Alternate History, or A Trip to Elsewhen

The essay focuses on the subgenre of literary utopia and science fiction usually referred to as ‘uchronia’ or ‘alternate history’, which offers a particularly interesting starting point for a critical reflection on utopia. In fact, if spatial utopia sets up a world which is completely separate from the one we live in, temporal utopia – uchronia – links the imaginary world to the real one. This can be accomplished in two ways. In the first case, the imaginary world is envisioned as a possible future version of our own world, which gives rise to the many futuristic utopias and dystopias of sci¬ence fiction. In the second case – which is the one under scrutiny – the new world is built through the speculative game of "what if", meaning that, with a more complex imaginative leap, it is assumed to be the consequence of a key episode in the past, which turned out differently and thus gave way to a wholly different historical process. The new world is therefore an imaginary deviation from history as we know it; it compels us to speculate on a different historical development: what did not happen but could have happened. The essay analyses works by, among others, L.-N. Geoffrey-Château, Ph. Roth, Ph.K. Dick, V. Nabokov, I. Asimov, U. LeGuin.