Full Description
A comprehensive guide to the speculative sub-genre of alternate history fiction, this book maps the unique terrain of this vibrant mode of storytelling and then explains how to write it. First giving a concise conceptual overview and the critical tools to differentiate the different forms of counterfactual fiction, Jack Dann lays out the 'tricks of the trade' such 'Heinleining', how to create recognizable 'divergent points' and how to employ paratextual elements and 'layering' to overcome readers' unfamiliarity with invented counterfactual events and cultures. Alongside this, Dann takes you step-by-step through a complete short story to demonstrate, line-by-line, how alternative history fiction works. As well as Dann's exacting methodology for writing professional quality alternate history stories, this book also features a live-on-the-page Q&A with some of the most esteemed alternate history writers working today, including Kim Stanley Robinson, John Birmingham and Lisa Goldstein among many others, who will detail their own particular hacks, theories, processes, methods and strategies.
Combining extensive and deep knowledge of the field with accessible writing advice, this is the ultimate guidebook to the broad and complex sub-genre of counterfactual and alternative history fiction.
Contents
About the Author
About the Contributors
1. A Few Introductory Notes and Thoughts About Alternate History
and the Slippery Slope of Fiction
2. Let's Examine What We're Talking About
- Definitions and Divergence Points
- 'Alternate History' and Science Fiction: a Potted History
- Model making...
3. Are we really Theorizing about History and Morality and Choice?
- How To Bring Your Readers Up To Speed
- Thinking About History...and Your Readers
4. Taking a Break From Me: "White City" by Lewis Shiner
5. Craft Problems and Solutions
- Deconstructing Tesla and Assembling the Counterfactual Fiction Writer's Toolbox
- A Quick Inventory
6. The Tactics of Creating Counterfactual Texts: a Roundtable Q & A
With Kim Stanley Robinson, William Gibson, Pamela Sargent, Harry Turtledove, John Crowley, Michael Bishop, , Lisa Goldstein, John Kessel, John Birmingham, Barry N. Malzberg, Janeen Webb, Bruce Sterling, Mark Shirrefs, Christopher Priest, Terry Bisson, Mary Rosenblum, Michael Swanwick, Paul Di Filippo, Richard Harland, Howard Waldrop, Lewis Shiner, and George Zebrowski
7. A Very Personal Meditation On Writing: Or How I Do It...and Think About It
8. A Very Few Last Words About...You
Appendix
Bibliography
Index
