It's another big one, folks! That's right, this month the crew of the good ship Ooorah! take on the monster that is Alternative History! Short stories and articles abound; there's even an interview and a contest, too, but that's nothing new! Show yo...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Man, that cover... Seriously, isn't it awesome? I mean it! How many ideas does it fill your respective noggins with? There's definitely plenty of stories there that I'd like to read! bobjan70 , the most excellent creator of our most recent covers, really has outdone himself this time!
Good job, Sir!
Anyways, on with the show, 'troopers...
This is one of the big ones. It's right up there with Space Opera, Time Travel and Military Science Fiction.
Alternate History... Those two words alone provoke thoughts that open up as near to never ending possibilities as you're likely to find. Any moment in history, any single moment, is fair game.
'Course the classic Alternate History story line depicts either the death of Hitler pre-1939 or the AXIS powers coming out of WWII victorious but there really is so much more to this sub-genre than that.
Go back as far as you can, to the very dawn of time... That's right, the birth of the Universe 14.7 billion years ago. Right there, that was when the first building blocks for life on Earth appeared but what if things had worked out slightly differently?
The above example is a little extreme I'll grant you, and you certainly don't need to go that far back to find an event that could have happened in an entirely alternate fashion thus changing the course of history as we know it. But that's the thing, we wouldn't know it. Who's to say that there isn't an organisation in existence whose sole purpose for being is to ensure that history runs as they want it to run.
You wouldn't know, would you?
Of course, Alternate History can even refer to your own history. What if, on January 3rd 2005 you'd had cornflakes for breakfast and forgone the full English. Where would you be now? Would your life be any different? Every single choice and decision we make on a daily basis, right down to the most minuscule and seemingly unimportant of compromises have consequences. Sometimes that might mean nothing more than you end up leaving the house slightly early than you otherwise might have, but then what? Because you had cornflakes rather than the full English and therefore left the house those few precious minutes earlier, what didn't you miss or perhaps more importantly, what did you miss?
So are you ready, 'troopers? It's time to change history!
