Jul. 29th, 2009

the_lady_lily: (Bibliography)
So, me and a couple of the history graduate students have come up with a great idea for a course, about teaching history via the medium of alternate history and what that tells us about history itself. We're batting the idea around and seeing whether we get anyway.

The problem is that none of us are excellent readers of alternate history, and this is where I appeal to my LJ readers, many of whom I know are into this sort of thing. We're thinking of things like Harry Turtledove and The Difference Engine and sort-of-kind-of the Baroque Cycle. There's also possibly space for things like Terry Pratchett, which play with history in interesting ways (the ones I thought might work particularly well were Pyramids and Jingo), and distopia novels (we were torn between 1984 and Brave New World). But this is all much a work in progress, and we are going to need many other books! One thing we'd really like to do is try to cover a range of perspectives - for instance, novels that think about what it would have been like if the east had become culturally dominant instead of the west, feminist alternate history, what if slavery still existed, that sort of thing. It would be very easy to get caught up in alternate histories of America, and for a number of reasons we don't want that to happen.

So, satisfy my curiousity. What are some of your favourite alternate history books?

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