What Almost Was: The Politics of the Contemporary Alternate History Novel

Abstract

Between August of 1995 and July of 1996, Speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich published two books.One, To Renew America, a folksy Republican polemic cobbled together from Gingrich's speeches, served as a sequel to Contract with America, the blueprint of the conservative movement that assumed control of Congress in 1995. 1 The other was 1945, coauthored with William R. Forstchen, a novel set in an alternate universe.2 In 1945's divergent timeline, Germany does not declare war on the United States, the Soviet Union is split into fragments, and the United States and Germany have settled into a cold war.Nazi soldiers parachute into the United States to a capture a nuclear facility in Tennessee, but posses of arms-bearing American veterans successfully defend their country.1945 was representative of the flourishing genre of alternate history novels in all but two ways: an author's celebrity and its media exposure.Due to Gingrich's status as the public leader of the conservative renaissance of the mid-1990s, 1945 was widely reviewed in mainstream publications.Treated as a curiosity and ridiculed for its poor literary quality, very few reviewers noted the libertarian themes in 1945, and even fewer placed it in the context of an inchoate literary genre.3 1995 can be considered the birth year of the alternate history novel as a genre.As a conceptual category, the counterfactual, as historians term their what-if narratives, has been pursued in print since classical Greece, if not earlier.(In a broad sense, anyone who has wondered "what if?" could be said to be an alternate

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