I kept trying to write about alternate history, but the concept turned slippery and strange in my grasp. Alternate history, I thought, over and over, until it became six syllables in an arcane language, a mantra, a riddle. This is just your Covid brain, I thought. I told my editor I’d get it to her in a week. I told her that many weeks ago, and I’m still here, trying to figure out why what ought to be a simple sub-genre label has begun to strike me as a fundamental category error.

It invites a simple definition: alternate history is history that isn’t real. But how is it not real? It diverged from a specific point that we know to be real? It explores history? Or it explores the present through the lens of history? Why do we draw a line between those two things, “present” and “history,” as though there were some clear demarcation between them? If we are living downstream from history, then what is our relationship to imagined history? Is it the same as an imagined present? Are our alternate timelines running alongside us, tumbling forward in our collective memories, yearnings and resentments, constantly reflecting and forming counterpoint to our actual stream?

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