When Novels Change History

As with so many concepts in literature, the French have an elegant word for it: uchronie. For Anglophone readers and writers, we have to make do with such unwieldy terms as "counterfactual novels", "alternate timelines" and "allohistories" to describe these books. Uchronie is a neologism modelled on Utopia â?? a "no-time" rather than a "no-place", used for "what if" books where significant historical events are changed. In its pure form, a uchronic novel involves a specific moment of divergence: in Kingsley Amis's The Alteration (Philip Pullman fans should check out the winking similarities between Lyra's universe and Amis's) it is that the Reformation never happened; in Philip Roth's The Plot Against America it is that Franklin Roosevelt loses the presidential election of 1940 to Charles Lindbergh. It is a kind of literature that seems to be on the increase â?? my evidence for this is gut instinct, triggered by reading a spate of them including Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union, Andrew Crumey's Mobius Dick and the trade collection of Geoff Johns's Flashpoint, but a quick browse around the website Uchronia seemed to confirm the hunch.