This is a list ofalternate history fiction, sorted primarily by type and then chronologically.
| Year | Title | Author | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
Pre-19th century[edit] | |||
| 1490 | Tirant lo Blanch | Joanot Martorell | A knight fromBrittany stops the Turks from takingConstantinople. |
19th century[edit] | |||
| 1836 | Napoleon and the Conquest of the World | Louis Geoffroy | Napoleon'sFirst French Empire emerges victorious in theFrench invasion of Russia in 1811 and in an invasion of England in 1814, later unifying the world under Bonaparte's rule. |
| 1845 | P.'s Correspondence | Nathaniel Hawthorne | A New Englander is treated as a madman because of being able to perceive a different reality in which long-dead famous people are still alive (though not necessarily well) in 1845: the poetsBurns,Byron,Shelley, andKeats, the actorEdmund Kean, the British politicianGeorge Canning and evenNapoleon Bonaparte.[1] |
| 1876 | Uchronie (Uchronia) | Charles Renouvier | TheNerva–Antonine emperors ban Christians. |
| 1895 | Aristopia | Castello Holford | The earliest settlers inVirginia discover a reef made of solid gold and are able to build aUtopian society in North America. |
1930s[edit] | |||
| 1931 | If It Had Happened Otherwise | Edited byJ. C. Squire | A collection of alternate history essays. |
| 1935 | It Can't Happen Here | Sinclair Lewis | While Hitler is coming to power in Europe, a fascist candidate becomes President of the USA taking complete control as a dictator. |
| 1939 | Lest Darkness Fall | L. Sprague de Camp | An Americanarchaeologist is transported to 6th century Rome (AD 535). |
1950s[edit] | |||
| 1952 | The Sound of His Horn | John William Wall | ABritish navallieutenant awakens in aNazi controlled world 102 years on from World War II. |
| 1953 | Bring the Jubilee | Ward Moore | The South is not defeated in theAmerican Civil War because it wins theBattle of Gettysburg. |
1960s[edit] | |||
| 1962 | The Man in the High Castle | Philip K. Dick | TheAxis powers win World War II. |
| 1966 | The Gate of Time | Philip José Farmer | AnIroquois combat pilot finds himself in a world where the New World is underwater and Native Americans settled in Eastern Europe. |
| 1967 | The Gate of Worlds | Robert Silverberg | TheBlack Death of the 14th century kills three-quarters of the European population. Seven centuries later, the main powers are Russia, Turkey, theAztecs, theIncas, and Japan. |
| 1968 | The Last Starship from Earth | John Boyd | Jesus Christ becomes arevolutionary agitator and assembles an army to overthrow theRoman Empire and establish atheocracy, which has lasted until the present day. |
| Pavane | Keith Roberts | QueenElizabeth I of England is assassinated, and in the ensuing disorder, theSpanish Armada is successful in suppressingProtestantism. | |
| 1969 | The Bomb That Failed (British,The Last Year of the Old World) | Ronald W. Clark | The failure of theTrinity test in June 1945 leads to an American invasion of Japan. |
1970s[edit] | |||
| 1970 | All Evil Shed Away | Archie Roy | Due to the assassination of Winston Churchill in 1940, Nazi Germany wins World War II and is locked in acold war with the United States. |
| 1971 | Lighter than a Feather | David Westheimer | The Americans invade Japan in November 1945 as part ofOperation Downfall. |
| 1972 | The Iron Dream | Norman Spinrad | Adolf Hitler emigrates from Germany to America and uses his modest artistic skills to become first a pulp science fiction illustrator and later a science fiction writer. |
| Tunnel Through the Deeps | Harry Harrison | Moors win theBattle of Las Navas de Tolosa on 16 July 1212 on theIberian peninsula.John Cabot discovers America, andGeorge Washington is shot as a traitor. | |
| 1973 | For Want of a Nail | Robert N. Sobel | TheAmerican Revolution fails and the British colonies become the Confederation of North America (CNA), while the defeated rebels go into exile in Spanish Tejas, eventually founding the United States of Mexico (USM). |
| The Ultimate Solution | Eric Norden | A world resulting from a totalNazi andImperial Japanese victory in World War II and partition of the world between them. | |
| 1974 | Das Königsprojekt | Carl Amery | TheRoman Catholic Church attempts to restore theHouse of Stuart to the English throne by altering history through the use of a time machine invented byLeonardo da Vinci. |
| 1975 | Hitler Has Won | Frederic Mullally | Alternate 1942. Japan strikes north rather than south, the Soviet Union falls, Germany is unassailable in Europe. There is a plot to defeat the Roman Catholic Church and install Hitler as the new Pope. |
| The Female Man | Joanna Russ | One of the multiple fictional worlds where the novel is set is an alternative 1969 where theGreat Depression never ended andWorld War II never started, so there were no significantfeminist movements. | |
| 1976 | The Alteration | Kingsley Amis | Martin Luther, rather than beginning theProtestant Reformation, becomes pope. |
| 1978 | And Having Writ… | Donald R. Bensen | Four aliens arrive on Earth in 1908 and try to advance human technology so they can return home. |
| Gloriana | Michael Moorcock | Queen Gloriana rules over "Albion", an alternativeBritish Empire that rules over America and Asia. | |
| SS-GB | Len Deighton | Detective novel set in 1941 in a Britain occupied by the Germans. | |
1980s[edit] | |||
| 1980 | The Divide | William Overgard | Set in 1976, thirty years after Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan have defeated the United States in World War II. |
| The Moscow Option | David Downing | The German Army conquers Moscow at the end of 1941. | |
| 1983 | The Burning Mountain: A Novel of the Invasion of Japan | Alfred Coppel | During World War II, a lightning strike at theTrinity test postpones deployment of the atomic bomb, forcing the U.S. toinvade Japan. |
| The Dragon Waiting: A Masque of History | John M. Ford | Fantasy alternate history combiningvampires, theMedicis, and the convoluted English politics surroundingEdward IV andRichard III. | |
| Kelly Country | A. Bertram Chandler | Australianbushranger and rebelNed Kelly leads a successful revolution againstBritishcolonial rule. The result is that Australia becomes a world power, but the Australian Republic which Kelly founded degenerates into a hereditary dictatorship. | |
| A Rebel in Time | Harry Harrison | A racist colonel wants to change history by helping the CSA win theAmerican Civil War. | |
| 1984 | The Bush Soldiers | John Hooker | TheJapanese successfully conquer and occupy most of the coastal fringe of Australia. |
| Job: A Comedy of Justice | Robert A. Heinlein | A man is thrust on a whirlwind tour of numerous parallel universes, at least three of which haveWilliam Jennings Bryan elected to the US presidency, each time under different circumstances. | |
| 1985 | The Proteus Operation | James P. Hogan | A group of military commandos, diplomats, and scientists travel back to 1939 and try to prevent the Axis Powers from winning World War II. |
| 1986 | The Crystal Empire | L. Neil Smith | TheBlack Death kills 85 percent of Europe's population. Like in other novels with this premise, Muslims conquer Europe in the centuries afterwards and become a dominant world power by the 20th century. Smith also postulates the plague wiping out theMongol Empire as well, allowing theMughal Empire to grow faster and farther in its place. |
| The Coming of the Quantum Cats | Frederik Pohl | Features the protagonist travelling across multiple different worlds. In one world,Nancy Reagan is the President of the United States and her mostly disregarded husband Ronald is known as "The First Gentleman".John F. Kennedy is a Senator from Massachusetts who is married toMarilyn Monroe. In another, America is a fascist dictatorship whereRonald Reagan remained true to his early left-wing politics and is still married to his first wifeJane Wyman, and in the past of many of the alternate worldsJoseph Stalin (who is known as Joseph Dzhugashvili) escaped from Russia to America in the 1900s, taking with him the proceeds of the1907 Tiflis bank robbery and using the money to set himself up as a big American capitalist. | |
| 1987 | Agent of Byzantium | Harry Turtledove | Imperial Byzantine special agent Basil Argyros is sent on various missions in an alternate universe whereMuhammad became a Christian saint. |
| In Search of the Epitaph | Bok Koh-il | In 1909,Itō Hirobumi survives his assassination attempt byAn Jung-geun and succeeds in a completeJapanization of Koreans, which leads to theEmpire of Japan dominating Korea by 1987. | |
| 1988 | Alternities | Michael P. Kube-McDowell[2] | |
| The Armor of Light | Melissa Scott andLisa A. Barnett | Sir Philip Sidney andChristopher Marlowe survive their historical deaths to battle witchcraft in the courts ofElizabeth I andJames VI. | |
| A Different Flesh | Harry Turtledove | Homo erectus crossed into theNew World instead of the ancestors of theNative Americans, leaving thePleistocene biosphere intact at the time of the 17th century AD. | |
| Fire on the Mountain | Terry Bisson | John Brown succeeds inhis raid onHarpers Ferry and touches off a slave rebellion in 1859. | |
| Gray Victory | Robert Skimin | TheConfederacy wins its independence and placesJeb Stuart on trial for losing theBattle of Gettysburg. | |
| The New Dinosaurs: An Alternative Evolution | Dougal Dixon | Non-avian dinosaurs do not die out 65 million years ago but instead keep the mammals in smallrodent-like forms. | |
1990s[edit] | |||
| 1990 | The Difference Engine | William Gibson andBruce Sterling | Charles Babbage'sAnalytical Engine takes on the roles of modern computers a century earlier. |
| The World Next Door | Brad Ferguson | People from a world that experienced a nuclear war in 1962 interact with people from a world that did not. | |
| A World of Difference | Harry Turtledove | The 4th planet of theSolar System, namedMinerva instead ofMars, is larger and contains intelligent alien life. The only stated change in Earth history is thatMikhail Gorbachev died shortly after taking leadership of theSoviet Union in 1985, and was succeeded by a hardline government so thatGlasnost never happened. | |
| 1992 | Fatherland | Robert Harris | Set in the 1960s in a Germany which won World War II. |
| The Guns of the South | Harry Turtledove | The Confederate Army is supplied withAK-47s by early-21st centurywhite supremacist South Africantime-travelers. | |
| Konpeki no Kantai | Yoshio Aramaki | World War II lasts ten years, Japan becomes a stronger naval power thanks to AdmiralIsoroku Yamamoto who appears several years in the past despite dying in the actual World War II. It is later adapted into twoOVA series, in which at first Japan defeats the Western Allies in the Pacific but eventually teams up with them to fight Nazi Germany. | |
| Resurrections from the Dustbin of History | Simon Louvish | FollowingRosa Luxemburg's successful 1918 revolution in Germany, Hitler flees to the USA. He becomes a senator for Illinois, and his son Rudolph runs for president in 1968 on a racist platform.Trotsky defeatsStalin in Russia, whileMussolini hangs on to power in Italy. | |
| 1993 | Anti-Ice | Stephen Baxter | Explosive scientific discovery made in the 1850s advances technology. |
| Aztec Century | Christopher Evans | Cortez changes sides at the onset of theConquistador era in the early 16th century, leading to the repulsion of Spanish invasion and occupation of Central America. | |
| Down in the Bottomlands | Harry Turtledove | At the end of theMiocene period, the Mediterraneanstays dry to the present day. | |
| Elvissey | Jack Womack | A dystopian 2033 where a Machiavellian multinational corporation has plans for world domination. | |
| The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump | Harry Turtledove | Fantasy with an alternate history undercurrent. History unfolded much as it did in our world, except that magic took the place of science. For example,Adolf Hitler waged a brutal war in the 20th century with magic weapons,Werner Heisenberg defined the uncertainty principle of thaumaturgy, andflying carpets take the place of automobiles. However, there are some fundamental differences, e.g., the United States and Mexico are both ruled by hereditary monarchies. Most importantly, the gods of all mythologies and religions are literal, proven beings, who coexist in ahenotheistic world in relative harmony – a breach in this latter harmony is central to the novel's main conflict. | |
| 1995 | 1901 | Robert Conroy | Depicts a hypothetical war between Germany and the United States at the start ofWilliam McKinley's second term as president. |
| 1945 | Newt Gingrich andWilliam R. Forstchen | Germans perfect long-rangejet aircraft by the end of World War II and conduct successful raids in North America against the US nuclear program. | |
| Dead, Mr. Mozart | Bernard Bastable | Wolfgang Mozart settles in England as a young man and never returns to his native Austria. As a respected but fairly impoverished composer and piano teacher in the 1820s (30 years after his death in our timeline), he is unwillingly pulled into a scandalous intrigue involving close relatives ofKing George IV. It is later followed by a sequel,Too Many Notes, Mr. Mozart. | |
| The Two Georges | Harry Turtledove andRichard Dreyfuss | King George III of Great Britain andGeorge Washington reach a settlement where theThirteen Colonies remain within the British Empire with increased autonomy and virtually all of their grievances redressed. | |
| 1996 | Attentatet i Pålsjö skog | Hans Alfredson | Swedish communists blow up a German train passing through Sweden, killingEva Braun, who was on board, Hitler is furious and invadesSweden, which surrenders. |
| Celestial Matters | Richard Garfinkle | The physics of this world and its surrounding cosmos are based on the physics ofAristotle and ancient ChineseTaoist alchemy. | |
| Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus | Orson Scott Card | Scientists from the future travel back to the 15th century to prevent theEuropean colonization of the Americas. | |
| Voyage | Stephen Baxter | The United States conducts aMars landing in 1986 as a result of inspiration byJohn F. Kennedy, who survived theassassination attempt on him in 1963. | |
| 1997 | Back in the USSA | Eugene Byrne andKim Newman | The United States experiences a communist revolution in 1917 and becomes a communist superpower, while Russiadoes not. |
| Xavras Wyżryn | Jacek Dukaj | Poland falls to theRed Army and becomes aSoviet republic in 1920. In an alternate 1996, Polish partisans fight the Soviet army. | |
| K is for Killing | Daniel Easterman | Charles Lindbergh is elected president rather thanFranklin Delano Roosevelt and a fascist organization calling itself the Amero-Aryan Alliance is brought to power and turns the country into a police state, complete withslaveryconcentration camps, andghettos. | |
| Making History | Stephen Fry | A time traveler creates a history in which Hitler was never conceived, let alone born. | |
| 1998 | Darwinia | Robert Charles Wilson | In March 1912, an event some called the "Miracle" causes Europe and parts of Asia and Africa to completely disappear along with all its inhabitants, replacing it with a slice of an alien planet, roughly equal in outline and terrain features, but with strangeflora andfauna that haveevolved differently to anything on Earth.America becomes involved in an effort to re-settle and colonise the new Europe, with historical figures such asLord Kitchener (having survived past 1916 due to the absence ofWW1) trying to preserve theBritish Empire and re-settleBritain. |
| 1999 | Battle Royale | Koushun Takami | Japan wins World War II and over 50 years later, children are pitted against each other in a game to the death. |
| Resurrection Day | Brendan DuBois | TheCuban Missile Crisis ends in a brief nuclear exchange between the U.S. and Soviet Union that wiped out several cities and has led to America being under military rule. | |
| The Intuitionist | Colson Whitehead | In a city heavily implied to be an alternate New York City in an unspecified time, huge skyscrapers litter the landscape and require vertical transportation in the form ofelevators. Black people are referred to as 'coloured' andintegration is a current topic. Elevator maintenance is divided between 'Intuitionists' who prefer to ride in an elevator and intuit the state of the elevator based on their own personal feelings, and the 'Empiricists', who insist on traditional instrument-based verification methods to assess the condition of the elevator. | |
| Die Mauer steht am Rhein ("The Wall Stands on the Rhine") | Christian von Ditfurth | The Cold War ends with Germany being reunified under the government of the communistGerman Democratic Republic. | |
2000s[edit] | |||
| 2000 | Fox on the Rhine | Douglas Niles andMichael Dobson | Heinrich Himmler takes over as leader after Hitler isassassinated in 1944 and arranges a cease-fire with the Soviet Union to free German forces. He then appointsErwin Rommel to command over the German forces in Western Europe. |
| 2001 | After Dachau | Daniel Quinn | Germany wins World War II and eventually all non-whites are killed off. |
| The Children's War | J. N. Stroyar | In World War II, Germany does not attack the Soviet Union and develops a nuclear weapons program. There is a 2004 sequel,A Change of Regime. | |
| The Haunting of Alaizabel Cray | Chris Wooding | Victorian London is overrun by the wych-kin, demonic creatures that have rendered the city uninhabitable south of the river, and which stalk the streets after dark. | |
| 2002 | Lion's Blood | Steven Barnes | The novel presents an alternate world where anIslamic Africa is the center of technological progress and learning while Europe remains largely tribal and backward. The story begins with Aidan O'Dere, aWhite European child growing up in a primitive 19th century Ireland with hispagan father,Christian mother, and his twin sister. Their village is attacked byVikings and Aidan and the surviving members of his family are taken asslaves. |
| Ice | Shane Johnson | TheApollo 19 mission suffers a major system failure, forcing its crew to strike out on their own. | |
| The Peshawar Lancers | S. M. Stirling | In 1878, a meteor shower devastates Europe and North America, forcing the European empires to relocate their populations to their colonies. | |
| Ruled Britannia | Harry Turtledove | TheSpanish Armada conquers England and forcesShakespeare to write a play aboutPhilip II. At the same time he is secretly writing a play for the English underground resistance. | |
| Uncle Alf | Harry Turtledove | TheGerman Empire triumphs over its enemies in theWorld War I in 1914, whenAlfred von Schlieffen personally oversees the implementation ofhis plan for a two-front war. It occupies Belgium and France after the war. Two years later, Germany helps Russia put down acommunist revolution in 1916. | |
| The Years of Rice and Salt | Kim Stanley Robinson | TheBlack Death of the 14th century kills 99 percent of the people in Europe and over the next seven centuries, India, China and theIslamic world come to dominate the planet. | |
| 2003 | Fox at the Front | Douglas Niles and Michael Dobson | A sequel toFox on the Rhine, taking place immediately after it.Rommel andGeorge Patton work together to get the Allies to Berlin ahead of the Soviets. |
| Cold War Hot: Alternate Decisions of the Cold War | Peter G. Tsouras | A collection of alternate history scenarios in the Cold War. | |
| Collaborator | Murray Davies | Set in a Nazi-occupied Great Britain centering on a former prisoner of war and life in occupied Britain. | |
| Conquistador | S. M. Stirling | An inter-dimensional gateway is discovered in California, which gives access to an alternate Earth in which the empire ofAlexander the Great flourishes, and where Europeans never discovered America. | |
| In the Presence of Mine Enemies | Harry Turtledove | A family ofsecret Jews hide in Berlin two or three generations after a Nazi victory in World War II. | |
| Roma Eterna | Robert Silverberg | TheRed Sea does not part beforeMoses and, as a result, theRoman Empire grows and prospers without the influence of Christianity. | |
| 2004 | Airborn | Kenneth Oppel | Airships, rather than airplanes, are used extensively for world travel. |
| Curious Notions | Harry Turtledove | Central Powers winWorld War I. | |
| The Plot Against America | Philip Roth | Charles Lindbergh is elected President of the United States in 1940 and collaborates with Nazi Germany. | |
| 2005 | In High Places | Harry Turtledove | Presents two alternative worlds. In the first one, the Black Death is deadlier, and while the remaining Europeans are able to limit the extent of Muslim colonization, European colonial empires never rise and England remains a backwater. The second is set in a Spain where the Roman Empire fell apart early and as a result is divided betweenCarthaginian colonies on the coasts andBasque settlements in the interior. |
| Never Let Me Go | Kazuo Ishiguro | Sterileclones are bred for theirorgans in what appears to be an alternate version of the 1990s. | |
| 2006 | 1862 | Robert Conroy | England enters theAmerican Civil War on the side of the Confederacy due to theRMSTrent incident. |
| Half Life | Shelley Jackson | Theatomic bomb resulted in a genetic preponderance of conjoined twins, who eventually become a minority subculture. | |
| 2007 | 1945 | Robert Conroy | The United States invades Japan in World War II despite using the atomic bomb. |
| Ice | Jacek Dukaj | TheFirst World War never occurs andPoland is still under Russian rule. | |
| Mainspring | Jay Lake | A young clockmaker's apprentice, who is visited by the Archangel Gabriel, is told that he must take the Key Perilous and rewind the Mainspring of the Earth. | |
| Russian Amerika | Stoney Compton | Alaska is still owned by Russia. | |
| The Yiddish Policemen's Union | Michael Chabon | During World War II, a temporaryYiddish-speakingsettlement for Jewishrefugees was established inAlaska in 1941. | |
| Macarthur's War | Douglas Niles andMichael Dobson | The US defeat inMidway forcesDouglas MacArthur to take over the Allied command in the Pacific and later launch the invasion of Japan. Isoroku Yamamoto also serves as Japan's war minister. | |
| 2008 | The Execution Channel | Ken MacLeod | Al Gore is elected president in 2000 and the9/11 attacks involved different targets. |
| The Man with the Iron Heart | Harry Turtledove | A Germaninsurgency at the end of World War II occurs. | |
| Without Warning | John Birmingham | On the eve of theIraq War in March 2003, an energy field appears in North America, wiping out all human and animal life within it. | |
| 2009 | 1942 | Robert Conroy | A third wave of airstrikes onPearl Harbor forces the American fleet to abandon the base, opening up theHawaiian islands to Japanese invasion. |
| The Infinities | John Banville | In one of an infinite number of universes,Mary, Queen of Scots, executed her cousin Elizabeth, England is a Catholic nation, Sweden is bellicose,Wallace's theory of evolution has been discredited, andcold fusion is the principal source of energy. | |
| The Age of Ra | James Lovegrove | TheAncient Egyptian gods have defeated all otherpantheons and now rule over the world. | |
2010s[edit] | |||
| 2010 | After America | John Birmingham | Sequel toWithout Warning. |
| Red Inferno: 1945 | Robert Conroy | The Allied advance on Berlin causes a paranoid Stalin to attack the American troops, forcing the Allies and a semi-rehabilitated Germany to work together to fight off the Soviet threat. | |
| 2011 | The Afrika Reich | Guy Saville | The British are defeated at theBattle of Dunkirk, allowing the Nazis to conquer Europe and then Africa. |
| Osama | Lavie Tidhar | Set in an alternate world whereOsama bin Laden is a fictional character in apulpdetective novel. | |
| Castro's Bomb | Robert Conroy | Fidel Castro seizes control of Soviet nuclear bombs during theCuban Missile Crisis. | |
| 11/22/63 | Stephen King | A time traveler stopsJohn F. Kennedy's assassination only to create an even worse late 20th century for America. | |
| 2012 | Age of Aztec | James Lovegrove | TheAztec Empire conquers the globe, beginning with the defeat ofHernán Cortés byMontezuma II. |
| Dominion | C. J. Sansom | Lord Halifax, rather than Winston Churchill, takes over the war effort in 1940, surrendering Britain to be a satellite state of Nazi Germany. | |
| Faultline 49 | David M. Danson (pseudonym of Joe MacKinnon) | Reporter David Danson travels through U.S.-occupied Canada in search of the principal provocateur in the Canadian-American War (a conflict instigated by 11 September 2001World Trade Center bombing in Edmonton, Alberta). | |
| Himmler's War | Robert Conroy | Hitler is killed by a random Allied bombing in 1944, allowing Heinrich Himmler to become the leader of Germany and push new advances on the Allies. | |
| The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln | Stephen L. Carter | Abraham Lincoln survives his assassination attempt and, two years later, faces animpeachment trial. | |
| The Mirage | Matt Ruff | Christian fundamentalists hijack airplanes and fly them into buildings in Iraq and Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab States declares a War on Terror and invades the U.S. | |
| Rising Sun | Robert Conroy | TheBattle of Midway is a defeat for the U.S. Navy, paving the way for Japan to attack the West Coast of the United States. | |
| Pact Ribbentrop - Beck | Piotr Zychowicz | Hitler makes a pact with Poland rather than invading it, so after conquering Western Europe the Poles join him in his 1941 attack on the Soviet Union and defeat it together, dividing its territory. | |
| North Reich | Robert Conroy | Britain surrenders to Nazi Germany and has a fascist regime installed across the Commonwealth and Empire, with Canada becoming a base from which Germany prepares to launch a war against the United States. | |
| 2013 | Fallout | Todd Strasser | TheCuban Missile Crisis leads toWorld War III. Twelve-year-old Scott and his family must squeeze into a small fallout shelter with six uninvited neighbors and somehow survive without enough food or water for the next two weeks. |
| 2014 | Unholy Land | Lavie Tidhar | In this world theUganda Scheme succeeded in the early 20th century, and theJewish state is inUganda, called Palestina, with Arafat City as its capital. By the book's present day tensions are rising, with Palestina putting up walls to keep out African refugees |
| 2016 | Underground Airlines | Ben Winters | TheAmerican Civil War never happens, with theCrittenden Compromise being adopted instead, and slavery remains legal in the Hard Four states ofAlabama,Louisiana,Mississippi, and a unitedCarolina. |
| Everfair | Nisi Shawl | African-American missionaries join forces with Africans, East Asians, Europeans, and socialists from the BritishFabian Society to buy theCongo Free State fromLeopold II of Belgium. Freeing it from becoming a site of colonial atrocities, they rename it 'Everfair', and make it a safe haven for the people of the Congo, former slaves returning from America, and other places where African natives and their descendants are being mistreated. | |
| 2017 | River of Teeth | Sarah Gailey | As one of his last acts of his presidency in early 1861, PresidentJames Buchanan approved the Hippo Act, a plan to importhippopotamuses into the United States as livestock. Decades later, the lawless swamps ofLouisiana are infested with murderousferal hippos. |
| The Underground Railroad | Colson Whitehead | TheUnderground Railroad was a literal railroad, and not just a metaphor. | |
| Jak zawsze [pl] | Zygmunt Miłoszewski | In 1963, instead ofcommunists,Poland is ruled by a social democratic-peasant alliance led by PresidentEugeniusz Kwiatkowski, and the country stands under the strong influence of France. | |
| The Berlin Project | Gregory Benford | During World War II the Americanatomic program completes theatomic bomb a year earlier than in reality, enabling it to be deployed against Germany and bring about a premature end to the war. | |
| 2018 | My Real Children | Jo Walton | Presents a world where the protagonist has two, mutually incompatible memories of history. In one worldKennedy is assassinated by a bomb in 1963, which leads to acceleratednuclear disarmament.The Soviet Union liberalises sooner and does not crush theHungarian andCzechoslovakian revolution. The USSR also reaches the moon first in 1967, and the USA is struggling to catch up to develop its own space andmoonbase technology. In another timeline,the Cuban Missile Crisis escalates into full-scale nuclear war, and Miami,Kyiv, Delhi,Tel Aviv and various unspecified Chinese cities are destroyed over the process of 50 years, creating a world whereanaplastic thyroid cancer is common. The USA becomes isolationist, not getting involved inVietnam, the EU consolidates much earlier anddecolonisation does not occur as swiftly. |
| A Man Lies Dreaming | Lavie Tidhar | Using astory-within-a-story narrative, it recounts a Jewish man inAuschwitz imagining an alternate history. In this alternate history, theNazis failed totake power in 1933, withcommunists taking power and purging the high ranking Nazi leadership. Hitler, called 'Wolf' in the novel, fled to England, which becamefascist, and now works as a private detective for hire. | |
| Through Darkest Europe | Harry Turtledove | Alternate medieval philosophies in both Christianity and Islam lead to a modern world where Islamic countries are the richest and most developed in the world, while European Christian countries are backward and violent. | |
| The Only Harmless Great Thing | Brooke Bolander | Sign language communication with elephants became possible in the 1880s, but they were still considered animals for several decades more.US Radium purchased several (includingTopsy the Elephant) to replace their litigious human employees from theRadium Girls scandal, because elephants can tolerate higher doses of radiation. Decades in the future, a scientist tries to persuade the elephant community to allow themselves to becomelong-term nuclear waste warning messages. | |
| The Atlantropa Articles | Cody Franklin | World War II never takes place and Germany completes Herman Sörgel's Atlantropa plan. The novel occurs thousands of years in the future and the Mediterranean Sea is a deadly wasteland. | |
| Summerland | Hannu Rajaniemi | In 1938 humanity discovers a realm to the afterlife called 'Summerland', a metropolis for the recently deceased, and the British Empire and the Soviet Union are vying for control over it. | |
| 2019 | Machines Like Me | Ian McEwan | Alan Turing lived well past WW2, and technology overall is more advanced than in our time, so by the time of the 80s the Internet, social media, andself-driving cars already exist.Robots are available to a select rich few.Thatcher lost theFalklands War and is battlingTony Benn in UK politics. |
| Red, White & Royal Blue | Casey McQuiston | Set in 2020 in a world whereDonald Trump lost the2016 United States presidential election. The novel can be considered "soft" alternate history, as it focuses more on romantic comedy than on the consequences of the stated divergence. | |
| Civilisations | Laurent Binet | TheVikings in c.1000 ad, travel to the Americas and make contact with native American peoples, specifically theIncas and theAztecs, sharing cultural ideas with them and iron smelting techniques, but cause a pandemic by bringing diseases from Europe with them. This, however, leads to Native Americans gaining immunity to European diseases, so are in a stronger position against European colonisation.Christopher Columbus is kidnapped and his men killed, and the Americas remain unconquered. In 1531 the Incas invade Europe. | |
| This Is How You Lose the Time War | Amal El-Mohtar andMax Gladstone | Book features two agents from two warring factions (called 'Red' and 'Blue'), who traverse multiple different timelines in a form of time war. One timeline they encounter features a world where theAztecs were not colonised, multiple worlds whereAtlantis exists and falls, and one where the Earth was destroyed in anuclear holocaust. | |
2020s[edit] | |||
| 2020 | The Once and Future Witches | Alix E. Harrow | Witches exist, and inNew Salem in 1893 witches join theSuffragette movement.Witchcraft exists in this world and is somewhat accepted, but witches are fighting for the right to practice witchcraft openly and more boldly. |
| Ring Shout; or, Hunting Ku Kluxes in the End Times | P. Djeli Clark | Set in an alternate historical world ofMacon, Georgia in 1922, the story is told from the perspective of Maryse Boudreaux. At this time,Prohibition is occurring and the town of Macon is known for havingKu Klux Klan marches with many white men, women, and children. Before the beginning of the story, the Second Klan came to be on 25 November 1915, on the day the trio refers to as "D-Day" or "Devil's Night", when an old witch summoned the "Ku Kluxes" at theStone Mountain in Atlanta. Despite the efforts of formerly enslaved persons such as Robert Smalls to disband the first Klan, they were not able to wipe out the monsters that feed off the hatred and killing of innocent African-Americans in the United States. Due to the release ofThe Birth of a Nation, a product ofdark magic, many white people were swayed into believing the narrative of the Ku Klux Klan as saviors and African-Americans as evil. | |
| Elatsoe | Darcie Little Badger | Magic exists in America, and the magic, monsters, knowledge, and legends of all its peoples, native or not, exist. Magic includes the ability to make an orb of light appear or travel across the world through rings offungi. Elatsoe, the protagonist, practises magic from her nativeLipan Apache family, and can raise the ghosts of dead animals. | |
| Rodham | Curtis Sittenfeld | Hillary Clinton never marriedBill Clinton, and instead pursues a career in law. In 2015 she runs successfully for president with endorsements fromDonald Trump. | |
| Agency | William Gibson | In an alternate 2017Brexit did not happen andHillary Clinton is president, andTurkey andSyria are at the brink of war. Experimental militaryAI technology is created that allows people to use as proxies and enter alternate timelines where apocalyptic events did not happen | |
| The Oppenheimer Alternative | Robert J. Sawyer | AfterJ. Robert Oppenheimer heads theManhattan Project and the development of theatomic bomb, he directs a secret project to save humanity after it is discovered that the Sun's core is unstable and will shed its outer layer in the late-2020s, engulfing the innerSolar System, including Earth. | |
| 2021 | Outlawed | Anna North | The United States experienced a devastatingflu pandemic in the 1830s. Among other implications, this pandemic resulted in strict fertility laws, and gender nonconformist women rebels hold out in theHole-in-the-Wall as outlaws in theAmerican frontier. |
| The Kingdoms | Natasha Pulley | Napoleon won theBattle of Trafalgar, and, the English were enslaved. | |
| 2022 | All the White Spaces | Ally Wilkes | A 1920 British expedition toAntarctica takes place in an alternate history to the one in whichErnest Shackleton and others explored the continent. |
| To Paradise | Hanya Yanagihara | In an alternate 1893 America, New York is part of the Free States, wheresame sex marriage is legal and normalised. | |
| 2023 | Babel, or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translator's Revolution | R.F. Kuang | In an alternateOxford set in theVictorian Age, theBritish Empire is established and maintained through the magical use of silver, which when engraved with certain words release magical powers. The magical power specifically comes from when two etymologically linked pair of words from both English and another language are matched. |
| Cahokia Jazz[3] | Francis Spufford | The variant ofsmallpox that arrived withEuropean settlers was variola minor, both dramatically less fatal than variola major and conferring immunity on those who contracted it. Far from theIndigenous peoples in North America from being almostentirely wiped out, there is instead a huge and thriving Native American population in the US in 1922 located in the fictional state ofDeseret. | |
| Title | Author | Description | Installments |
|---|---|---|---|
| Paratime series | H. Beam Piper andJohn F. Carr | Consists of several short stories, one novella, and one novel. The series deals with an advanced civilization that is able to travel between parallel universes with alternate histories, and uses that ability to trade for goods and services that its own, exhausted Earth cannot provide. The protagonists of the stories are the Paratime Police, the organization that protects the secret of paratime travel. |
Sequels not written by Piper and mainly written by John F. Carr:
|
| Crosstimeseries | Andre Norton | The story takes its protagonist through several versions of Earth as it might have been if history had gone differently. |
|
| Imperium series | Keith Laumer | Series featuring a continuum of parallel worlds policed by the Imperium, formed in an alternate history where theAmerican Revolution did not occur, and the British Empire andGermany merged into a unified empire in 1900, with a government based in an alternateStockholm. American diplomat Brion Bayard is the protagonist, having been kidnapped by the Imperium because the Brion Bayard in a third parallel Earth is apparently waging war against the Imperium. Further adventures follow after Bayard decides to remain in the service of the Imperium. Includes three novels and two omnibus collections (Beyond the Imperium (1981) and Imperium (2005)) |
|
| Lord Darcy | Randall Garrett | A number of short stories and one novel (Too Many Magicians) based on the premise that KingRichard I of England returned safely from France and thatRoger Bacon had codified the laws ofmagic. |
|
| A Nomad of the Time Streams | Michael Moorcock | A series of novels featuring a grown-up version ofE. Nesbit'sOswald Bastable (fromThe Story of the Treasure Seekers and other books) who experiences a variety of alternate realities that have diverged from his own timeline. |
|
| Operation Otherworld | Poul Anderson | The existence of God has been scientifically proven and magic has been harnessed for the practical needs of the adept by thedegaussing ofcold iron, while the United States is part of an alternate Second World War against the IslamicKhalifate, which has invaded the United States. |
|
| North American Confederacy series | L. Neil Smith | A single word in theDeclaration of Independence differs andAlbert Gallatin joins theWhiskey Rebellion in 1794 to the benefit of the farmers, rather than the fledgling United States government. This results in the rebellion to become a Second American Revolution. This eventually leads toGeorge Washington being overthrown and executed by firing squad for treason, Gallatin being declared the second president, theU.S. Constitution being declared null and void, and a revised version of theArticles of Confederation being ratified, but with a much greater emphasis on individual and economic freedom. These actions eventually lead to the US merging with its neighbors as the North American Confederacy, alibertarian society in the 1890s. |
|
| Fireball trilogy | John Christopher | Two cousins are transported into an alternate history Earth through a mysterious fireball where the Roman Empire never fell. |
|
| The Dark Tower | Stephen King | Although this is primarily a fantasy and time travel series with elements ofsteampunk, there are interludes of alternate history. For example, in one scene, the characters enter a world whereSpiro Agnew became the 38th US president, in another they visit a world whereGary Hart was president in the 1980s andRonald Reagan never entered politics. |
|
| Eden trilogy | Harry Harrison | TheK–T extinction never happens. Mammals evolve into human-like creatures who are a persecuted minority in a world ruled by bipedal reptilians. |
|
| Germanicus trilogy | Kirk Mitchell | Rome never fell, afterPontius Pilate pardons Joshua bar-Joseph (Christ), and the Romans win a decisive victory at Teutoberg Forest and Latinize Greater Germania. |
|
| The Tales of Alvin Maker | Orson Scott Card | A North America where people wield magic, or knacks, and the revolution was only partly successful. |
|
| The Hammer and the Cross series | Harry Harrison | Vikings rebel against the harsh rule of the Catholic Church. |
|
| The Domination | S. M. Stirling | The early entry of the Netherlands on the American side of theAmerican Revolution causes them to lose theCape Colony to Britain, which renames it theCrown Colony of Drakia after SirFrancis Drake and settlesLoyalists andHessians there, who absorb theBoers to set up aslavery-based empire called the Domination of the Draka. |
|
| Anno Dracula series | Kim Newman | The heroes of Bram Stoker's 1897 novelDracula fail to stopCount Dracula's conquest of Great Britain, resulting in a world wherevampires are common and increasingly dominant in society. |
|
| Worldwar andColonization series | Harry Turtledove | Aliens with a feudal caste system and 1990s style technology calling themselves the "Race" invade Earth in the middle of World War II, forcing the Allied and Axis Forces to put aside their differences and battle this new threat. |
|
| TheSouthern Victory series | Harry Turtledove | The South won theAmerican Civil War in 1862 due to not losing the copy ofSpecial Order 191, resulting in the US and CSA continuing to exist and battling through this timeline's versions of theFranco-Prussian War, theFirst World War and theSecond World War. |
|
| Stars and Stripes trilogy | Harry Harrison | Prince Albert dies prematurely and Britain becomes involved in theAmerican Civil War. |
|
| Belisarius | David Drake andEric Flint | Opposing factions from the future influence early times through intermediaries for their own purposes: the "good" side operating through theByzantine generalBelisarius and the "evil" side operating through the Indian state ofMalwa. |
|
| The Age of Unreason | Gregory Keyes | Alchemy really works thanks toIsaac Newton. |
|
| Nantucket series | S. M. Stirling | The island ofNantucket is sent back in time to the Bronze Age circa 1250 BC. |
|
| 1632 series | Eric Flint | An entire modernWest Virginia town is transported in time and space to Germany during theThirty Years' War. |
|
| Arabesk trilogy | Jon Courtenay Grimwood | Woodrow Wilson brokered an earlier peace toWorld War I so that it never expanded outside of theBalkans. The books are set in a liberal IslamicOttoman North Africa in the 21st century, mainly centring onAlexandria, referred to as El Iskandriyah. |
|
| Elemental Masters | Mercedes Lackey | An alternate Edwardian Earth is home to magicians who have control over the four elements. |
|
| The Neanderthal Parallax series | Robert J. Sawyer | A Neanderthal visitor from a parallel world whereHomo sapiens became extinct andNeanderthals became the dominant species arrives on our world. The Neanderthal society is sexually segregated, with men and women interacting for only a few days each month, and reproduction being consciously limited to ten-year intervals. |
|
| Hannibal series | John Maddox Roberts | TheCarthaginians won theSecond Punic War against theRomans. |
|
| Heirs of Alexandria series | Mercedes Lackey,Eric Flint andDave Freer | Set in a renaissance Europe where theLibrary of Alexandria was not destroyed by a Christian mob and the now saintedHypatia of Alexandria andJohn Chrysostom shaped religious thought, significantly altering how the Church developed. |
|
| Civil War series | Newt Gingrich andWilliam R. Forstchen | Robert E. Lee wins theBattle of Gettysburg. | |
| Crosstime Traffic | Harry Turtledove | Travel between parallel universes is possible. |
|
| Days of Infamy series | Harry Turtledove | Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor extends to occupying all of Hawaii |
|
| Insh'Allah series | Steven Barnes | Shows an alternate world in whichCarthage destroyed Rome, with Europe remaining tribal and anIslamic-dominated Africa colonizing theNew World. |
|
| The Merchant Princes series | Charles Stross | Series of nine novels. In the series, there exists a number of parallel worlds all of which are on the same geographical Earth, but with different societies at different points of development. Members of a certain bloodline can travel between these worlds along with their immediate possessions. |
|
| Axis of Time series | John Birmingham | An American-led UN Multinational Force arrives uptime from 2021 via a wormhole that was accidentally generated as a byproduct of a scientific experiment to the year 1942. |
|
| TheEmberverse series | S. M. Stirling | An event called "The Change" in 1998 causes electricity,guns,explosives,internal combustion engines andsteam power to stop working. |
|
| The Sky Crawlers | Hiroshi Mori | Follows the journeys and tribulations of a group of youngfighter pilots involved indogfight warfare, and is set during an alternate historical period. |
|
| Romanitas Trilogy | Sophia McDougall | TheRoman Empire survived to contemporary times. |
|
| Trail of Glory series | Eric Flint | Sam Houston was not injured at the beginning of the War of 1812, and substantially revises the history of theTrail of Tears. |
|
| The Lords of Creation | S. M. Stirling | An ancient alien civilization makesMars andVenus habitable and seeds them with Earth life. |
|
| Temeraire | Naomi Novik | TheNapoleonic Wars are fought with an Air Force ofdragons. |
|
| TheSmall Change trilogy | Jo Walton | The United Kingdom made peace withNazi Germany (againstWinston Churchill's wishes). |
|
| Pacific War series | Newt Gingrich andWilliam R. Forstchen | AlternatePacific War. |
|
| Destroyermen series | Taylor Anderson | In the midst of World War II, an old battered four stacker and its Japanese enemy is swept through a storm and finds itself on a version of Earth where humans had never evolved. |
|
| Leviathan Trilogy | Scott Westerfeld | ||
| The Pantheon series | James Lovegrove | Alternate Earths where the gods of ancient myth and legend are real and play an active role in human affairs. |
|
| TimeRiders | Alex Scarrow | Three people who have been rescued moments before death are recruited into a secret agency to prevent time travel from unraveling history. |
|
| The Hot War series | Harry Turtledove | In response toChinese intervention in the Korean War, PresidentHarry S. Truman orders the use ofatomic weapons againstManchuria in 1951 leading to a full-scale nuclear war betweenNATO and theWarsaw Pact. |
|
| Noughts and Crosses series | Malorie Blackman | In an alternative history, Africa became a unified empire and invaded, occupied and colonised Europe instead of Europe colonising Africa. At the time of the series, slavery had been abolished for some time, but segregation, similar to theJim Crow Laws, continues to operate to keep the "Crosses" (dark-skinned people) in control of the "noughts" (lighter-skinned people). An international organisation, the Pangaean Economic Community, exists. Seeming to be similar to the United Nations in scope but similar to the European Union in powers, it is playing a role in forcing change by directives and boycotts. |
|
| His Dark Materials | Philip Pullman | The series features the multiverse, and characters cross between different worlds.Lyra Belacqua, the series' protagonist, comes from an alternate Earth whereJohn Calvin, instead of forming a new breakaway church, instead became the Pope, moved theChurch toGeneva, and so by the time of the first book the Church (named "the Magisterium") is far more dominant, aggressive and interferes in society's affairs. Much of the dress code and social mores are still from the 18th century (women are not allowed to teach atOxford University),cars andfixed-winged aircraft, butzeppelins are a common and dominant mode of transport. There aresix known planets in this world and the month of April has an extra day. Magical aspects exist as the underpinning quantum reality of Lyra's universe, and other species, such as Witches and talking, intelligent armoured bears (calledpanserbjørne) co-exist with Humans. Other worlds include that of the world ofCittàgazze, which serves as the crossroads to the worlds because all the windows lead here. Other worlds include that of aworld where elephant-like creatures evolved a distinct anatomy based on a diamond-framed skeleton without a spine, andone where Humans aligned with the Majesterium are engaged in a genocidal war with theGallivespians. |
|
| Take Them to the Stars | Sylvain Neuvel | A mysterious society of powerful women manipulate history to save humanity, and ultimately get them into space. |
|
| Altered State | J. G. Jenkinson | An East German scientist tries to help Germany win WWI by sending documents to 1913. His grandfather, a soldier in the Kaiser's army, experiences the new war, and the scientist's future paramour from the 21st century he creates travels back to stop him. |
|
| The Apollo Murders | Chris Hadfield | Set in an alternate 1973 and 1975 during theCold War, and features an Apollo 18 mission to the Moon, and the American-SovietApollo–Soyuz space mission. |
|
| Year | Title | Editor(s) |
|---|---|---|
| 1932 | If It Had Happened Otherwise | J. C. Squire |
| 1989 | Alternate Empires | Gregory Benford andMartin H. Greenberg |
| Alternate Heroes | ||
| 1991 | Alternate Wars | |
| 1992 | Alternate Americas | |
| Alternate presidents | Mike Resnick | |
| Alternate Kennedys | ||
| 1993 | Alternate Warriors | |
| 1994 | Alternate Outlaws | |
| 1996 | War of the Worlds: Global Dispatches | Kevin J. Anderson |
| 1997 | Alternate Tyrants | Mike Resnick |
| 1998 | Alternate Generals | Harry Turtledove |
| 1999 | What If? | Robert Cowley |
| 2001 | What If? 2 | |
| The Best Alternate History Stories of the 20th Century | Harry Turtledove and Martin H. Greenberg | |
| 2003 | What Ifs? of American History | Robert Cowley |
| 2006 | Futures Past | Jack Dann andGardner Dozois |
| 2009 | Other Earths | Nick Gevers andJay Lake |
| Columbia & Britannia | Brian A. Dixon andAdam Chamberlain | |
| 2011 | Lest Darkness Fall and Related Stories | Alexei Panshin andCory Panshin |
| Year | Title | Author | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1881 | Hands Off | Edward Everett Hale | Joseph is rescued from theslave traders he was sold to, but this benevolent act leads to humanity's extinction centuries later.[4] |
| 1934 | Sidewise in Time | Murray Leinster | Sections of the Earth's surface begin changing places with their counterparts in alternate timelines, including one where theSouth won theBattle of Gettysburg. |
| 1937 | The Curfew Tolls | Stephen Vincent Benét | A portrait ofNapoleon Bonaparte if he had been born in the 1730s. |
| 1948 | He Walked Around the Horses | H. Beam Piper | DiplomatBenjamin Bathurst arrives in a timeline where the British defeated the American rebels. |
| 1952 | Sail On! Sail On! | Philip José Farmer | The Earth is flat andAristotle's axiom that objects of different weights drop with different velocities is true. |
| 1958 | Two Dooms | C. M. Kornbluth | TheAxis powers win the Second World War. |
| 1960 | Delenda Est | Poul Anderson | Renegadetime travelers meddle in the outcome of theSecond Punic War, bringing about the premature deaths ofPublius Cornelius Scipio andScipio Africanus at theBattle of Ticinus in 218 BC, and thus creating a new timeline in whichHannibal destroys Rome in 210 BC. |
| 1987 | The Forest of Time | Michael Flynn | The Thirteen Colonies, after getting independent of Britain, did not succeed in creating the United States but developed into separate and mutually hostile nation-states which often fight bitter wars with each other. |
| 1987 | Thor Meets Captain America | David Brin | TheNazis are championed by theNorse Pantheon. |
| 1987 | Why I Left Harry's All-Night Hamburgers | Lawrence Watt-Evans | A young man tells his story about growing up working at agreasy spoon diner where travelers from alternate versions of Earth frequently drop in. |
| 1988 | The Last Article | Harry Turtledove | ANazi invasion of India and the brutal reaction of theGermans to thenonviolent resistance andpacifism ofGandhi and his followers. |
| 1991 | Red Reign | Kim Newman | The original short story thatAnno Dracula is based on. |
| 1997 | The Undiscovered | William Sanders | William Shakespeare lives among theCherokee and tries to produce a version ofHamlet for them. |
| 1998 | The Twelfth Album | Stephen Baxter | The Beatles do not split up and produce twelfth album calledGod. |
| 2000 | A Colder War | Charles Stross | The follow-up expedition inH. P. Lovecraft'sAt the Mountains of Madness has occurred, and inexorably fuses theCold War andCthulhu Mythos. |
| 2000 | Watching Trees Grow | Peter F. Hamilton | The Roman Empire never fell. |
| 2002 | The Daimon | Harry Turtledove | Greek philosopherSocrates aids the Athenian generalAlkibiades in defeat the Spartans. |
| 2002 | Shikari in Galveston | S. M. Stirling | Novella et in the same world asThe Peshawar Lancers, but occurs several years earlier. |
| 2003 | The Cuban Missile Crisis: Second Holocaust | Robert L. O'Connell | The 1962Cuban Missile Crisis developed into war. |
| 2005 | The Apotheosis of Martin Padway | S. M. Stirling | A sequel toLest Darkness Fall byL. Sprague de Camp, continues the story of the American archaeologist transported back to 6th century Rome. |
| 2008 | A Murder in Eddsford | S. M. Stirling | A murder mystery set in Post-Change Britain inThe Emberverse series. |
| 2008 | Something for Yew | S. M. Stirling | Another Rutherston and Bramble mystery. |
| Year | Title | Description |
|---|---|---|
| 1988 | Sky Galleons of Mars | Set in an alternateBelle Époque where the major nations of Earth are extending their colonial interests on Mars and Venus. |
| 1988 | Space: 1889 | Set in an alternateBelle Époque where the major nations of Earth are extending their colonial interests on Mars and Venus. |
| 1991 | "Reich Star" | Set in a 2134 where the Axis powers won World War II. |
| 1993 | Forgotten Futures | Settings inspired by Victorian andEdwardian science fiction and fantasy. |
| 1998 | Crimson Skies | The United States crumbles into many hostile nation-states following the effects of theGreat War,Prohibition, andthe Great Depression. |
| 1999 | Brave New World | Superhero game set in a fascist United States of America living in a perpetual state ofmartial law since the 1960s. |
| 1999 | GURPS Alternate Earths andGURPS Alternate Earths II | |
| 2001 | Godlike: Superhero Roleplaying in a World on Fire, 1936–1946 | Set in an alternate history version of World War II where people known as Talents have developed unexplained powers. |
| 2005 | GURPS Infinite Worlds | |
| 2008 | Gear Krieg | Technological developments during the 1920s (includingJ. Walter Christie's invention of a bipedal mecha system) leads to a World War II where all major powers are equipped with more advanced military equipment than in reality. |
| Year | Title | Author | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1986 | Captain Confederacy | Will Shetterly and Vince Stone | Asuperhero is created for propaganda purposes in a world in which theConfederate States of America won their independence. |
| 1986 | Watchmen | Alan Moore | The United States has costumed adventurers and the country is edging closer tonuclear warfare with the Soviet Union. The point of divergence comes in the 1930s but does not affect larger history until the 1960s. |
| 1989 | Baker Street | Gary Reed andGuy Davis | Features an alternativeSherlock Holmes world where the values and class system of Victorian era England carried over into a late 20th Century where World War II never occurred. |
| 1991 | Batman: Holy Terror | Alan Brennert | Set in a world whereOliver Cromwell lived ten years longer than he should have, and America is a commonwealth nation run by a corrupttheocratic government. |
| 1995–ongoing | Astro City | Kurt Busiek et alia | In an early installment, a man travels back in time and prevents theChallenger space shuttle from exploding in 1986, and one of the rescued crew later sires a descendant who will save all mankind from disaster in the future. |
| 1997 | Wonder Woman: Amazonia | William Messner-Loebs | In 1888,Queen Victoria and most of her family are murdered by an arsonist. A distant American cousin,"Jack Planters", becomes King and rules theBritish Empire with a misogynistic atmosphere. In the 1920s, an analog ofWonder Woman leads a popular uprising against King Jack's rule. |
| 1998–2011 | Full Metal Panic! | Shoji Gatoh | The series is set in a alternate history, based upon actual world events around the late 20th century to the early 21st century. |
| 2001 | Ministry of Space | Warren Ellis | Soldiers and operatives of the United Kingdom reached the German rocket installations atPeenemünde ahead of theU.S. Army and theSoviets, and brought all the key personnel and technology to England. |
| 2002 | Scarlet Traces | Ian Edginton | Britain was able to develop alien technology, abandoned after the abortive Martian invasion ofThe War of the Worlds to establish economic and political dominance over the remainder of the world. |
| 2003 | Arrowsmith | Kurt Busiek | The United States is actually the United States of Columbia,magic is real, and the First World War is fought with and bydragons, spells,vampires and all other kinds of magical weapons and beings. |
| 2003 | Superman: Red Son | Mark Millar | Superman is raised in the Soviet Union, and his presence upsets the balance of theCold War. |
| 2003 | Shin Konpeki no Kantai (New Deep Blue Fleet) | Yoshio Aramaki | Amanga sequel set three years afterKonpeki no Kantai. The series depictsWorld War III between a new republican Japan facing Nazi Germany in a final battle for the fate of the world.[5] |
| 2003 | The Life Eaters | David Brin | Comic based on Brin's novellaThor Meets Captain America. |
| 2003 | Marvel: 1602 and its sequels | Neil Gaiman | SetMarvel Comics' heroes and villains in the early 17th century due to aCaptain America of an alternatedystopian future being transported to the past. Timestream altered to the point of surviving dinosaurs, mostly in America. |
| 2004 | Ex Machina | Brian K. Vaughan | Set in a world in which a superhero called the Great Machine becomes mayor of New York after intervening in theSeptember 11 attacks – mitigating the death toll by saving the entire South Tower of theWorld Trade Center. |
| 2006 | General Leonardo | Erik Svane andDan Greenberg | A French-languagegraphic novel series in whichLeonardo da Vinci manages to build his avant-garde war machines, with theVatican confiscating them to mount aCrusade to recaptureJerusalem. |
| 2006 | Roswell, Texas | L. Neil Smith and Rex F. May | Davy Crockett survived theAlamo andSanta Anna did not, and in which an expanded Texas eventually became the "Federated States of Texas" rather than one of the United States. |
| 2006–2012 | The Boys | Garth Ennis andDarick Robertson | In a world where superheroes exist, and theBrooklyn Bridge was destroyed rather than theTwin Towers during9/11. Most of the superheroes are corrupted by their celebrity status and often engage in reckless behavior, compromising the safety of the world. |
| 2008 | Aetheric Mechanics | Warren Ellis | Set in 1907, during awar in the air between Britain andRuritania. |
| 2008–2011 | Chotto Edo Made | Set in a world where theTokugawa shogunate never ended. | |
| 2009 | Grandville | Bryan Talbot | Set in a world in which France won theNapoleonic Wars. It also features elements of steampunk and anthropomorphic animals. |
| 2009 | Storming Paradise | Chuck Dixon | The first detonation of the atomic bomb atTrinity was exploded prematurely, killing prominent nuclear physicists such asRobert Oppenheimer. This forces the loss of reproducing the atomic bomb and having PresidentTruman to initiate the bloody Allied invasion of Japan inOperation Downfall. |
| 2011 | Flashpoint | ||
| 2018–ongoing | Chainsaw Man | Tatsuki Fujimoto | The events are set in alternate 1997, in which devils are born out of human fears and Devil Hunters deal with them. TheSoviet Union still exists, and many events, such asAIDS,Holocaust andnuclear weapons, have been erased from history due to the consumption of suitable devils by the Chainsaw Devil. |
| 2023 | 1/6 | Alan Jenkins and Gan Golan | TheJanuary 6 United States Capitol attack of 2021 was successful and as a direct result,Donald Trump remains President and Trump's former Vice PresidentMike Pence is hanged during the attack for opposing Trump.[6] |
| 2023–ongoing | Ultimate Universe | Various | Heavily alteredEarth-616 template.Assassination of John F. Kennedy orchestrated by theMaker, along with the dissolution of thefederal government of the United States in 1969, all part of the creation of a new world order of continental empires and corporatocracy under theshadow governance of the Maker's Council. |
| Year | Title | Director | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1936 | Things to Come | William Cameron Menzies | Earth becomes a dictatorship after a deadly plague wiped out most life following a thirty-year war. |
| 1942 | Went the Day Well? | Alberto Cavalcanti | Nazi paratroopers take over an English village and the townspeople lead a resistance against them. |
| 1951 | The Magic Face | Frank Tuttle | Hitler is killed by his valet Rudi Janus, who takes his place during World War II. |
| 1966 | It Happened Here | Kevin Brownlow andAndrew Mollo | Nazi Germany successfullyinvades and occupies the United Kingdom during World War II. |
| 1971 | Punishment Park | Peter Watkins | During theVietnam War,President Richard Nixon decrees a state of emergency based on theMcCarran Internal Security Act of 1950, which authorizes federal authorities to detain persons judged to be a "risk to internal security", including members of the anti-war, Civil Rights, and feminist movements, as well as conscientious objectors and members of the Communist Party. Detainee's are offered the chance to earn back their freedom by physical trial; fleeing and avoiding National Guard troops in the California Desert for 3 days. |
| 1984 | Red Dawn | John Milius | The Soviet Union and communist Latin American nations, invade the United States, starting World War III. |
| 1989 | Kiki's Delivery Service | Hayao Miyazaki | According to the director, takes place in a Europe where the World Wars were averted. |
| 1991 | Edward II | Derek Jarman | Based on theMarlovian play. In the 1990s, England is ruled by a weak king, who is then deposed in a coup led by a quasi-fascist group. |
| 1991 | The Rocketeer | Joe Johnston | It imagines a 1938 where experimental jet packs exist and the Nazis are trying to use them to dominate the world, diverging from known historical events. |
| 1994 | Fatherland | Christopher Menaul | Based on the1992 novel about anAxis victory in World War II. |
| 1995 | Richard III | Richard Loncraine | Based on aShakespeare play, England is ruled by a quasi-fascist regime in the 1930s. |
| 1995 | White Man's Burden | Desmond Nakano | Set in an alternate America where African Americans andCaucasian Americans have reversed cultural roles. |
| 1996–ongoing | Independence Day franchise | Roland Emmerich | Earth was attacked in the 1990s by analien invasion, and society was subsequently rebuilt using tools and knowledge captured from the enemy. The original 1996 film was not alternate history, but the second filmIndependence Day: Resurgence (2016) and a planned third film are. |
| 1997 | Starship Troopers | Paul Verhoeven | The director has stated that this is set centuries after anAxis victory in World War II. |
| 1998 | Six-String Samurai | Lance Mungia | The USSR launched several nuclear warheads at the United States in 1957, reducing most of the nation to an inhospitable desert. |
| 1998 | World War III | Robert Stone | Gorbachev is overthrown in early October 1989 (with hard-line Communists still firmly in control of almost all of their satellite states), Soviet and East German troops opened fire on demonstrators in Berlin and Leipzig, and the new Soviet regime precipitated a third World War. |
| 2000 | Timequest | Robert Dyke | A man travels through time to prevent theassassination of John F. Kennedy. |
| 2001 | The One | James Wong | A serial killer targets his owndoppelgangers in variousalternate universes. We briefly visit a world whereAl Gore became the 43rd US president. |
| 2002 | 2009: Lost Memories | Lee Si-myung | The Korean peninsula is still a part of the Japanese Empire, asIto Hirobumi was never assassinated, and the Empire of Japan sides with the Allies against Nazi Germany. |
| 2002 | Nothing So Strange | Brian Flemming | Covers the assassination ofMicrosoft chairmanBill Gates on 2 December 1999. |
| 2003 | The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen | Stephen Norrington | Based loosely on acomic book of the same name, an espionage thriller set in 1899, in asteampunk world where technology advanced faster than in ours and where several fictional characters from other works of fiction such asSherlock Holmes andJekyll and Hyde are real. The point of divergence is not revealed. |
| 2004 | C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America | Kevin Willmott | TheConfederate States win theAmerican Civil War, annex the United States, and still maintain slavery in the year 2004. |
| 2004 | Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow | Kerry Conran | Set around 1939 in a world more advanced than ours, although the point of divergence is not revealed.World War II does not occur; instead all humanity is held in fear by an army of giant robots created by a reclusivemad scientist. |
| 2004 | The Incredibles | Brad Bird | An animated adventure set in a mid 20th century where technology and culture resemble our 2004. This advanced state is implicitly due to the existence ofsuperheroes. The chronology is not emphasized in the plot, but can be gleaned from calendars and newspapers visible at various moments throughout the film. |
| 2004 | The Place Promised in Our Early Days | Makoto Shinkai | Ananime film byMakoto Shinkai is set in a modern-day Japan that was partitioned after thePacific War between the Soviet backed Republic ofEzo inHokkaido and a US allied government in the rest of the Home Islands. The movie also deals with alternate universes. |
| 2007 | Pirates of the Caribbean: At the World's End | Jerry Bruckheimer | KingGeorge II of Great Britain with the help of Lord Cutler Beckett carries out a coup abolishing theBritish Constitution causing theBritish Empire to return toabsolutism and persecute pirates and the people associated with them. |
| 2009 | Watchmen | Zack Snyder | Film adaptation of thecomic book of the same name,Richard Nixon remains President in 1985, years after the USA definitively won theVietnam War. |
| 2009 | Inglourious Basterds | Quentin Tarantino | A group of Jewish-American soldiers assassinateHitler in Paris in 1944. |
| 2009 | The Invention of Lying | Ricky Gervais andMatthew Robinson | At the beginning of the story, human beings had never evolved the mental trait of deceit, and progressed to the modern world without ever having heard of dishonesty, fiction, or belief in any God(s) or religion whatsoever. The protagonist is the first individual to develop such ability and uses it to his benefit. |
| 2011 | Resistance | Amit Gupta | Based on thesame-titled novel, after the June 1944Normandy Invasion fails, the British Isles come under a German occupation. |
| 2011 | Real Steel | Shawn Levy | In the near futureboxing between human fighters has been abolished and have been replaced withrobots. |
| 2013 | The Great Martian War 1913–1917 | Mike Slee | In an alternateWorld War I, instead of theCentral Powers, theAllies fight off aMartian invasion. |
| 2014 | Captain America: The Winter Soldier | Russo brothers | In theMarvel Cinematic Universe, instead ofLee Harvey Oswald being the assassin of the United States PresidentJohn F. Kennedy, the assassin was a legendary agent ofHydra, theWinter Soldier. |
| 2014 | Big Hero 6 | Don Hall andChris Williams | San Francisco was rebuilt after the1906 earthquake with a Japanese motif, and renamed San Fransokyo. |
| 2014 | Predestination | The Spierig Brothers | Based on the 1950s novella "All You Zombies" which was written as a future history – space travel technology in the 1960s seems to be somewhat more advanced than in our history, and New York was hit by massive terror attacks in the 1970s. A squadron of time-traveling enforcers attempt to correct history. |
| 2015 | The Good Dinosaur | Peter Sohn | TheK-T extinction is averted, and non-avian dinosaurs live long enough to develop a kind of agricultural civilization. |
| 2015 | April and the Extraordinary World | Christian Desmares and Franck Ekinci | TheFranco-Prussian War never happened, andemperors of House Bonaparte still rule France. In 1941, the greatest scientists (Albert Einstein,Enrico Fermi...) have mysteriously disappeared so the world only uses coal as an energy source and planet is totally deforested. |
| 2015 | World Wide What? | Adam Townsend and Andy Trace | TheWorld Wide Web, or the Internet as we know it today, is never invented. |
| 2016 | Love Is All You Need? | K. Rocco Shields | Set in a world were homosexuality is the norm andheterosexuality is a taboo if practiced outside a designated breeding season. There are also differences in gender roles. |
| 2017 | Blade Runner 2049 | Denis Villeneuve | The setting builds on the continuity of the 1982 film (which depicted a futuristic, heavily urbanized Los Angeles in 2019). Analog technology is shown to be widespread in 2049, and defunct corporations in our reality (likePan Am) as well as countries like the Soviet Union are shown to be thriving in the film's future. |
| 2018 | Overlord | Julius Avery | The plot follows several American paratroopers who are dropped behind enemy lines in an Alternate 1940s, where theUS Armed Forces are desegregated in 1944 (In real life the US military was desegregated on 26 July 1948) the day beforeD-Day and discover terrifyingNazi experiments. |
| 2019 | Yesterday | Danny Boyle | A man finds himself in a world wherethe Beatles (among other celebrities and products) never existed. |
| 2019 | Once Upon a Time in Hollywood | Quentin Tarantino | Members of theManson Family, (Tex,Sadie, andKatie) decide to murderwestern actor Rick Dalton and hisstunt double Cliff Booth instead of actressSharon Tate on the night of 8 August 1969, but are eventually stopped and killed by both Booth and Dalton. |
| 2019 | The Mandela Effect | David Guy Levy | Initially set in an alternate world where certain collectively false memories (popularly called theMandela effect) are real. |
| 2021 | Justice Society: World War II | Jeff Wamester | In theMultiverse, the Atlanteans and Nazis attempt an invasion of New York. |
| 2021 | Jungle Cruise | Jaume Collet-Serra | In an alternate timeline, a skipper of a riverboat, along with a scientist and her brother, journey through the Amazon, the expedition is motivated by the search for theTree of Life. |
| 2022 | Weird: The Al Yankovic Story | Eric Appel | Aparody biographical film with an alternate life story of Americanparody musician"Weird Al" Yankovic. Yankovic becomes the most popular musician of all time and dates a sociopathic version of singerMadonna[7] that becomes a drug lord by taking over the drug network ofPablo Escobar after Yankovic murders him to rescue her from a kidnapping. She assassinates Yankovic in 1985 at a major award ceremony. |
| 2024 | Y2K | Jeff Wamester | TheY2K problem involving computers was not averted and as was feared at the time, caused major disasters on 1 January 2000. |
| 2024 | The Kingdom | Mike Tuviera | The film is set in the modern day where the Philippines is a monarchy known as the Kingdom of Kalayaan which has never been colonized.[8] |
| 2025 | The Electric State | Russo Brothers | In an alternate 1990s, robots are exiled after a failed uprising. |
| Original run | Title | Description |
|---|---|---|
| 1963–present | Doctor Who | This series has made extensive use of alternative history, especially (but not exclusively) since its relaunch in 2005. These includeInferno,Day of the Daleks,Pyramids of Mars (a brief glimpse of a dead Earth), "Father's Day", "Rise of the Cybermen", which follows into "Doomsday". |
| 1966–2005 | Star Trek | This series has used the theme several times. Examples include:TOS- "The City on the Edge of Forever" (alternate World War II outcome);Enterprise- "Storm Front" where Nazis seized East Coast of America. |
| 1978 | An Englishman's Castle | A 3-part BBC mini-series focusing on television writer Peter Ingram, who lives in a present-day Britain in which Nazi Germany won World War II. |
| 1983 | Blackadder | Secret history: upon the death ofRichard III in 1485 atBattle of Bosworth Field, Richard IV is crowned king of England, but this has (according to the prologue) been censored out of official histories byHenry VII, leaving the history we know. |
| 1985 | Otherworld | A family is transported to an alternate Earth while exploring theGreat Pyramid of Giza. |
| 1987 | Amerika | AnABC TV miniseries about life in the United States after a bloodless takeover engineered by the Soviet Union. The miniseries takes place in 1997 |
| 1995–2000 | Sliders | A gang of scientists, a musician and others as travellers who "slide" between parallel worlds by use of a wormhole referred to as an "Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky bridge". First episode was Soviet-ruled America after Soviets seized Americas. Other episodes were many alternate Earths asBritish America, Ancient Egyptian-ruled America, Spanish America,Druids-controlling America,Atomic Bombs never existed, and others. |
| 1995 | Spellbinder | In an alternate world wherestatic electricity is used as a power source. |
| 1997 | Spellbinder: Land of the Dragon Lord | Sequel to original TV show. |
| 1997 | Red Dwarf | The episode "Tikka to Ride" deals with a timeline in whichJohn F. Kennedy was never assassinated. |
| 1999 | Blackadder: Back and Forth | A spoof ofDoctor Who where atime traveling Blackadder's meddling with history causes changes including aFrench victory at theBattle of Waterloo. |
| 2001 | Princess of Thieves | This retelling of theRobin Hood legend takes the legend's customary historical exaggeration to extremes, by ending withRichard the Lionheart being succeeded asKing of England, not by his brotherJohn Lackland, but by his sonPhilip of Cognac. |
| 2003–04 | Evil Con Carne | The series takes place in a year 2002 where theLeague of Nations still existed. |
| 2004–05 | Zipang | A Japanese warship is sent back in time to World War II, altering much of the situation at Midway, but also alters the loss ofUSS Wasp (CV-7), in which it is destroyed by a Tomahawk missile instead of being lost to a submarine. |
| 2006 | The Boondocks:Return of the King | Martin Luther King Jr. survives his assassination, waking up from a coma 32 years later. |
| 2006 | Code Geass | Britannia, the descendant of what was once Britain, is the primary world power and conquers Japan through the use of mecha called Knightmare Frames; an exiled Britannian prince named Lelouch leads the Japanese resistance against them. |
| 2009 | Fringe | In the episode "There's More Than One of Everything",Olivia Dunham ends up in a world where9/11 still happens, but only theWhite House andThe Pentagon were targeted while theWorld Trade Center remained standing. |
| 2011 | Futurama | In the episode "All The presidents' Heads", during a trip back in time,Fry accidentally causesPaul Revere to misdirect theAmerican Revolutionaries, creating a timeline in which theAmerican Revolution failed, and Great Britain went on to conquer all of North America, renaming it "West Britannia". |
| 2011 | Supernatural | In the episode "My Heart Will Go On", theTitanic never sank and the goddessAtropos is killing the descendants of survivors who should have died. |
| 2013 | What If...? Armageddon 1962 | John F. Kennedy isassassinated in December 1960, and underLyndon B. Johnson's leadership, theCuban Missile Crisis snowballs into nuclear war. |
| 2014 | Ascension | In 1963, the U.S. government launches a covert space mission sending 600 volunteers aboard the USS Ascension self-sustaining [generation ship], on what should be a century-long voyage to colonize a planet orbitingProxima Centauri to assure the survival of the human race from the escalation ofCold War. |
| 2015 | The Man in the High Castle | Based on the book with the same title, the show portrays a 1962 in which the Axis powers won World War II and divided the Americas. |
| 2016 | 11.22.63 | Based on the book11/22/63 byStephen King, in which the main character goes back in time trying to saveJohn F. Kennedy and altering the course of events. |
| 2017 | Neo Yokio | Set where New York (or this universe as aforementioned 'New Yokio') that magicians saves city from take over by Demons in 19th century and gaining place in the upper echelons of society and becoming known as "magistocrats" ever since. |
| 2017 | SS-GB | British drama series set in a 1941 alternative timeline in which the United Kingdom is occupied by Nazi Germany during the Second World War. |
| 2018 | 1983 | Polish Netflix original series set in 2003. Two decades after a 1983 terrorist attack, a law student and cop uncover a conspiracy that's kept Poland as a police state and the Iron Curtain standing. |
| 2019 | Love, Death & Robots | In the 17th Episode of the Netflix original seriesAlternate Histories, it shows six different timelines of the death of Adolf Hitler in 1908 instead of 1945. |
| 2019-present | For All Mankind | An Apple TV+ original that explores a world where the Soviet Union was the first to land on the Moon in 1969, sparking a more intense and advanced space race that continued well into the 1990s. The point of divergence is described as Soviet space engineerSergei Korolev surviving past 1966, leading to his technological expertise being used for the Soviet Moon landing. |
| 2020 | Hollywood | American Netflix original series set in postWorld War IIHollywood in 1947–1948, where traditional power dynamics in the American film industry are systematically dismantled and racism and homophobia are assigned to the dustbin of history. |
| 2020 | Noughts + Crosses | Set in an alternate version of the British Isles, where African powers colonized most of Europe, and enforce a race-based hierarchy. Based on the young adult novel of the same name. |
| 2020 | Bridgerton | The QueenCharlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz is a black woman when in real life she wasCaucasian. This comes from an old Britishurban legend with the same claims. |
| 2021 | Joseon Exorcist | This series was set in Joseon era of Korea and made extensive use of alternate history. In this alternate world, Joseon is besieged by the Fallen Angel "Azazel" from the Vatican religion. The King of Joseon called for a Vatican priest to help defeat Azazel through exorcism, and stop his demons from possessing people through a physical disease. The series was cancelled after episode 2 because many Koreans found the alternate universe offensive. |
| 2021–2023 | Loki | Showing an agency that prevents alterations to timelines and different versions ofLoki from alternate universes appear. |
| 2021–2024 | What If...? | The series explores alternate timelines in themultiverse that show what would happen if major moments from theMarvel Cinematic Universe had occurred differently. |
| 2023-present | The Last of Us | Like the game series of the same name, the main story begins twenty years after a fungal pandemic destroys civilization, and turned most of the population in to the Infected. Unlike the original game, the pandemic begins in 2003, not 2013. |
| Year | Title | Author | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1946 | Peace in Our Time | Noël Coward | Nazi Germany successfully invades Britain in World War II. |
| 1995 | Best | Fred Lawless | AfterThe Beatles remove their original drummerPete Best from their rock band and replace him withRingo Starr, Best goes on to be a world-famous rock superstar while The Beatles are stuck asone hit wonders.[9] |
| 2000 | The Madagascar Plan | Brian Borowka | Nazi Germany resettles the Jews on Madagascar.[10] |
| 2001 | The Adventures of Stoke Mandeville, Astronaut and Gentleman | Fraser Charlton and Nikolas Lloyd | The British develop space travel during the reign ofQueen Victoria. |
| 2006 | Picasso's Closet | Ariel Dorfman | An alternate account of Picasso's life (and possibly death) in Paris during World War II.[11] |
| 2007 | Universal Robots | Mac Rogers | Robots take over Czechoslovakia and eventually the world just before World War II in a thought-provoking script that raises questions about the future of humanity and science.[12] |
| Year | Title | Description |
|---|---|---|
| 1996 | Command & Conquer: Red Alert (series) | A series of computerreal time strategy video games set in an alternate timeline, created whenAlbert Einstein travels back to the past and eliminatesAdolf Hitler in an attempt to prevent World War II from taking place. This plan indirectly backfires and results in an unchecked Soviet invasion of Europe byJoseph Stalin in 1946. |
| 1997 | Fallout (series) | A series of role playing video games set in a post-apocalyptic United States where the world's timeline diverges after World War II, in which the cultural basis and technological aspects of the 1950s and the "World of Tomorrow" remains a part of everyday life. |
| 1999 | Crimson Skies | PC game based on the originalboard game, the United States collapses during theGreat Depression, leading to the rise of 23 nation-States in the former U.S. and Canada, new airplane and zeppelin technologies, and rampant air piracy. |
| 2000 | Gunparade March | An alien invasion occurs in 1945, before the end of World War II. The series led to the creation of an anime series. |
| 2002 | Iron Storm | World War I lasts more than half a century. At the time of the start of the game in 1964, the "Great War" (as the war is still called in that time) has gone on for fifty years. |
| 2003 | Crimson Skies: High Road to Revenge | Video game sequel to PC game. |
| 2003 | Enigma: Rising Tide | The British passenger shipLusitania was not sunk by a GermanU-boat inWorld War I. |
| 2003 | Freedom Fighters | Set in an alternateCold War where the Soviet Union drops the atomic bomb on Berlin in 1945 and eventually invades the United States in likely early 2000s. |
| 2006 | Hearts of Iron II: Doomsday | Contains a scenario involving Soviet forces attacking Allied forces in 1945, starting World War III. |
| 2006 | Resistance: Fall of Man | Set in 1951 Britain as human resistance forces attempt to drive out an alien species of unconfirmed origin called the Chimera. |
| 2007 | War Front: Turning Point | Set in an alternate version of World War II in which Adolf Hitler died during the early days of the war, and a more effective leadership arose to command Germany during the conflict. |
| 2007 | S.T.A.L.K.E.R. (series) | Set in an alternateChernobyl exclusion zone where laboratories were established to research the effects of irradiation and a second catastrophe in 2006 irrevocably mutated the zone. |
| 2007 | BioShock | Set in Rapture, an underwater city built in the 1940s, during an alternate 1960. |
| 2007 | World in Conflict | Set in 1989 during the social, political, and economic collapse of the Soviet Union. However, the Soviet Union pursued a course of war to remain in power. |
| 2008 | Turning Point: Fall of Liberty | Depicts the invasion of the United States by Nazi Germany during the 1950s. |
| 2009 | Damnation | Set in the early part of the twentieth century after the American Civil War has spanned over several decades, where steam engines replace internal combustion engines. |
| 2010 | BioShock 2 | Sequel toBioShock. Takes place in the same city. |
| 2010 | Metro 2033 | A global nuclear war devastates the world in 2013 and the surviving population has taken refuge in theMoscow Metro. |
| 2010 | Singularity | Set in an alternate 1955 where the Soviet Union finds a secret element called E-99. Thanks to the new element they are able to create the TMD. (Time Manipulation Device) which helps them rewrite history. |
| 2013 | Assassin's Creed III: The Tyranny of King Washington | Set in an alternate reality whereGeorge Washington has crowned himself King of the newly founded United States. |
| 2013 | The Last of Us | The story is set twenty years after a fungal pandemic collapsed civilization on 26 September 2013, and turned most of the population into the Infected. |
| 2013 | Timelines: Assault on America | Germany invades North America inWorld War II. |
| 2013 | BioShock Infinite | Set mostly in Columbia, a floating American city, during an alternate 1912. Prequel toBioShock. |
| 2013 | Call of Duty: Ghosts | Set after a war dubbed "Tel Aviv War" before 2005, destroyed the oil reserves of Middle East, allowing a super-state called "The Federation of the Americas" to emerge. |
| 2013 | Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon | Takes place in an alternate 2006 in a timeline where the US and the USSR fought a nuclear war. |
| 2014 | Watch Dogs | Set in the near future where surveillance, hacking, and smart city infrastructure have progressed faster and are more centralized. |
| 2014 | Wolfenstein: The New Order | Set in an alternate 1960 where Nazi Germany using extremely advanced stolen technology won World War II and now rules the entire world. |
| 2015 | Wolfenstein: The Old Blood | A prequel toWolfenstein: The New Order about an Allied stealth operation at the German base, Castle Wolfenstein in 1946. |
| 2017 | Prey | Takes place in an alternate 2025, in whichJohn F. Kennedy was never assassinated and theSpace Race led to the construction of a large crewed space station orbiting the Moon. |
| 2017 | Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus | A sequel toWolfenstein: The New Order, set in a Nazi-occupied America in 1961. |
| 2018 | Frostpunk | Set in an alternate early 20th century where volcanic eruptions in the 1880s led to a global ice age. |
| 2018 | We Happy Few | Set in an alternate 1960s city-state off the coast of Great Britain named Wellington Wells, where the inhabitants of the town are subjected to unethical drug-induced experiments. The point of divergence is mentioned to be the election ofHuey Long as President of the United States, which kept America out of WW2 leading to the invasion and occupation of Britain by Germany, as well as its subsequent impoverishment. |
| 2019 | The Outer Worlds | Set in an alternate future whereWilliam McKinley was never assassinated in 1901, leading to a future dominated by largeGilded Age-styled business trusts which have colonized other planets. |
| 2019 | Wolfenstein: Youngblood | A Threequel to MachineGames' Wolfenstein series set in 1980, 19 years after the events ofThe New Colossus. |
| 2020 | Art of Rally | Set in an alternative future when theGroup B class ofRally cars was not discontinued. |
| 2020 | Call of Duty: Black Ops: Cold War | The Soviet Ending results in the Soviet Union nuking Western Europe, making these countries fall under Soviet influence. |
| 2020 | Cyberpunk 2077 | Set in a future that diverged in the late 1980s (based on the in-universe history of the tabletop RPG the game is based on). Advanced cybernetics are shown to be commonplace by 2013, theJapanese economic miracle led to Japan becoming a corporate-dominated superpower, and defunct regimes like the Soviet Union are shown to be powerful in 2077. |
| 2023 | Atomic Heart | The Soviet Union develops robots in 1936 and when the Nazisinvade in 1941, The Soviets are able to defeat the Nazis much earlier (in 1942 instead of 1945) by using the robots as soldiers. |
| 2024 | Pacific Drive | Set in an alternate 1998 where experiments done in theOlympic Peninsula during the mid-20th century led to anomalous phenomena in the region, resulting in a restricted zone being created by the US government |
| 2025 | Atomfall | Set in an alternate 1960s where theWindscale nuclear disasters turned much of Northwest England into a radioactive quarantine zone. |
Ang kuwento, set sa modern Philippines na never nasakop – an uncolonized Philippines, woah!!! [The story, set in a modern Philippines which was never invaded – an uncolonized Philippines, woah!!!]