Warping Time: Alternate History, Historical Fantasy, and the Postmodern uchronie québécoise

Uchronia

“…1 While his tale (as this phrase suggests) was set in the historical past, literary scholars today tend to employ "uchronia" in a more expansive sense, as an umbrella category comprising alternate history stories, parallel worlds stories, and tales involving "future uchronias"; as Amy Ransom notes, "Just as the ou-topos, the no-where of utopia, may be either good (eutopian) or bad (dystopian), so may the ou-chronos rewrite the past, explore the future or lie parallel to the reader's present." 2 In our own time, of course, uchronian narratives have never been more popular-at the time of this writing, two of the most-discussed television programs on air are adaptations of Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale-while the tendency to think of reality in terms of a branching of multiple "forking paths" (in Borges's phrase) has entered into our cognitive habitus. Until recently, the emergence of uchronian themes in fiction has been largely discussed in connection with the early twentieth century, in particular with the American "scientifiction" pulps of the 1930s and 1940s (Murray Leinster's "Sideways in Time," published in 1934 in Astounding Stories, is an often-cited milestone).…”