Alternate History Quotes

You cannot see the past that did not happen any more than you can foresee the future.

The contrafactual history is what it would have been the other way. Think of the Kennedy triumph in the missiles crisis. Worked out fine. Khrushchev blinked and so forth. The other road, you don't want to think too hard about. You could have had nuclear missiles wiping out a tenth of the globe.

I always like worlds where you could be in several different time periods.

To me, steampunk and urban fantasy are naturally hinged together. And I think that's because I love the early gothic Victorian literature, and both things spring from that movement.

I'm very picky with what I read. It's a specific genre of science fiction.

Hans Zimmer and I considered 'Sherlock Holmes: A Game Of Shadows' to be a steampunk genre; our inspiration came from Sherlock's own travels.

I'm Beginning To Wonder If It Would Have Been Best Had The South Won The Civil War.

Middle-earth is our world. I have (of course) placed the action in a purely imaginary (though not wholly impossible) period of antiquity, in which the shape of the continental masses was different.

History is a novel that has been lived, a novel is history that could have been.

Archduke Franz Ferdinand Found Alive! First World War a Mistake!

Time machine... wouldn't you like to travel through time? I would. I'd go back... mess with people. You know what I would do? I would go back to when my mom and dad were having sex, to have me. Ya'know, come in, spank my dad on the ass I'm your son from the future! Ahaha!

I certainly have been writing stories that are hard science fiction, that are very reminiscent of 'Golden Age tales' from the '40s and '50s. I've also written stories that are very high fantasy that are the direct opposite of that style.

Technically and logically speaking, actual Victorian science fiction writers cannot be dubbed 'steampunks.' Although they utilized many of the same tropes and touchstones employed later by twenty-first-century writers of steampunk, in their contemporary hands these devices represented state-of-the-art speculation.

My Real Children starts quietly, then suddenly takes you on two roller-coaster rides at once, swooping dizzily through a double panorama and ending in a sort of super Sophie's Choice. A daring tour de force.

British and Canadian sci-fi strikes me as more forward-looking than its American counterpart, as evidenced by the success of Iain M. Banks, Charlie Stross, Robert Charles Wilson, and Cory Doctorow.

Blending consensus historical events and personages with imaginary occult forces is a strong recipe for counterfactual storytelling goodness that combines the best of two worlds: resonant history with wild-eyed fantasy.

There are so many stories to tell in the worlds of science fiction, the worlds of fantasy and horror that to confine yourself to even doing historical revisionist fiction, whatever you want to call it - mash-ups, gimmick lit, absurdist fiction - I don't know if I want to do that anymore.

This is what I think is fun about fiction - you get to use as much history as you want as scaffolding and then go beyond it and change it and mutate it.

In Japan, there's a TV series called Jin. It deals with time travel. I like stories about time travel. It's a story about people living in modern day that travel back to the Edo era. Those things really interest me.

War has always been a part of science fiction. Even before the birth of SF as a standalone genre in 1926, speculative novels such as 'The Battle of Dorking' from 1871 showed how SF's trademark 'what if' scenarios could easily encompass warfare.

Kim Newman's Anno Dracula is back in print, and we must celebrate. It was the first mash-up of literature, history and vampires, and now, in a world in which vampires are everywhere, it's still the best, and its bite is just as sharp. Compulsory reading, commentary, and mindgame: glorious.

I'm a history dork and a sci-fi dork.

Bryce Zabel and I went down the road of revising the Kennedy historical record together on the NBC seriesDark Skies. This time instead of giving new meaning to the established JFK chronology, hes created a brand new one altogether.Surrounded by Enemiesis an exhilarating ride, full of twists and turns that never were, but surely could have been.

The history of things that didn't happen has never been written.

I often wonder how different the world would be if Hitler had not been turned down when he applied to art school.