10 Great Counter-Factual Novels

What if Napoleon had won the Battle of Waterloo, Robert E Lee triumphed at the Battle of Gettysburg, or James Callaghan managed to hold off Mrs Thatcher's challenge in the General Election of 1979? Writers love these exercises in the historical subjunctive, and the counter-factual novel offers a panorama of alternative worlds in which tiny twitches on the chronological thread find the past rearranging itself into unexpected shapes. As for strict definition, critics usually try to establish clear water between the counter-factual and its distant cousin the dystopia. The latter is usually a future shock scenario in which something has gone horribly wrong, while the former generally resembles a gigantic chessboard in which the removal of a single piece has radically changed the alignment of the other 31.