Theorists differ in how they relate consciousness to electromagnetism. Electromagnetic field theories (or "EM field theories") of consciousness propose that consciousness results when a brain produces an electromagnetic field with specific characteristics. Susan Pockett and Johnjoe McFadden have proposed EM field theories; William Uttal has criticized McFadden's and other field theories.
In general, quantum mind theories do not treat consciousness as an electromagnetic phenomenon, with a few exceptions.
AR Liboff has proposed that "incorporating EM field-mediated
communication into models of brain function has the potential to reframe
discussions surrounding consciousness".
Also related are E. Roy John's work and Andrew and Alexander
Fingelkurts theory "Operational Architectonics framework of brain-mind
functioning".
Cemi theory
The starting point for McFadden and Pockett's theory is the fact that every time a neuron fires to generate an action potential, and a postsynaptic potential in the next neuron down the line, it also generates a disturbance in the surrounding electromagnetic field.
McFadden has proposed that the brain's electromagnetic field creates a
representation of the information in the neurons. Studies undertaken
towards the end of the 20th century are argued to have shown that
conscious experience correlates not with the number of neurons firing,
but with the synchrony of that firing.
McFadden views the brain's electromagnetic field as arising from the
induced EM field of neurons. The synchronous firing of neurons is, in
this theory, argued to amplify the influence of the brain's EM field
fluctuations to a much greater extent than would be possible with the
unsynchronized firing of neurons.
McFadden thinks that the EM field could influence the brain in a
number of ways. Redistribution of ions could modulate neuronal activity,
given that voltage-gated ion channels are a key element in the progress of axon
spikes. Neuronal firing is argued to be sensitive to the variation of
as little as one millivolt across the cell membrane, or the involvement
of a single extra ion channel. Transcranial magnetic stimulation is similarly argued to have demonstrated that weak EM fields can influence brain activity.
McFadden proposes that the digital information from neurons is
integrated to form a conscious electromagnetic information (cemi) field
in the brain. Consciousness
is suggested to be the component of this field that is transmitted back
to neurons, and communicates its state externally. Thoughts are viewed
as electromagnetic representations of neuronal information, and the
experience of free will in our choice of actions is argued to be our subjective experience of the cemi field acting on our neurons.
McFadden's view of free will is deterministic. Neurons generate
patterns in the EM field, which in turn modulate the firing of
particular neurons. There is only conscious agency in the sense that the
field or its download to neurons is conscious, but the processes of the
brain themselves are driven by deterministic electromagnetic
interactions. The feel of subjective experience or qualia corresponds to
a particular configuration of the cemi field. This field representation
is in this theory argued to integrate parts into a whole that has
meaning, so a face is not seen as a random collection of features, but
as somebody's face. The integration of information in the field is also
suggested to resolve the binding/combination problem.
In 2013, McFadden published two updates to the theory. In the first, 'The CEMI Field Theory: Closing the Loop' McFadden cites recent experiments in the laboratories of Christof Koch and David McCormick
which demonstrate that external EM fields, that simulate the brain's
endogenous EM fields, influence neuronal firing patterns within brain
slices. The findings are consistent with a prediction of the cemi field
theory that the brain's endogenous EM field - consciousness - influences
brain function. In the second, 'The CEMI Field Theory Gestalt
Information and the Meaning of Meaning', McFadden claims that the cemi field theory provides a solution to the binding problem
of how complex information is unified within ideas to provide meaning:
the brain's EM field unifies the information encoded in millions of
disparate neurons.
Susan Pockett has advanced a theory, which has a similar physical basis to McFadden's, with consciousness seen as identical to certain spatiotemporal patterns
of the EM field. However, whereas McFadden argues that his
deterministic interpretation of the EM field is not out-of-line with
mainstream thinking, Pockett suggests that the EM field comprises a
universal consciousness that experiences the sensations, perceptions,
thoughts and emotions of every conscious being in the universe. However,
while McFadden thinks that the field is causal for actions, albeit
deterministically, Pockett does not see the field as causal for our
actions.
The concepts underlying this theory derive from the physicists, Hiroomi Umezawa and Herbert Fröhlich
in the 1960s. More recently, their ideas have been elaborated by Mari
Jibu and Kunio Yasue. Water comprises 70% of the brain, and quantum brain dynamics
(QBD) proposes that the electric dipoles of the water molecules
constitute a quantum field, referred to as the cortical field, with
corticons as the quanta of the field. This cortical field is postulated
to interact with quantum coherent waves generated by the biomolecules in
neurons, which are suggested to propagate along the neuronal network.
The idea of quantum coherent waves in the neuronal network derives from
Fröhlich. He viewed these waves as a means by which order could be
maintained in living systems, and argued that the neuronal network could
support long-range correlation of dipoles. This theory suggests that
the cortical field not only interacts with the neuronal network, but
also to a good extent controls it.
The proponents of QBD differ somewhat as to the way in which
consciousness arises in this system. Jibu and Yasue suggest that the
interaction between the energy quanta (corticons) of the quantum field
and the biomolecular waves of the neuronal network produces
consciousness. However, another theorist, Giuseppe Vitiello, proposes
that the quantum states produce two poles, a subjective representation
of the external world and also the internal self.
Advantages
Locating consciousness in the brain's EM field, rather than the neurons,
has the advantage of neatly accounting for how information located in
millions of neurons scattered through the brain can be unified into a
single conscious experience (called the binding problem): the
information is unified in the EM field.
In this way, EM field consciousness can be considered to be "joined-up
information". This theory accounts for several otherwise puzzling facts,
such as the finding that attention and awareness
tend to be correlated with the synchronous firing of multiple neurons
rather than the firing of individual neurons. When neurons fire
together, their EM fields generate stronger EM field disturbances;
so synchronous neuron firing will tend to have a larger impact on the
brain's EM field (and thereby consciousness) than the firing of
individual neurons. However their generation by synchronous firing is
not the only important characteristic of conscious electromagnetic
fields—in Pockett's original theory, spatial pattern is the defining
feature of a conscious (as opposed to a non-conscious) field.
Objections
In a circa-2002 publication of The Journal of Consciousness Studies, the electromagnetic theory of consciousness faced an uphill battle for acceptance among cognitive scientists.
"No serious researcher I know believes in an electromagnetic theory of consciousness", Bernard Baars wrote in an e-mail. Baars is a neurobiologist and co-editor of Consciousness and Cognition, another scientific journal in the field. "It's not really worth talking about scientifically", he was quoted as saying.
McFadden acknowledges that his theory, which he calls the "cemi
field theory", is far from proven but he argues that it is certainly a
legitimate line of scientific inquiry. His article underwent peer review
before publication.
The field theories of consciousness do not appear to have been as
widely discussed as other quantum consciousness theories, such as those
of Penrose, Stapp or Bohm. However, David Chalmers argues against quantum consciousness. He instead discusses how quantum mechanics may relate to dualistic consciousness. Chalmers is skeptical that any new physics can resolve the hard problem of consciousness.
He argues that quantum theories of consciousness suffer from the same
weakness as more conventional theories. Just as he argues that there is
no particular reason why particular macroscopic physical features in the
brain should give rise to consciousness, he also thinks that there is
no particular reason why a particular quantum feature, such as the EM
field in the brain, should give rise to consciousness either. Despite the existence of transcranial magnetic stimulation with medical purposes, Y. H. Sohn, A. Kaelin-Lang and M. Hallett have denied it, and later Jeffrey Gray states in his book Consciousness: Creeping up on the Hard Problem, that tests looking for the influence of electromagnetic fields on brain function have been universally negative in their result. However, a number of studies have found clear neural effects from EM stimulation.
Dobson, et al. (2000): 1.8 millitesla = 18,000 mG
Thomas, et al. (2007): 400 microtesla = 4000 milligauss
Huesser, et al. (1997): 0.1 millitesla = 1000 mG
Bell, et al. (2007) 0.78 Gauss = 780 mG
Marino, et al. (2004): 1 Gauss = 1000 mG
Carrubba, et al. (2008): 1 Gauss = 1000 mG
Jacobson (1994): 5 picotesla = 0.00005 mG
Sandyk (1999): Picotesla range
In April 2022, the results of two related experiments at the University of Alberta and Princeton University were announced at The Science of Consciousness conference, providing further evidence to support quantum processes operating within microtubules. In a study Stuart Hameroff was part of, Jack Tuszyński of the University of Alberta demonstrated that anesthetics hasten the duration of a process called delayed luminescence, in which microtubules and tubulins re-emit trapped light. Tuszyński suspects that the phenomenon has a quantum origin, with superradiance being investigated as one possibility. In the second experiment, Gregory D. Scholes and Aarat Kalra of Princeton University
used lasers to excite molecules within tubulins, causing a prolonged
excitation to diffuse through microtubules further than expected, which
did not occur when repeated under anesthesia. However, diffusion results have to be interpreted carefully, since even
classical diffusion can be very complex due to the wide range of length
scales in the fluid filled extracellular space. Nevertheless, University of Oxford quantum physicist Vlatko Vedral told that this connection with consciousness is a really long shot.
Also in 2022, a group of Italian physicists conducted several
experiments that failed to provide evidence in support of a
gravity-related quantum collapse model of consciousness, weakening the
possibility of a quantum explanation for consciousness.
Influence on brain function
The
different EM field theories disagree as to the role of the proposed
conscious EM field on brain function. In McFadden's cemi field theory,
as well as in Drs Fingelkurts' Brain-Mind Operational Architectonics
theory, the brain's global EM field modifies the electric charges across
neural membranes, and thereby influences the probability that
particular neurons will fire, providing a feed-back loop that drives free will.
However, in the theories of Susan Pockett and E. Roy John, there is no
necessary causal link between the conscious EM field and our consciously
willed actions.
References to "Mag Lag" also known as the subtle effect on
cognitive processes of MRI machine operators who sometimes have to go
into the scanner room to check the patients and deal with issues that
occur during the scan could suggest a link between magnetic fields and
consciousness. Memory loss and delays in information processing have
been reported, in some cases several hours after exposure.
One hypothesis is that magnetic fields in the 0.5-9 Tesla range
can affect the ion permeability of neural membranes, in fact this could
account for a lot of the issues seen as this would affect many different
brain functions.
Implications for artificial intelligence
If true, the theory has major implications for efforts to design consciousness into artificial intelligence machines; current microprocessor
technology is designed to transmit information linearly along
electrical channels, and more general electromagnetic effects are seen
as a nuisance and damped
out; if this theory is right, however, this is directly
counterproductive to creating an artificially conscious computer, which
on some versions of the theory would instead have electromagnetic fields
that synchronized its outputs—or in the original version of the theory
would have spatially patterned electromagnetic fields.
A painting by Jakub Różalski depicts an alternate history of the 1920s, in which rural peasants must contend with giant mechanical walking tanks.
Alternate history (also referred to as alternative history, allohistory, althist, or simply AH) is a subgenre of speculative fiction in which one or more historical events have occurred but are resolved differently than in actual history. As conjecture based upon historical fact, alternate history stories propose What if?
scenarios about crucial events in human history, and present outcomes
very different from the historical record. Some alternate histories are
considered a subgenre of science fiction, or historical fiction.
Since the 1950s, as a subgenre of science fiction, some alternative history stories have featured the tropes of time travel
between histories, the psychic awareness of the existence of an
alternative universe by the inhabitants of a given universe, and time
travel that divides history into various timestreams.
Definition
Often described as a subgenre of science fiction,
alternative history is a genre of fiction wherein the author speculates
upon how the course of history might have been altered if a particular
historical event had an outcome different from the real life outcome.
An alternate history requires three conditions: (i) A point of
divergence from the historical record, before the time in which the
author is writing; (ii) A change that would alter known history; and
(iii) An examination of the ramifications of that alteration to history. Occasionally, some types of genre fiction are misidentified as alternative history,
specifically science fiction stories set in a time that was the future
for the writer, but now is the past for the reader, such as the novels 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) by Arthur C. Clarke, 1984 (1949) by George Orwell and the movie 2012 (2009) because the authors did not alter the real history of the past when they wrote the stories.
Similar to the genre of alternative history, there is also the
genre of secret history - which can be either fictional or non-fictional
- which documents events that might have occurred in history, but which
had no effect upon the recorded historical outcome. Alternative history also is thematically related to, but distinct from, counterfactual history, which is a form of historiography
that explores historical events in an extrapolated timeline in which
key historical events either did not occur or had an outcome different
from the historical record, in order to understand what did happen.
The earliest example of alternate (or counterfactual) history is found in Livy's Ab Urbe Condita Libri (book IX, sections 17–19). Livy contemplated an alternative 4th century BC in which Alexander the Great had survived to attack Europe as he had planned; asking, "What would have been the results for Rome if she had been engaged in a war with Alexander?"Livy concluded that the Romans would likely have defeated Alexander. An even earlier possibility is Herodotus's Histories, which contains speculative material.
Another example of counterfactual history was posited by cardinal and Doctor of the ChurchPeter Damian in the 11th century. In his famous work De Divina Omnipotentia, a long letter in which he discusses God's omnipotence, he treats questions related to the limits of divine power, including the question of whether God can change the past, for example, bringing about that Rome was never founded:
I
see I must respond finally to what many people, on the basis of your
holiness's [own] judgment, raise as an objection on the topic of this
dispute. For they say: If, as you assert, God is omnipotent in all
things, can he manage this, that things that have been made were not
made? He can certainly destroy all things that have been made, so that
they do not exist now. But it cannot be seen how he can bring it about
that things that have been made were not made. To be sure, it can come
about that from now on and hereafter Rome does not exist; for it can be
destroyed. But no opinion can grasp how it can come about that it was
not founded long ago...
One early work of fiction detailing an alternate history is Joanot Martorell's 1490 epicromanceTirant lo Blanch, which was written when the fall of Constantinople to the Turks was still a recent and traumatic memory for Christian Europe. It tells the story of the knight Tirant the White from Brittany who travels to the embattled remnants of the Byzantine Empire. He becomes a Megaduke and commander of its armies and manages to fight off the invading Ottoman armies of Mehmet II. He saves the city from Islamic conquest, and even chases the Turks deeper into lands they had previously conquered.
19th century
One of the earliest works of alternate history published in large quantities for the reception of a large audience may be Louis Geoffroy's Histoire de la Monarchie universelle : Napoléon et la conquête du monde (1812–1832) (History of the Universal Monarchy: Napoleon and the Conquest of the World) (1836), which imagines Napoleon's First French Empire emerging victorious in the French invasion of Russia in 1812 and in an invasion of England in 1814, later unifying the world under Bonaparte's rule.
The Book of Mormon (published 1830) is described as an "alternative history" by Richard Lyman Bushman, a biographer of Joseph Smith.
Smith claimed to have translated the document from golden plates, which
told the story of a Jewish group who migrated from Israel to the
Americas and inhabited the region from about 600 B.C. to 400 A.D.,
becoming the ancestors of Native Americans. In the 2005 biography Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling, Bushman wrote that the Book of Mormon
"turned American history upside down [and] works on the premise that a
history—a book—can reconstitute a nation. It assumes that by giving a
nation an alternative history, alternative values can be made to grow."
The first novel-length alternate history in English would seem to be Castello Holford's Aristopia (1895). While not as nationalistic as Louis Geoffroy's Napoléon et la conquête du monde, 1812–1823, Aristopia is another attempt to portray a Utopian society. In Aristopia, the earliest settlers in Virginia discover a reef made of solid gold and are able to build a Utopian society in North America.
Early 20th century and the era of the pulps
In 1905, H. G. Wells published A Modern Utopia.
As explicitly noted in the book itself, Wells's main aim in writing it
was to set out his social and political ideas, the plot serving mainly
as a vehicle to expound them. This book introduced the idea of a person
being transported from a point in our familiar world to the precise
geographical equivalent point in an alternate world in which history had
gone differently. The protagonists undergo various adventures in the
alternate world, and then are finally transported back to our world,
again to the precise geographical equivalent point. Since then, that has
become a staple of the alternate history genre.
A number of alternate history stories and novels appeared in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (see, for example, Joseph Edgar Chamberlin's The Ifs of History [1907] and Charles Petrie's If: A Jacobite Fantasy [1926]). In 1931, British historian Sir John Squire collected a series of essays from some of the leading historians of the period for his anthology If It Had Happened Otherwise.
In that work, scholars from major universities, as well as important
non-academic authors, turned their attention to such questions as "If
the Moors in Spain Had Won" and "If Louis XVI Had Had an Atom of Firmness". The essays range from serious scholarly efforts to Hendrik Willem van Loon's fanciful and satiric portrayal of an independent 20th-century New Amsterdam, a Dutch city-state on the island of Manhattan. Among the authors included were Hilaire Belloc, André Maurois, and Winston Churchill.
One of the entries in Squire's volume was Churchill's "If Lee Had
Not Won the Battle of Gettysburg", written from the viewpoint of a
historian in a world in which the Confederacy had won the American Civil War.
The entry considers what would have happened if the North had been
victorious (in other words, a character from an alternate world imagines
a world more like the real one we live in, although it is not identical
in every detail). Speculative work that narrates from the point of view
of an alternate history is variously known as "recursive alternate history", a "double-blind what-if", or an "alternate-alternate history". Churchill's essay was one of the influences behind Ward Moore's alternate history novel Bring the Jubilee in which General Robert E. Lee won the Battle of Gettysburg
and paved the way for the eventual victory of the Confederacy in the
American Civil War (named the "War of Southron Independence" in this
timeline). The protagonist, the autodidact Hodgins Backmaker, travels
back to the aforementioned battle and inadvertently changes history,
which results in the emergence of our own timeline and the consequent
victory of the Union instead.
The American humorist author James Thurber
parodied alternate history stories about the American Civil War in his
1930 story "If Grant Had Been Drinking at Appomattox", which he
accompanied with this very brief introduction: "Scribner's
magazine is publishing a series of three articles: 'If Booth Had Missed
Lincoln', 'If Lee Had Won the Battle of Gettysburg', and 'If Napoleon
Had Escaped to America'. This is the fourth".
Another example of alternate history from this period (and arguably the first that explicitly posited cross-time travel from one universe to another as anything more than a visionary experience) is H.G. Wells' Men Like Gods (1923) in which the London-based journalist
Mr. Barnstable, along with two cars and their passengers, is
mysteriously teleported into "another world", which the "Earthlings"
call Utopia. Being far more advanced than Earth, Utopia is some 3000
years ahead of humanity in its development. Wells describes a multiverse
of alternative worlds, complete with the paratime travel machines that
would later become popular with American pulp writers. However, since
his hero experiences only a single alternate world, the story is not
very different from conventional alternate history.
In the 1930s, alternate history moved into a new arena. The December 1933 issue of Astounding published Nat Schachner's "Ancestral Voices", which was quickly followed by Murray Leinster's "Sidewise in Time"
(1934). While earlier alternate histories examined
reasonably-straightforward divergences, Leinster attempted something
completely different. In his "World gone mad", pieces of Earth traded
places with their analogs from different timelines. The story follows
Professor Minott and his students from a fictitious Robinson College as
they wander through analogues of worlds that followed a different
history.
"Sidewise in Time" has been described as "the point at which the
alternate history narrative first enters science fiction as a plot
device" and is the story for which the Sidewise Award for Alternate History is named.
A somewhat similar approach was taken by Robert A. Heinlein in his 1941 novelette Elsewhen
in which a professor trains his mind to move his body across timelines.
He then hypnotizes his students so that they can explore more of them.
Eventually, each settles into the reality that is most suitable for him
or her. Some of the worlds they visit are mundane, some are very odd,
and others follow science fiction or fantasy conventions.
World War II produced alternate history for propaganda: both British and American authors wrote works depicting Nazi invasions of their respective countries as cautionary tales.
Time travel to create historical divergences
The period around World War II also saw the publication of the time travel novel Lest Darkness Fall by L. Sprague de Camp in which an American academic travels to Italy at the time of the Byzantine invasion of the Ostrogoths.
De Camp's time traveler, Martin Padway, is depicted as making permanent
historical changes and implicitly forming a new time branch, thereby
making the work an alternate history.
In William Tenn's short story Brooklyn Project
(1948), a tyrannical US Government brushes aside the warnings of
scientists about the dangers of time travel and goes on with a planned
experiment - with the result that minor changes to the prehistoric past
cause Humanity to never have existed, its place taken by tentacled
underwater intelligent creatures - who also have a tyrannical government
which also insists on experimenting with time-travel.
Time travel as the cause of a point of divergence
(POD), which can denote either the bifurcation of a historical timeline
or a simple replacement of the future that existed before the
time-travelling event, has continued to be a popular theme. In Ward Moore's Bring the Jubilee
(1953), the protagonist lives in an alternate history in which the
Confederacy has won the American Civil War. He travels backward through
time and brings about a Union victory at the Battle of Gettysburg.
When a story's assumptions about the nature of time travel lead
to the complete replacement of the visited time's future, rather than
just the creation of an additional time line, the device of a "time
patrol" is often used where guardians move through time to preserve the
"correct" history.
A more recent example is Making History by Stephen Fry in which a time machine is used to alter history so that Adolf Hitler was never born. That ironically results in a more competent leader of Nazi Germany and results in the country's ascendancy and longevity in the altered timeline.
Quantum theory of many worlds
While many justifications for alternate histories involve a multiverse, the "many world" theory
would naturally involve many worlds, in fact a continually exploding
array of universes. In quantum theory, new worlds would proliferate with
every quantum event, and even if the writer uses human decisions, every
decision that could be made differently would result in a different
timeline. A writer's fictional multiverse may, in fact, preclude some
decisions as humanly impossible, as when, in Night Watch, Terry Pratchett
depicts a character informing Vimes that while anything that can
happen, has happened, nevertheless there is no history whatsoever in
which Vimes has ever murdered his wife. When the writer explicitly
maintains that all possible decisions are made in all possible
ways, one possible conclusion is that the characters were neither brave,
nor clever, nor skilled, but simply lucky enough to happen on the
universe in which they did not choose the cowardly route, take the
stupid action, fumble the crucial activity, etc.; few writers focus on
this idea, although it has been explored in stories such as Larry Niven's story All the Myriad Ways,
where the reality of all possible universes leads to an epidemic of
suicide and crime because people conclude their choices have no moral
import.
In any case, even if it is true that every possible outcome
occurs in some world, it can still be argued that traits such as bravery
and intelligence might still affect the relative frequency of worlds in
which better or worse outcomes occurred (even if the total number of
worlds with each type of outcome is infinite, it is still possible to
assign a different measure to different infinite sets). The physicist David Deutsch,
a strong advocate of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum
mechanics, has argued along these lines, saying that "By making good
choices, doing the right thing, we thicken the stack of universes in
which versions of us live reasonable lives. When you succeed, all the
copies of you who made the same decision succeed too. What you do for
the better increases the portion of the multiverse where good things
happen."
This view is perhaps somewhat too abstract to be explored directly in
science fiction stories, but a few writers have tried, such as Greg Egan in his short story The Infinite Assassin,
where an agent is trying to contain reality-scrambling "whirlpools"
that form around users of a certain drug, and the agent is constantly
trying to maximize the consistency of behavior among his alternate
selves, attempting to compensate for events and thoughts he experiences,
he guesses are of low measure relative to those experienced by most of
his other selves.
Many writers—perhaps the majority—avoid the discussion entirely. In one novel of this type, H. Beam Piper's Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen,
a Pennsylvania State Police officer, who knows how to make gunpowder,
is transported from our world to an alternate universe where the recipe
for gunpowder is a tightly held secret and saves a country that is about
to be conquered by its neighbors. The paratime patrol members are
warned against going into the timelines immediately surrounding it,
where the country will be overrun, but the book never depicts the
slaughter of the innocent thus entailed, remaining solely in the
timeline where the country is saved.
The cross-time theme was further developed in the 1960s by Keith Laumer in the first three volumes of his Imperium sequence, which would be completed in Zone Yellow (1990). Piper's politically more sophisticated variant was adopted and adapted by Michael Kurland and Jack Chalker in the 1980s; Chalker's G.O.D. Inc
trilogy (1987–89), featuring paratime detectives Sam and Brandy
Horowitz, marks the first attempt at merging the paratime thriller with
the police procedural. Kurland's Perchance
(1988), the first volume of the never-completed "Chronicles of
Elsewhen", presents a multiverse of secretive cross-time societies that
utilize a variety of means for cross-time travel, ranging from high-tech
capsules to mutant powers. Harry Turtledove has launched the Crosstime Traffic series for teenagers featuring a variant of H. Beam Piper's paratime trading empire.
Rival paratime worlds
The concept of a cross-time version of a world war, involving rival paratime empires, was developed in Fritz Leiber's Change War series, starting with the Hugo Award winning The Big Time (1958); followed by Richard C. Meredith's Timeliner trilogy in the 1970s, Michael McCollum's A Greater Infinity (1982) and John Barnes'Timeline Wars trilogy in the 1990s.
Such "paratime" stories may include speculation that the laws of
nature can vary from one universe to the next, providing a science
fictional explanation—or veneer—for what is normally fantasy. Aaron Allston's Doc Sidhe and Sidhe Devil
take place between our world, the "grim world" and an alternate "fair
world" where the Sidhe retreated to. Although technology is clearly
present in both worlds, and the "fair world" parallels our history,
about fifty years out of step, there is functional magic in the fair
world. Even with such explanation, the more explicitly the alternate
world resembles a normal fantasy world, the more likely the story is to
be labelled fantasy, as in Poul Anderson's "House Rule" and "Loser's
Night". In both science fiction and fantasy, whether a given parallel
universe is an alternate history may not be clear. The writer might
allude to a POD only to explain the existence and make no use of the
concept, or may present the universe without explanation of its
existence.
Major writers explore alternate histories
Isaac Asimov's short story "What If—"
(1952) is about a couple who can explore alternate realities by means
of a television-like device. This idea can also be found in Asimov's
novel The End of Eternity (1955), in which the "Eternals" can change the realities of the world, without people being aware of it. Poul Anderson's Time Patrol stories feature conflicts between forces intent on changing history and the Patrol who work to preserve it. One story, Delenda Est, describes a world in which Carthage triumphed over the Roman Republic. The Big Time, by Fritz Leiber, describes a Change War ranging across all of history.
Keith Laumer's Worlds of the Imperium is one of the earliest alternate history novels; it was published by Fantastic Stories of the Imagination in 1961, in magazine form, and reprinted by Ace Books in 1962 as one half of an Ace Double.
Besides our world, Laumer describes a world ruled by an Imperial
aristocracy formed by the merger of European empires, in which the American Revolution never happened, and a third world in post-war chaos ruled by the protagonist's doppelganger.
Philip K. Dick's novel, The Man in the High Castle
(1962), is an alternate history in which Nazi Germany and Imperial
Japan won World War II. This book contains an example of
"alternate-alternate" history, in that one of its characters authored a
book depicting a reality in which the Allies won the war, itself
divergent from real-world history in several aspects. The several
characters live within a divided United States, in which the Empire of Japan takes the Pacific states, governing them as a puppet, Nazi Germany takes the East Coast of the United States and parts of the Midwest, with the remnants of the old United States' government as the Neutral Zone, a buffer state between the two superpowers. The book has inspired an Amazon series of the same name.
Vladimir Nabokov's novel, Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (1969), is a story of incest that takes place within an alternate North America settled in part by Czarist Russia
and that borrows from Dick's idea of "alternate-alternate" history (the
world of Nabokov's hero is wracked by rumors of a "counter-earth" that
apparently is ours). Some critics believe that the references to a counter-earth suggest that the world portrayed in Ada is a delusion in the mind of the hero (another favorite theme of Dick's novels). Strikingly, the characters in Ada
seem to acknowledge their own world as the copy or negative version,
calling it "Anti-Terra", while its mythical twin is the real "Terra".
Like history, science has followed a divergent path on Anti-Terra: it
boasts all the same technology as our world, but all based on water
instead of electricity; e.g., when a character in Ada makes a long-distance call, all the toilets in the house flush at once to provide hydraulic power.
Guido Morselli described the defeat of Italy (and subsequently France) in World War I in his novel, Past Conditional (1975; Contro-passato prossimo), wherein the static Alpine front
line which divided Italy from Austria during that war collapses when
the Germans and the Austrians forsake trench warfare and adopt
blitzkrieg twenty years in advance.
Kingsley Amis set his novel, The Alteration
(1976), in the 20th century, but major events in the Reformation did
not take place, and Protestantism is limited to the breakaway Republic
of New England. Martin Luther was reconciled to the Roman Catholic Church and later became Pope Germanian I.
Kim Stanley Robinson's novel, The Years of Rice and Salt (2002), starts at the point of divergence with Timur turning his army away from Europe, and the Black Death has killed 99% of Europe's population, instead of only a third. Robinson explores world history from that point in AD 1405 (807 AH) to about AD 2045 (1467 AH). Rather than following the great man theory of history, focusing on leaders, wars, and major events, Robinson writes more about social history, similar to the Annales School of history theory and Marxist historiography, focusing on the lives of ordinary people living in their time and place.
Michael Chabon, occasionally an author of speculative fiction, contributed to the genre with his novel The Yiddish Policemen's Union (2007), which explores a world in which the State of Israel
was destroyed in its infancy and many of the world's Jews instead live
in a small strip of Alaska set aside by the US government for Jewish
settlement. The story follows a Jewish detective solving a murder case
in the Yiddish-speaking semi-autonomous city state of Sitka. Stylistically, Chabon borrows heavily from the noir
and detective fiction genres, while exploring social issues related to
Jewish history and culture. Apart from the alternate history of the Jews
and Israel, Chabon also plays with other common tropes of alternate
history fiction; in the book, Germany actually loses the war even harder
than they did in reality, getting hit with a nuclear bomb instead of
just simply losing a ground war (subverting the common "what if Germany
won WWII?" trope).
Contemporary alternate history in popular literature
The late 1980s and the 1990s saw a boom in popular-fiction versions
of alternate history, fueled by the emergence of the prolific alternate
history author Harry Turtledove, as well as the development of the steampunk genre and two series of anthologies—the What Might Have Been series edited by Gregory Benford and the Alternate ... series edited by Mike Resnick. This period also saw alternate history works by S. M. Stirling, Kim Stanley Robinson, Harry Harrison, Howard Waldrop, Peter Tieryas, and others.
In 1986, a sixteen-part epic comic book series called Captain Confederacy began examining a world where the Confederate States of America won the American Civil War. In the series, the Captain and others heroes are staged government propaganda events featuring the feats of these superheroes.
Perhaps the most incessantly explored theme in popular alternate history focuses on worlds in which the Nazis won World War Two. In some versions, the Nazis and/or Axis Powers win; or in others, they conquer most of the world but a "Fortress America" exists under siege; while in others, there is a Nazi/Japanese Cold War comparable to the US/Soviet equivalent in 'our' timeline. Fatherland (1992), by Robert Harris, is set in Europe following the Nazi victory. The novel Dominion by C.J. Sansom
(2012) is similar in concept but is set in England, with Churchill the
leader of an anti-German Resistance and other historic persons in
various fictional roles. In the Mecha Samurai Empire series (2016), Peter Tieryas
focuses on the Asian-American side of the alternate history, exploring
an America ruled by the Japanese Empire while integrating elements of
Asian pop culture like mechas and videogames.
Several writers have posited points of departure for such a world but then have injected time splitters from the future. For instance James P. Hogan's The Proteus Operation. Norman Spinrad wrote The Iron Dream in 1972, which is intended to be a science fiction novel written by Adolf Hitler after fleeing from Europe to North America in the 1920s.
In Jo Walton's
"Small Change" series, the United Kingdom made peace with Hitler before
the involvement of the United States in World War II, and slowly
collapses due to severe economic depression. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and William R. Forstchen have written a novel, 1945, in which the US defeated Japan but not Germany
in World War II, resulting in a Cold War with Germany rather than the
Soviet Union. Gingrich and Forstchen neglected to write the promised
sequel; instead, they wrote a trilogy about the American Civil War,
starting with Gettysburg: A Novel of the Civil War, in which the Confederates win a victory at the Battle of Gettysburg
- however, after Lincoln responds by bringing Grant and his forces to
the eastern theater, the Army of Northern Virginia is soon trapped and
destroyed in Maryland, and the war ends within weeks.
While World War II has been a common Point of Divergence in
alternate history literature, several works have been based on other
points of divergence. For example, Martin Cruz Smith, in his first novel, posited an independent American Indian nation following the defeat of Custer in The Indians Won (1970). Beginning with The Probability Broach in 1980, L. Neil Smith wrote several novels that postulated the disintegration of the US Federal Government after Albert Gallatin joins the Whiskey Rebellion in 1794 and eventually leads to the creation of a libertarian utopia. In the 2022 novel Poutine and Gin
by Steve Rhinelander, the point of divergence is the Battle of the
Plains of Abraham of the French and Indian War. That novel is a mystery
set in 1940 of that time line.
A recent time traveling splitter variant involves entire
communities being shifted elsewhere to become the unwitting creators of
new time branches. These communities are transported from the present
(or the near-future) to the past or to another timeline via a natural
disaster, the action of technologically advanced aliens, or a human
experiment gone wrong. S. M. Stirling wrote the Island in the Sea of Time trilogy, in which Nantucket Island and all its modern inhabitants are transported to Bronze Age times to become the world's first superpower. In Eric Flint's 1632 series, a small town in West Virginia is transported to 17th century central Europe and drastically changes the course of the Thirty Years' War, which was then underway. John Birmingham's Axis of Time
trilogy deals with the culture shock when a United Nations naval task
force from 2021 finds itself back in 1942 helping the Allies against the
Empire of Japan
and the Germans (and doing almost as much harm as good in spite of its
advanced weapons). The series also explores the cultural impacts of
people with 2021 ideals interacting with 1940s culture. Similarly, Robert Charles Wilson's Mysterium
depicts a failed US government experiment which transports a small
American town into an alternative version of the US run by believers in a
form of Christianity known as Gnosticism,
who are engaged in a bitter war with the "Spanish" in Mexico (the chief
scientist at the laboratory where the experiment occurred is described
as a Gnostic, and references to Christian Gnosticism appear repeatedly
in the book).
Although not dealing in physical time travel, in his alt-history novel Marx Returns, Jason Barker introduces anachronisms into the life and times of Karl Marx, such as when his wife Jenny sings a verse from the Sex Pistols's song "Anarchy in the U.K.", or in the games of chess she plays with the Marxes' housekeeper Helene Demuth, which on one occasion involves a Caro–Kann Defence.
In her review of the novel, Nina Power writes of "Jenny's 'utopian'
desire for an end to time", an attitude which, according to Power, is
inspired by her husband's co-authored book The German Ideology. However, in keeping with the novel's anachronisms, the latter was not published until 1932. By contrast, the novel's timeline ends in 1871.
Through crowdfunding on Kickstarter, Alan Jenkins and Gan Golan produced a graphic novel series called 1/6 depicting a dystopian alternate reality in which the January 6 United States Capitol attack was successful. What follows is the burning down of the Capitol building and the hanging of Vice President Mike Pence. Under Donald Trump's second term as president, a solid gold statue of him is erected and armed thugs patrol the streets of Washington DC suppressing civilian resistance with brutal violence under the banner of the Confederate flag.
Many works of straight fantasy and science fantasy take place in historical settings, though with the addition of, for example, magic or mythological beasts.
Some present a secret history in which the modern day world no longer
believes that these elements ever existed. Many ambiguous
alternate/secret histories are set in Renaissance or pre-Renaissance
times, and may explicitly include a "retreat" from the world, which
would explain the current absence of such phenomena. Other stories make
plan a divergence of some kind.
Randall Garrett's "Lord Darcy" series presents a point of divergence: a monk systemizes magic rather than science, so the use of foxglove to treat heart disease is regarded as superstition. Another point of divergence occurs in 1199, when Richard the Lionheart survives the Siege of Chaluz and returns to England and makes the Angevin Empire so strong that it survives into the 20th century.
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke
takes place in an England where a separate Kingdom ruled by the Raven
King and founded on magic existed in Northumbria for over 300 years. In Patricia Wrede's Regency fantasies, Great Britain has a Royal Society of Wizards.
The Tales of Alvin Maker series by Orson Scott Card (a parallel to the life of Joseph Smith, founder of the Latter Day Saint movement)
takes place in an alternate America, beginning in the early 19th
century. Prior to that time, a POD occurred: England, under the rule of Oliver Cromwell,
had banished "makers", or anyone else demonstrating "knacks" (an
ability to perform seemingly supernatural feats) to the North American
continent. Thus the early American colonists embraced as perfectly
ordinary these gifts, and counted on them as a part of their daily
lives. The political division of the continent is considerably altered,
with two large English colonies bookending a smaller "American" nation,
one aligned with England, and the other governed by exiled Cavaliers.
Actual historical figures are seen in a much different light: Ben
Franklin is revered as the continent's finest "maker", George Washington
was executed after being captured, and "Tom" Jefferson is the first president of "Appalachia", the result of a compromise between the Continentals and the British Crown.
On the other hand, when the "Old Ones" (fairies) still manifest themselves in England in Keith Roberts's Pavane, which takes place in a technologically backward world after a Spanish assassination of Elizabeth I allowed the Spanish Armada
to conquer England, the possibility that the fairies were real but
retreated from modern advances makes the POD possible: the fairies
really were present all along, in a secret history.
Again, in the English Renaissance fantasy Armor of Light by Melissa Scott and Lisa A. Barnett, the magic used in the book, by Dr. John Dee
and others, actually was practiced in the Renaissance; positing a
secret history of effective magic makes this an alternate history with a
point of departure. Sir Philip Sidney survives the Battle of Zutphen in 1586, and shortly thereafter saving the life of Christopher Marlowe.
When the magical version of our world's history is set in
contemporary times, the distinction becomes clear between alternate
history on the one hand and contemporary fantasy, using in effect a form of secret history (as when Josepha Sherman's Son of Darkness has an elf living in New York City, in disguise) on the other. In works such as Robert A. Heinlein's Magic, Incorporated where a construction company can use magic to rig up stands at a sporting event and Poul Anderson's Operation Chaos and its sequel Operation Luna,
where djinns are serious weapons of war—with atomic bombs—the use of
magic throughout the United States and other modern countries makes it
clear that this is not secret history—although references in Operation Chaos to degaussing
the effects of cold iron make it possible that it is the result of a
POD. The sequel clarifies this as the result of a collaboration of
Einstein and Planck in 1901, resulting in the theory of "rhea tics". Henry Moseley applies this theory to "degauss the effects of cold iron and release the goetic forces." This results in the suppression of ferromagnetism and the re-emergence of magic and magical creatures.
Alternate history shades off into other fantasy subgenres
when the use of actual, though altered, history and geography
decreases, although a culture may still be clearly the original source; Barry Hughart's Bridge of Birds and its sequels take place in a fantasy world, albeit one clearly based on China, and with allusions to actual Chinese history, such as the Empress Wu. Richard Garfinkle's Celestial Matters incorporates ancient Chinese physics and Greek Aristotelian physics, using them as if factual.
Alternate history has long been a staple of Japanese speculative fiction with such authors as Futaro Yamada and Ryō Hanmura writing novels set in recognizable historical settings with added supernatural or science fiction elements. Ryō Hanmura's 1973 Musubi no Yama Hiroku
which recreated 400 years of Japan's history from the perspective of a
secret magical family with psychic abilities. The novel has since come
to be recognized as a masterpiece of Japanese speculative fiction. Twelve years later, author Hiroshi Aramata wrote the groundbreaking Teito Monogatari which reimagined the history of Tokyo across the 20th century in a world heavily influenced by the supernatural.
Television
1983 is set on a world where the Iron Curtain never fell and the Cold War continues until the present (2003).
An Englishman's Castle tells the story of the writer of a soap opera in a 1970s England which lost World War II.
England is run by a collaborator government which strains to maintain a
normal appearance of British life. Slowly, however, the writer begins
to uncover the truth.
In the Community episode "Remedial Chaos Theory,"
each of the six members of the study group rolls a die to decide who
has to go downstairs to accept a pizza delivery for the group, creating 6
different alternative worlds. Characters from the worst universe,
"darkest timeline," would later appear in the "prime universe".
Confederate was a planned HBO series set on a world where the south won the US Civil War. Social media backlash during pre-production led to the series being cancelled with no episodes produced.
Counterpart tells of a United Nations
agency that is responsible for monitoring passage between alternative
worlds. Two of the worlds, Alpha and Prime are locked in a cold war.
Dark Skies
tells that much of history having been shaped since the 1940s by a
government conspiracy with aliens. One race of aliens can take over
humans, while those immune to the alien's control fight back.
Doctor Who's
main character has visited two alternative worlds in the TV show and
several in its spin off media. The Third Doctor visits a world with a
fascist Great Britain on the brink of destruction, Inferno
while the Tenth Doctor visits a Britain that has a President and blimps
are a common form of transportation beset by Cybermen, "Doomsday". The Seventh Doctor faces a threat from an alternative world in Battlefield, where magic is real and the alternative version of The Doctor is hinted to be that reality's Merlin.
Fallout shows a 1950s retro-future world that suffers a global nuclear war on the Amazon streaming service.
Fatherland is a TV movie set in a 1960 alternative world where US President Joseph Kennedy
and Adolf Hitler have agreed to meet to discuss an end to their
country's Cold War 15 years after the Axis victory in World War II.
However, an American reporter has discovered proof of the long denied Final Solution threatens the meeting.
Fringe
has the father of one of the main characters cross into another reality
to steal that world's version of his son after his son dies. The second
world has a slightly different history, with a few different states in
the United States, such as only one Carolina and Upper Michigan as a state. In addition, the 9/11 attack didn't take down the Twin Towers but the White House. Also, several major DC Comics events are different, such as Superman not Supergirl dying during Crisis on Infinite Earths.
The incursion to steal the son has many negative effects on that world,
and while the realities start out as antagonist, they eventually work
together to repair the damage.
Motherland: Fort Salem explores a female-dominated world in which witchcraft is real. Its world diverged from our timeline when the Salem witch trials are resolved by an agreement between witches and ungifted humans.
Noughts + Crosses
is a British TV show set on a world where a powerful West African
empire colonizes Europe 700 years before the start of the series.
Parallels was a planned TV show whose pilot was later released as a Netflix
movie. The plot concerns a building which can shift realities every 36
hours and those who use the building to travel to other realities.
The TV show Sliders
explores different possible alternate realities by having the
protagonist "slide" into different parallel dimensions of the same
planet Earth.
The Great Martian War 1914-1917
An alternate history documentary where giant martians with machines
invaded the Earth during WW1, causing huge technological upgrades and
the entente and central powers fighting alongside each other.
SS-GB (TV series) shows a world where the Axis Powers quickly win World War II, killing Churchill and installing a puppet government. However, British resistance fights back.[54]
In the various Star Trek TV shows and spin off media a Mirror Universe
has been encountered where Earth has an empire that subjugates other
planets. Doppelgängers of the main cast of many the TV shows appear in
that reality.
The Watchmen
series is set on a world where costumed heroes were initially welcomed
but later outlawed. It is set 34 years after the events of the comic
book on which the series shares a name.
The Marvel Cinematic Universe series, Loki (2021 & 2023), on Disney+, shows an agency which prevents alterations to the timeline. Alternate versions of Loki from various universes appear.
Fans
of alternate history have made use of the internet from a very early
point to showcase their own works and provide useful tools for those
fans searching for anything alternate history, first in mailing lists and usenet
groups, later in web databases and forums. The "Usenet Alternate
History List" was first posted on 11 April 1991, to the Usenet newsgroup
rec.arts.sf-lovers. In May 1995, the dedicated newsgroup soc.history.what-if was created for showcasing and discussing alternate histories.
Its prominence declined with the general migration from unmoderated
usenet to moderated web forums, most prominently AlternateHistory.com,
the self-described "largest gathering of alternate history fans on the
internet" with over 10,000 active members.
In addition to these discussion forums, in 1997 Uchronia: The Alternate History List
was created as an online repository, now containing over 2,900
alternate history novels, stories, essays, and other printed materials
in several different languages. Uchronia was selected as the Sci Fi Channel's "Sci Fi Site of the Week" twice.
In Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Catalan, and Galician, the words uchronie, ucronia, and ucronía are native versions of alternate history, from which comes the English loanworduchronia. The English term uchronia is a neologism that is sometimes used in its original meaning as a straightforward synonym for alternate history. However, it may also now refer to other concepts, namely an umbrella genre of fiction that encompasses alternate history, parallel universes in fiction, and fiction based in futuristic or non-temporal settings.
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