happened to fall into Russian hands after the war. Not to mention the whole Nazi Zombies business.
 * Covert Front has three main points of divergence: a technological revolution in the 19th century that leads to a Steampunk world, World War One beginning in 1901, and scientists.
 * The Doomsday expansion for Hearts of Iron II has for its titular campaign an alternate 1945/46 where the Allies and Soviets declare war on each other almost right after World War 2 ends. Some of the series' mods, such as Kaiserreich, take the concept further.
 * This is based on a real life contingency plan by the western Allies, called Operation Unthinkable, for an attack on Soviet forces, using captured and rearmed German troops as auxiliaries. It was ultimately ruled unfeasible, as the Red Army outnumbered Anglo-American forces 3:1, had better and shorter supply lines, and nuclear weaponry could not be produced fast enough to be effective. See the other Wiki.
 * The Armageddon expansion includes a campaign where World War II happened differently. Multiple points of divergence occurred.
 * Russian Revolution failed while the Ukraine seceded to become the Cossacks. The Bourbon dynasty continues and manages to merge the Spanish and French branches. Africa and South America embraces Communism after the fall of former European colonies. India becomes a Republic after the British lost control. Siam unifies Southeast Asia to repel colonial forces. Sweden annexes its neighbors. The United States annexed Canada at the cost of recognizing the Confederates. The United Kingdom, Persia, Italy and Japan fell to Communism as a result of poor leadership. China continues to be a Republic without it splintering into warlord groups. Prussia and the Ottoman Empire attempt to restore their glory. And finally, for some reason Tannu Tuva is the only nation in the world that didn't pick a side.
 * This is pretty much what happens over the course of Singularity.
 * The RTS version of Axis & Allies features two campaigns: one for the Allies and one for the Axis. The Axis campaign diverges with the Battle of Crete going well for the Germans. Afterwards, Rommel takes El Alamein and the Suez Canal, followed by Manstein seizing Stalingrad. The Japanese invade Australia, depriving the Americans of a staging area in the Pacific. The Allies launch the D-Day Invasion, but Rommel and Rundstedt drive them back, setting the stage for victory in Operation Sea Lion. The Japanese then stomp out the last British resistance in India and later aide the Germans in the capture of Moscow. Finally, Admiral Yamamoto wipes out the American fleet, captures Midway and Hawaii, leaving the Americans unable to continue fighting.
 * Mini-Manhattan in Prototype has its tallest in-game building resembling one of the former World Trade Center towers, if only vaguely.
 * Making History is all about creating this, without a particular alternate timeline in mind.
 * Illusion Of Gaia turns out to be this, to an extreme degree- a comet that contains Dark Gaia passed by the Earth at some point and scrambled history severely. Certain things still exist but the planet was quite messed up. After defeating Dark Gaia in the end, the planet is restored to its modern 20th century.
 * Until the sequel, Terranigma, where Dark Gaia comes back and completely wipes out the Earth again. The hero is sent out to the surface to revive everything, turning the world into a mix between Alternate History and Anachronism Stew- Christopher Columbus exists alongside modern New York and futuristic Tokyo.
 * The original Mega Man series takes place in early 21st century (the earliest games actually marked the year 200X instead of 20XX) and because it's already 2012 by now, it's safe to assume that the series takes place in Alternate Techline where robots evolved quite fast during the Cold War.
 * Mega Man Battle Network and Mega Man Star Force takes place in an Alternate History to the main series where, instead of robots, computers evolved quite fast.
 * Aztec Wars: The Aztecs have decided to move out from the Americas before their discovery by Columbus, and proceeded to conquer most of the world. The Russians and Chinese are the only ones holding out against them. All sides use Steampunk liberally.

Webcomics

 * Twice Blessed is set in an alternate version of our world, where history was changed drastically at some point when magic was discovered by "Archmage Plato".
 * Radioactive Panda makes a throwaway joke about how George Lucas suffered a fatal heart attack in 1993; the characters lament that they "only" got to see Spielberg's vision of the prequel trilogy, which won 14 Oscars.
 * Speaking of George Lucas, Darths and Droids takes place in an Alternate History where the Star Wars films were never made and instead the plot was used as an RPG campaign.
 * Darths and Droids is part of a growing genre started by DM of the Rings, which all have this trope as a basis.
 * This trope is taken to extremes (and routinely extended) here.
 * In Roswell, Texas set in 1948 Davy Crockett survived the Alamo, assassinated Santa Anna and used his influence to keep Texas an independent nation. A running gag is historical figures with very different life stories. Just a couple of examples: Meir Kahane, Malcolm Little (Malcolm X) and George Lincoln Rockwell are all Texas Rangers. Walt Disney is President For Life of California with Marion Michael Morrison (John Wayne) as his Army Chief of Staff
 * Girl Genius takes place in a world more or less like our own in the 1800s or so, except for the presense of 'Sparks'- natural mad scientists who are compelled to build amazing technological wonders and pretty much rule the world- not very well mind you. There's at least one Spark who's noticed this and is trying to wipe out the rest (though he's understandably considered Ax Crazy and not the hero). The storyline of the comic is theorised to be their world's equivalent of the Napoleonic Wars with Magnificent Bastard Klaus Wulfenbach in the Napoleon role.
 * Also it is hinted that the Queen of England is some kind of undead or at least immortal creature/machine, and that something happened in the Americas at some point in the past to make them effectively inaccessible.
 * Templar Arizona takes place in, to quote the author, "a slightly irregular Arizona that fell off the back of a truck somewhere, and now all the power outlets are a weird shape and a couple of wars never happened." Specifically the titular town exists on what in our world is the Navaho Reservation, there is or was a guerilla war going on in Australia between the government and the natives and both Greco-Roman and Egyptian Mythology have a bigger cultural background presence.
 * Rumors of War takes place in a Bronze Age world similar to our own where the Trojan War was not one, but three, separate known-world-spanning affairs the left a Scavenger World in its wake. A Wizard Did It.
 * Collar 6 was recently revealed to be this. The point of divergence was when
 * Least I Could Do Once had a storyline about Rayne writing an Alternate History book about Nazi Germany, though the main Alternate History thing about it was the Self-Insert Fic part.
 * Westward takes place in a universe where World War II ended with the destruction of Berlin (and, incidentally, much of Europe) by a (presumed) Soviet superweapon. The Cold War continues into the 21st century, a manned mission to Mars happened in 1974 with attempts to colonize it made by the 1980s, and Faster-Than-Light Travel is possible in 1999 (though no-one entirely understands how it works). Because the webcomic's plot ultimately spreads to other universes, other Alternate Histories may be encountered as well.
 * El Goonish Shive presents us with a glimpse into one, in which the Uryuoms made public contact with Earth as far back as the American Revolution. One character, who has memories of that timeline, remarks that she's utterly screwed in this world's history class because of it.

Web Originals

 * The That Guy With the Glasses universe to a small extent. It mostly reflect our own world but their are small divergances such as Super Mecha Death Christ killing Hitler a year early.
 * The many, many, many varied (and often well researched and highly detailed) scenarios created over the years by the members of Alternate History Dot Com. They also created a weekly comedic AH-themed forum series, AH Dot Com the Series - in which the members explore various Alternate History timelines. You can access the site and its discussion board here.
 * Decades of Darkness (see here and here) is a very long story about a universe where seven US states (the New England states, New York and New Jersey) separate from the US in 1810 and formed the Republic of New England, after the premature death of Thomas Jefferson. As a result, the USA keep slavery as an institution long into the 20th century, and became generally nastier. (The author describes DoD as "The Draka, but in a realistic fashion".) If printed, it would qualify as a Doorstopper. A novel taking place in the world of DoD is planned.
 * A World of Laughter, a World of Tears by statichaos is an ATL where Eisenhower suffers a heart attack on the campaign trail, forcing the Republican Party to search for a fresh candidate in the 1952 Presidential Election. Who do they pick? Walt Disney. Don't let the premise fool you, though -- this timeline is extremely dark, and every update turns it more and more into a World Half Empty. Has a sequel coming at some point in the near future.
 * Holding Out for A Hero Gustav Stresemann Survives by Faeelin. Germany doesn't turn militant in the 1930s, yet the world is not all sunshine and rainbows. Very detailed.
 * Superpower Empire: China 1912 -- The attempt to turn China into a republic after the fall of the Qing dynasty peters out, and instead a neo-imperial regime is set up. By preempting China's fall into warlordism, civil war and revolutionary upheaval, it fast-forwards its resurgence as a great power.
 * No Spanish Civil War in 1936 by Dr. Strangelove. Francisco Franco receives an answer to a letter that went unanswered in our world, there is no military rebellion against the government, and the shaky Spanish democracy survives long enough to join the allies in WWII. All sort of hijinks ensue, including and much more.
 * For All Time starts with FDR dying two weeks after Pearl Harbor, and leads into what is perhaps the ultimate Crapsack World. The equivalent of NATO falls apart, the Soviets gain ground everywhere (they take Italy, Austria, Turkey, Iran, all of Korea, and Hokkaido, among others), France collapses after a string of inept fascist dictators (capped off by Jean-Bedel Bokassa) American race relations take a long dive off the cliff, nuclear weapons proliferate and are used to the point where they would outweigh any effects of global warming, the Reverend Jim Jones gets elected US President, and to top it all off, the Soviets get Andrei Chikatilo as their last General Secretary. Emphasis on "last" -- he destroys Soviet Russia in a nuclear civil war, but not before nuking China and the Middle East.
 * Look to The West, a timeline which begins with a very minor For Want of a Nail and so far has got an imperial America, a very different Steampunk French Revolution, and Russians and Lithuanians conquering Japan.
 * Well Meet Again, where America stays within the British Empire...just...only to lead to a world ruled by sadists, dominated by war and genocides everywhere...
 * The Chaos Timeline is called by its author User:Max Sinister "the Mount Everest of Alternate History": A realistic timeline which starts with the death of Genghis Khan, thus erasing his conquests from history, and continuing it until the present. With the result that history changes a lot compared to our world, although some patterns seem to reappear. Features among other things a New Roman empire, a German technocracy and a Socialist western Europe.
 * The Pax Gallicana (Napoleon's Victory) timeline, examining a world where Napoleonic France wasn't so down on its luck in the later years of the Napoleonic Wars. The TL is currently in the 1940s and an analogue of World War Two ended not too long ago.
 * The Austria Never Forget Thy Past timeline by User:Imperial Vienna starts off with the restoration of Karl von Habsburg as Archduke in 1919. As time passes, Austria reclaims most of its pre-WW 1 territory (except the Hungarian half), Switzerland plunges into civil war, the Bourbons and Nazi-backed Bonapartes battle for France, a different World War 2 unfolds and . The Archduchy still succumbs to a (bloodier) Anschluss, though underground Habsburg cells thwart the Nazis with the covert help of . Noted for its monarchist undertones and being oddly "romantic". The current TL stopped in 1945, with a second version in the works.
 * The Strangerverse, a loosely-tied Alien Space Bats saga of several timelines by different authors, concerns the outcomes of a time traveler's attempt to save the world. Said outcomes turn out to be (well-played) nation-wanks.
 * Reds!, a series by Jello Biafra (no, not the punk front man), depicts an alternate history in which President William McKinley was not assassinated, and in the resulting political climate (which marginalized Progressive reformers due to Teddy Roosevelt never becoming president), socialism becomes much more popular in the United States. After a much more brutal World War One (made more brutal, ironically, by the well-meaning attempts of internationalists like William Howard Taft to build stable international alliances), the American populace is radicalized and heavily divided, a powder keg ready to explode, until the Great Depression sparks a revolution in the United States.
 * Green Antarctica by DValdron. A world that is to all appearances like ours, until Captain Cook discovers an enormous, technically sophisticated civilization in Antarctica that has been developing on its own, quite unaware of the rest of humanity. The people there are not friendly. The timeline starts with the colonization of a more livable Antarctica by humans, and the development of society and technology therein.
 * A Greater Britain by Ed T postulates a world in which Oswald Mosley never becomes a fascist and instead becomes Prime Minister of Britain.
 * Isaac's Empire by Basileus Giorgios is an ongoing work following the trials and fortunes of a surviving Byzantine Empire.
 * Fear Loathing and Gumbo On The Campaign Trail Seventy Two is a timeline where John Julian McKeithen, the governor of Louisiana, runs for president in 1972. This leads to, among other things, a deadlocked election (thanks to George McGovern and George Wallace running for president), President Agnew because of the deadlocked election, an awesome gambit to get Agnew out of office, China turning into our present-day North Korea, a worse Vietnam War (where we win, at least for now), a worse Troubles thanks to Ted Heath staying in office and appointing Margaret Thatcher, and lots of other nasty turmoil and unrest.
 * Fight and be Right by Ed T is a timeline where Randolph Churchills political career takes off and he dominates Brittish politics for 20 years, by the '40s.
 * The Navatlacas: Heirs to Hernan and Montezuma by Ringo Starr is a timeline in which Hernan Cortes does a bit better in the conquest of the Aztecs, and decides to go independent...
 * Damsels and Dirigibles is a timeline that brings hot chicks and airships together in an interwar (1918-1939) setting. Along with gas masks, ridiculously conspicuous uniforms, and sabers, Damsels and Dirigibles intends to create a unique aesthetic style that is chock full of fanciful anachronisms and all around pulpy fun. Although this timeline has a rather dull point of divergence (the Hague Convention of 1899), the plentiful (albeit amateur) illustrations and harrowing tales should nullify any historical boredom you happen to come upon. Original illustrations, whether they be sketches or fake newspaper clippings, periodically accompany updates, and naturally they heavily feature the titular damsels and dirigibles. Also The Cthulhu Mythos (or at least At the Mountains of Madness)is true.
 * Images of 1984 by Will Ritson is a timeline that plays with the premise and events of Orwell's novel. Namely that "Oceania" is little more than Britain turned into a rogue state, albeit more draconian and isolated than North Korea. Currently on hiatus.
 * Canadian Power: The Canadian Forces as a Major Power by theMann has Canada retain its CV capability when Pierre Elliot Trudeau buys the HMS Eagle from the United Kingdom to replace the aging Bonaventure in 1972. Robert Stanfield and David Lewis force a non-confidence vote that leads to Stanfield becoming Prime Minister, through the accquisition of the Eagle, and later, military hardware like F-14s intended to go Iran before its revolution, Canada becomes a military power.
 * Also notable is the ISOT where the devastated Canadian cities in Nineteen Eighty Three Doomsday are replaced with their Canadian Power counterparts, as well as Canadian Forces bases, ships, and other pieces off infrastructure. Currently ongoing.
 * An Alternate History of the Netherlands tells how the Dutch managed to liberate all of Belgium in the Dutch War of Independence and was able to become a superpower by the end of the 20th century. This includes a Communist Balkan Union and a Sweden that swallows Russia after the Great Northern War.
 * XXC is a well-done, albeit sometimes confusing, timeline in which an entierly plausible, and yet divergent, 20th century is created, featuring, among other things, Artist!Hitler.
 * O Renascimento de um Império is a surprisingly thorough saga chronicling Portugal's rise as a world power from 1750 onwards. In the process, it turns into a liberal, multicultural (or at least multiethnic) empire, where the Kingdom works hand-in-hand with an independent Anglican-style Portuguese Catholic Church. On the other hand, their road to glory isn't clean.
 * The Anglo/American - Nazi War charts a world where the Axis forces never invade North Africa, thus freeing up troops and supplies to win the battle of Stalingrad. Stalin, enraged at the defeat, purges the Red Army's leadership, paving the way for the Nazi conquest of the Soviet Union. With the Western Allies lacking an opening to invade Europe, Hitler is free to enact all his dreams upon the continent. At least until the Nazis make the miscalculation to break their ceasefire with the Western Allies...
 * A Prussian on the Spanish Throne starts in 1870, with Spain looking for a new King after Isabella II was kicked out of Spain. A For Want of a Nail happens: a Spanish politician decides not to tell the French Ambassador about the Government's preferred candidate for the throne, Leopold of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen. With that small change, in a Prussian becomes the King of Spain and Spain modernizes really fast, becoming something very unlike the RL Spain of the time. Has a Crowning Moment of Awesome when Spain and Germany beat the USA in this timeline's Spanish-American War (called The War of the Two Oceans). Sadly defunct.
 * The Legacy Of The Glorious is an attempt to build an AH with the same idea as A Prussian on the Spanish Throne, but with two Points of Divergence: the same as the one in A Prussian on the Spanish Throne (although more elaborate) and a telegram that was sent with a mistake in RL gets sent correctly. Defunct, but revived in ''The Legacy of the Glorious (Milarqui's Cut).
 * A sadly defunct-for-years website contained rules for a tabletop RPG set in alternate world where, in the Old World, the hominid family tree branched out into half a dozen sentient species that were all analogous to various fantasy races (elves, dwarves, gnomes, halflings, orcs, goblins, and of course humans), while in the New World dinosaurs never went extinct and gave rise to several races of intelligent saurians (all with culture similar to the Aztecs). Also, dragons. Completely illogical, but fun.
 * Shattered World starts with a war between Nazis and Soviets in, which goes better for the Soviets as Stalin didn't purge the officer corps. A very short ceasefire occurs, just before a WORSE World War Two that is still ongoing in 1949, with nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons being commonly used. There's even a wiki for it.
 * Ansem Retort has one, where Ronald Reagan turned into the Incredible Hulk to tear down the Berlin Wall, Jimmy Carter did not exist, the Flying Spaghetti Monster created time, and a time-travelling Sinistar ate the Challenger.
 * Later,
 * Ill Bethisad is a world that diverged from ours rather often since Roman times. The Holy Roman Empire never fell, the USA don't exist as such and nuclear weapons are used a bit more freely. History is still remarkably similar. For example, the Second World War is started by the German chancellor Hessler. Many aspects of this particular universe seriously disregard the basic rules of casauality, so it's one of the softer, less realistic alternate histories, but still rich in content and plenty of fun.
 * A Day in Time takes place in an Alternate History were the bombing if Hiroshima drew the attention of hostile aliens, which invaded Earth and attempted to wipe out humanity. The protagonists are refugees living on the moon. Now that one of them has gone back in time to World War Two, it seems likely that we're going to see a new alternate alternate history as well.
 * This Onion Article is about a new show on the Sci Fi Channel that is about a world where Germany didn't win World War II. Apparently a Nazi Victory stops the Syfy from changing its name.
 * Nineteen Eighty Three Doomsday is located at the Alternate History Wiki and involves a world where a worldwide nuclear exchange between the Soviet Union and the United States happens on September 26th, 1983. The United States has ceased to exist, the Soviet Union is a rump state in Siberia (still called the USSR), the Commonwealth of Australia and New Zealand is the most powerful nation on Earth and South America is an economic powerhouse.
 * Other parts of the world range from well-off (parts of Europe, Canada) to isolated (Japan) to apocalyptic (Eastern Europe, China)
 * The Salvation War is pretty much one of these being written in real time. On the story's starting date in 2008, God announces to the world that the gates of Heaven are closed, and humanity should just lay down and die, accepting that they'll go to Hell. Unsurprisingly, a significant portion of the population takes issue with this and declares war on Hell, and then Heaven. All kinds of real life figures factor into the story, and some real events are worked in shortly after they happen.
 * The RDNA-verse is one, and in part an Axis Powers Hetalia AU. It follows an alternate Earth where where the course events (at once distinct and very familiar) turned generally for the better. That was until an upheaval called the Terror changed history irreversibly in the 1920s...among other things as various stories unfold over the next 100 years. The name itself comes from one of the prominent countries: The Royal Dominion of New Austria, which would have been Mexico in OTL.
 * For All Nails expands on Robert Sobel's For Want of a Nail. The similarity of the title to For All Time is intentional-For All Nails offers a darker, more dystopian take on Sobel's timeline.
 * Enthalpy is set in 2001. A giant wall was constructed in Earth's orbit to deflect the (real-life) asteroid AL 00667. Also, children drive hovercrafts and advanced genetic engineering allows for the creation of giant insects and cans that spray instant pig clones.
 * The Speculative Dinosaur Project takes place in an Alternate Universe where the K-T asteroid never hit.
 * The Speculative Evolution Forums have a fair amount of alternate histories, such as one project in which the KT Extinction happened in the Jurassic, and one in which all fantasy creatures really exist.
 * The Fountainhead Fillibuster: Tales From Objectivist Katanga - Explores what might have happened if Ayn Rand and L. Ron Hubbard had decided to cooperate in creating an Objectivist nation-state...in the former Belgian Congo.
 * Dresden Codak parodies this, as Kimiko wonders what would've happened if the Permian and Cretaceous extinctions never happened oh my God it's alternate prehistory fanfiction!
 * It was a thinly-veiled ship-fic between her and her old physics TA.

Western Animation

 * Justice League featured a relatively conventional version of this in the three-part story "The Savage Time". The immortal Vandal Savage sending back a laptop computer with detailed notes on the history of the Second World War, the German Reich and on advanced 21st century technology. Past!Savage then uses this knowledge to invent powerful weapons that the Nazis use to repel the Allies on D-day, and presumably the oncoming Russian hordes (though there's zero mention of that). He then proceeds to... get this: sent warplanes with an invading army to America, probably because the situation at home was just that good. In the end, it resulted in a world where at least America (but most likely all of it) is ruled by Savage with an iron fist.
 * Much more lighthearted: Freakazoid found himself flung back in time a little before 07 December 1941, and saw a few Japanese planes coming towards Hawaii. The end result after he interferes?
 * In Evil Con Carne, the League of Nations never disbanded and the world is fairly peaceful, save for the Villain Protagonist leading a terrorist group trying to Take Over the World. Since it pretty much shares canon with The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy, it seems that the Soviet Union never fell either.
 * Fairly Oddparents has one of the screwed-up wishes of Timmy Turner result in England winning the Revolutionary War; the biggest changes in the present day are things like people drinking tea instead of coffee, flying the Union Jack, saying things like "Pip pip and cheerio," and society tending to Victorian dress, clothing, etc. The usual mayhem results as Timmy tries to set things right; naturally his parents don't notice any difference at all.
 * There was a similar variation in Futurama as Fry, Leela, Bender, etc try to restore things after scrambling the American Revolution in a vain attempt to "improve" the Fry family history.
 * For some reason changing the Revolution often tends to be played for laughs, with the alternate outcome largely cosmetic.
 * The Family Guy episode "Road to the Multiverse" had Stewie and Brian travel through multiple universes, some that fall under this. Stewie's ultra bred pig came from a universe where Christianity never existed, causing the world not to experience the Dark Ages and technology being more advanced.
 * In the episode "Back to the Pilot" Brian and Stewie went back in time to January 31st 1999. While they were there Brian successfully warned his past self about 911, which allowed Brian to prevent the Twin Towers from falling. As a result however George Bush never got reelected because he was unable to use terrorist propaganda in his favor. As such he recreated the Confederacy in Texas and spread it through eight unknown states which triggered the Second Civil War. In the future because of the Second Civil War the world has been turned into a post-apocalyptic warzone due to nuclear war.

Other

 * In the 1970s, the Royal Military Academy of Sandhurst initiated a wargames reeanactment of WW 2, if Operation Sea Lion, the invasion of Britain by Nazi Germany, had taken place. The result was a complete disaster for the Germans. Although they would have managed to land and gain a foothold, they would have been bogged down first by the Home Guard, then bombed to submission by the RAF, and finally have their means of escape cut off by the Royal Navy. With that done, Germany would have lost quite a chunk of its army to the enemy, and would probably have never been able to initiate another such action against Britain for the rest of the entire war, provided the USSR would have still been in their way.
 * The roadside attraction "Professor Cline's Dinosaur Kingdom" features an alternate version of the American Civil War where the Union army was armed with dinosaurs.


 * There are several usenet groups to discuss various alternate histories, like soc.history.what-if, though they don't get much traffic nowadays, with the decline of interest in newsgroups in general.
 * That's in large part because, as Web technology has matured, Web-based discussion forums have largely taken the place of newsgroups. In that connection, http://www.alternatehistory.com/discussion/index.php is the largest and best-known of several Web forums devoted to the discussion of Alternate History. Indeed, several Alternate Timelines developed on that website have their own Tropes pages here.