2. What distinctions are there between alternate history, postmodern alternate history and uchronie genres?
Alternate histories are a science fiction genre that is centered around the premise that some events we are familiar with did not have the same outcome as our world, the result being an entirely different world (Hellekson, 2000, p. 248). Alternate histories may also include other science fiction elements like time travel or parallel worlds that act as their own alternate histories that exist alongside each other. There are several approaches to alternate histories that can be distinguished from one another, these are the alternate history, postmodern alternate history, and uchronie.
Alternate history is the most straight forward genre of alternate histories, as the main distinction between this genre and others of alternate histories is that it has a much more linear and diachronic view of time. A diachronic view of time is a single string of events throughout history, a singular line that encompasses all of history. Applying this to alternate history the line might be altered somewhere along the line which affects everything after so it can be easily changed.
On the other hand, there is the postmodern alternate history, and the distinction between this and other genres of alternate histories according to Ramson (2010, p. 263) is “the postmodern alternate history tends to foreground historical chaos.” The genre of postmodern alternate history was suggested by Paul Alkon and later Amy Ramson, foregrounding historical chaos means placing a highly chaotic and important moment of history at the front of the text and will typically the reason for the alternate history of a text. Postmodern alternate history also predominately uses a synchronic view of time. Philip K Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (1962) is an alternate history novel that could be considered postmodern alternate history. This is because Dick’s view of history is more synchronic than diachronic and the text foregrounds WWII, using one of the most common themes of the genre, the Nazi’s winning WWII.
Finally, there is uchronie which is the French term used for the alternate histories genre and the key distinction of this genre is that it “emphasizes less a causal or diachronic notion of history and more a synchronic or polyphonous one” (Mountfort, 2016, p. 288). This synchronic view of history is one that suggests events that occur throughout history are their moments in history as oppose to the diachronic view which was a single string of linear events. These individual moments may coexist alongside each other and they are all a part of a piece. It shares some similarities to the many worlds theory, which posits that all outcomes of quantum measurements did happen in another world or universe.
References
Dick, P. (1962). The Man in the High Castle. London: Penguin.
Hellekson, K. (2000). Towards a Taxonomy of the Alternate History Genre. Extrapolation.
Mountfort, P. (2016). The I Ching and Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle. SF-TH Inc.
Ransom, A. (2010). Warping Time: Alternate History, Historical Fantasy, and the Postmodern Uchronie Québécoise. Extrapolation.
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