Editing Alternate history (section)

==Definition==
Often described as a subgenre of [[science fiction]], alternative history is a genre of fiction wherein the author speculates upon how the course of history might have been altered if a particular historical event had an outcome different from the real life outcome.<ref name="Collins">{{cite web |title=Alternative history |url=http://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/alternative-history |url-status=live |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160107040916/https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/alternative-history |archive-date=7 January 2016 |access-date=15 January 2016 |website=Collins English Dictionary}}</ref> An alternate history requires three conditions: (i) A point of divergence from the historical record, before the time in which the author is writing; (ii) A change that would alter known history; and (iii) An examination of the ramifications of that alteration to history.<ref name=SHS>{{cite web|author=Steven H Silver |title=Uchronicle |url=http://www.helixsf.com/uchronicle/uchronicle0706.htm |publisher=Helix |date=1 July 2006 | access-date=26 May 2009 |author-link=Steven H Silver }}{{dead link|date=July 2017 |bot=InternetArchiveBot |fix-attempted=yes }}</ref> Occasionally, some types of [[genre fiction]] are misidentified as ''alternative history'', specifically science fiction stories set in a time that was the future for the writer, but now is the past for the reader, such as the novels ''[[2001: A Space Odyssey (novel)|2001: A Space Odyssey]]'' (1968) by [[Arthur C. Clarke]], ''[[Nineteen Eighty-Four|1984]]'' (1949) by [[George Orwell]] and the movie ''[[2012 (film)|2012]]'' (2009) because the authors did not alter the real history of the past when they wrote the stories.<ref name=SHS />

Similar to the genre of alternative history, there is also the genre of secret history - which can be either fictional or non-fictional - which documents events that might have occurred in history, but which had no effect upon the recorded historical outcome.<ref name=SHS/><ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.leepers.us/evelyn/reviews/borges.htm |title=Jorge Luis Borges Reviews by Evelyn C. Leeper |publisher=Leepers.us |access-date=25 November 2012}}</ref> Alternative history also is thematically related to, but distinct from, [[counterfactual history]], which is a form of [[historiography]] that explores historical events in an extrapolated timeline in which key historical events either did not occur or had an outcome different from the historical record, in order to understand what did happen.<ref>"It [alternative history] is, at the very root, the idea of conjecturing on what did not happen, or what might have happened, in order to understand what did happen."{{cite book |last1=Black |first1=Jeremy |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=pQZeAQAAQBAJ&pg=PA125 |title=Studying History |last2=MacRaild |first2=Donald M. |publisher=Palgrave Macmillan |year=2007 |isbn=9780230364929 |page=125}}{{Dead link|date=January 2023|bot=InternetArchiveBot|fix-attempted=yes}}</ref><ref>Martin Bunzl, "Counterfactual History: A User's Guide", ''American Historical Review'' (2004) 109 No. 3, pp. 845–858 [https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/530560 in JSTOR]</ref>