To be clear, there has been no change in history to produce this world: 9/11 still happened, Hitler is still dead. We (you, me, us) arrive there the hard way through pandemics and other bad stuff that the (mostly very well-off) survivors refer to as “the jackpot.” This being Gibson’s vision, the technology of the future is impressive, slick, and squishy. Yes, he shows us a future, about 150 years from now. William Gibson does something significantly different. These are not Wellsian voyages to the future: they imagine a change in our past that produces our new future or a chance to observe (or take advantage of) a parallel timeline. ( It’s a Wonderful Life comes to mind as a personal counter-history, while The Man in the High Castle is only one of many works which posit an Axis victory in 1945.) Broadly defined, “para-history” constitutes a sub-genre in its own right, one with deep science fiction roots. In film, literature, and other media, we are regularly shown a present in which things are familiar and yet not. In addition to attempts on the part of scholarly historians to change up the past, there are plenty of storylines in fiction that put a protagonist into a puzzling, often terrifyingly different timeline. Toronto: Penguin Random House Canada (Berkley Books), 2020įully articulated alternative histories have been around for at least a century.
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